"I thought you were with Mr. Villars!"
"Cudjo has gone with him. I am going with you."
"O Pomp!" cried Penn, with a joyful sense of reliance upon his powerful and sagacious black friend. "But is Mr. Villars safe?"
"Cudjo is faithful," said Pomp. "He believes the old man is your friend, and a friend of the slave. Besides, I promised, if he would take him to the cave, that my next shot, if I have a chance, should be at his old acquaintance, Sile Ropes."
Pomp took the lead, guiding Penn through hollows and among thickets to a ledge crowned with shrubs of savin, whose summit commanded a view of all that mountain-side.
They crept among the bushes to the edge of the cliff. There they paused. Neither friend nor foe was in sight. No sound of fire-arms was heard,—only the birds were singing.
Penn never forgot that scene. How fresh, and beautiful, and still the morning was! The sunlight flushed the craggy and wooded slopes. Far off, dim with early mist, lay the lovely hills and valleys of East Tennessee. On the north the peaks of the mountain range soared away, purple, rosy, glorious, in soft suffusing light. In the south-west other peaks receded, billowy and blue. And God's pure, deep sky was over all.
Touched by the divine beauty of the day, Penn lay thinking with shame of the scenes of human folly and violence with which it had been desecrated, when the negro drew him softly by the sleeve.
"Look yonder! down in the edge of that little grove!"
Peering through an opening in the savins through which Pomp had thrust his rifle, Penn saw, stealing cautiously out of the grove, a man.