r. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for
the cities down that stream.

Harry waited, while the song grew a little in volume, and, penned now
between high banks, gave back soft echoes. But the raft came very
slowly, only as fast as the current of the river. He thought he would
see a light as the men usually cooked and slept in a rude little hut
built in the center of the raft. But all was yet in darkness.

The singer, however rude and unlettered a mountaineer he may have been,
had a voice and ear, and Harry still listened with the keenest pleasure
to the melodious note that came floating down the river. The spell was
upon him. His imagination became so vivid that it was not a mountaineer
singing. He had gone back into another century. It was one of the
great borderers, perhaps Boone himself, who was paddling his canoe upon
the stream, the name of which was danger. And Kenton, and Logan and
Harrod and the others were abroad in the woods.

He was engrossed so deeply that he did not hear a heavy step behind him,
nor did he see a huge bewhiskered figure in the path, holding a clubbed
rifle. Yet he turned. It was perhaps the instinct inherited from his
great ancestor, who was said to have had a sixth sense. Whatever it may
have been, he faced suddenly about, and saw Bill Skelly aiming at him
a blow with the clubbed rifle, which would at once crush his skull and
send his body into the deep stream.

The same inherited instinct made him leap within the swing of the rifle
and clutch at the mountaineer's throat. The heavy butt swished through
the air, and the very force of the blow jerked the weapon from Skelly's
hands. The next instant he was struggling for his life. Harry was a
powerful youth, much stronger than many men, and, at that instant,
the spirit and strength of his great ancestor were pouring into his
veins. The treacherous attempt upon his life filled him with rage.
He was, in very truth, the forest runner of the earlier century, and he
strove with all his great might to slay his enemy.

Skelly, six feet two inches tall and two hundred pounds of muscle and
sinew, struck the boy fiercely on the side of the head, but the terrible
grasp was still at his throat. He was the larger and the stronger,
but the sudden leap upon him gave his younger and smaller antagonist an
advantage. He had a pistol in his belt, but with that throttling grip
upon his throat he forgot it. The hunter