CHAPTER XIV. UNWELCOME GUESTS
While she was yet puzzling over the strange mood of absorbed brooding into which Jim had fallen, his face suddenly lighted, and he changed with such rapidity that her uneasiness was doubled.
They had reached the stretches of deep forest at the foot of the Black Mountain ranges. The Swannanoa had become a silver thread of laughing, foaming spray and deep, still pools beneath the rocks. The fields were few and small. The little clearings made scarcely an impression in the towering virgin forests.
“Great guns, Kiddo!” he exclaimed, “this is some country! By George, I had no idea there was such a place so close to New York!”
She looked at him with uneasy surprise. What could be in his mind? The solemn gorge through which they were passing gave no entrancing views of clouds or sky or towering peaks. Its wooded cliffs hung ominously overhead in threatening shadows. The scene had depressed her after the vast sunlit spaces of sky, of shining valleys and cloud-capped, sapphire peaks on which they had turned their backs.
“You like this, Jim?” she asked.
“It's great—great!”
“I thought that waterfall we just passed was very beautiful.”
“I didn't see it. But this is something like it. You're clean out of the world here—and there ain't a railroad in twenty miles!”
The deeper the shadows of tree and threatening crag, the higher Jim's strange spirit seemed to rise.