midday
At the gorge that men called a `` master shut-in '' , which was Sim 's rendezvous for such an emergency meeting , he found that others had arrived before him , and among the faces into which he looked was that of Rick Joyce , black with a wrath as yet held in abeyance , but promising speedy and stormy eruption . The spot was wild beyond description , lying in the lap of mountains that had in some day of world infancy been riven into a mighty boulder-strewn fissure between walls of sheer and gloomy precipices . It was a place to which men would come for no legitimate purpose ; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven , and inviting only to copperhead , skunk , and fox . About it lay `` laurel-hells '' thick-matted and gnarled , briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire , and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday . But these men had cut , and used familiarly , tortuous and hidden zig-zags of entry and exit , and they came separately from divergent directions . When Sim arrived they were waiting for their informal quorum , but at last a dozen had assembled and in other places there were other dozens . Each group had a commander freshly come from a sort of staff meeting , which had already decided the larger questions of policy .