ld" in that
case was like the "old" that one college boy uses when he calls another
"old fellow."

But if Silent Tom did not talk much he thought and felt a very great
deal. The love of the wilderness was keen in him. Elsewhere he would
have been like a lion in an iron-barred cage. And, like the rest of the
five, he would have sacrificed his life to protect those little
settlements of his own kind to the south. It has been said that usually
when the five slept they were yet almost awake, but this morning when
Silent Tom was awake he was also dreaming. He was dreaming of the great
triumph that they had won on the preceding day: Five against a thousand!
Rifles against cannon! A triumph not alone of valor but of intellect, of
wiles and stratagems, of tactics and management!

He did not possess, in the same great degree, the gift of imagination
which illuminated so nobly the minds and souls of Henry and Paul and the
shiftless one, but he felt deeply, nevertheless. Matter-of-fact and
practical, he recognized, that they had won an extraordinary victory, to
attempt which would not even have entered his own mind, and knowing it,
he not only gave all credit to those who had conceived it, but admired
them yet the more. He was beginning to realize now that the impossible
was nearly always the possible.

Life looked very good to Tom Ross that day. It was bright, keen and full
of zest. A deeply religious man, in his way, he felt that the forest,
the river, and all the unseen spirits of earth and air had worked for
them. The birds singing so joyously among the boughs sang not alone for
themselves, but also for his four comrades who slept and for him also.

He listened awhile, crossed the swamp on the fallen trees, scouted a
little and then came back, quite sure that no warrior was within miles
of them, as they were marching in another direction, and then returned
to the oasis. The four still slept the sleep of the just and victorious.
Then Tom, the cunning, smiled to himself, and came very near to uttering
a deep-throated chuckle.

Opening his little knapsack, he took out a cord of fishing line, with a
hook, which, with wisdom, he always carried. He tied the line on the end
of a stick, and, then going eastward from the oasis, he walked across
the fallen or drifted trees until he came to the permanent channel of a
creek, into which the flood waters drained. There he dropped his hook,
having previously procured bait, worms found u