ill
pardon me for saying so, it will be wise for us to listen."

"Very well," said Alloway. "Tell us what he says."

Thus spoke Yellow Panther, head chief of the Miamis, veteran of many
wars, through the medium of Braxton Wyatt:

"We and our brethren, the Shawnees, have come with many warriors upon a
long war path. Our friends, the white men whom the mighty King George
has sent across the seas to help us, have brought with them the great
cannon which will batter down the forts of the Long Knives in
Kaintuckee. But the signs are bad. The boats which were to carry the
cannon on the river have been blown up. An enemy stands across our path
and before we go farther we must hunt him down. If we cannot do it then
Manitou has turned his face away from us."

Wyatt translated and Alloway sourly gave adhesion. It was hard for him
to think that a single little group of borderers could hold up a great
force like theirs, armed with cannon too. But he was acute enough to see
that the menace of a rupture would become a reality if he insisted upon
having his own way.

Henry had watched them while they talked, and then he turned aside to a
point nearer the river's brink, from which he could see two pairs of
their strongest canoes lashed together in the stream, ready for the
reception of the cannon when they should come. How was he to get at
them? He knew that he could not use a fire boat again, but these rafts,
for such they were, must be destroyed in some manner.

Lying deep in the thickets he considered his problem. One of the reasons
why he excelled nearly all the scouts of the border was because he
thought so much harder and longer, and now he concentrated all his
faculties for success.

It did not take him long to mature his plan, and when he had done so he
moved down the stream, where the chance of an Indian sentinel
discovering him was much smaller. There he waited a space, while the
night darkened still more, the moon and stars being shut out entirely. A
wind arose and little crumbling waves pursued one another on the
surface of the river, which was flooded and yellow from spring rains.

He saw only one or two sentinels and they showed but dimly. Farther down
the Englishmen, the chiefs and the renegades were sitting about the low
fire, and he felt sure that the white men, at least, would sleep there
by the coals. From his covert in the bushes he saw them presently
spreading their blankets, and then they lay down with th