way down to the boat,
where the young soldier awaited them. He only said, "I have been uneasy
about that orderly all the time for fear our presence here did not
protect him, as he was not on the ever-sacred soil of the 'beloved city
of refuge'--Chote--old town. I wished we had taken the precaution of
ordering him ashore. Affairs are near the crisis, Paul."

They seated themselves, and the young soldier pulled out from the shore,
Demere, both angry and cast down, realizing as he had not heretofore the
imminence of the peril to the settlement.

Dusk was upon the river; stars began to palpitate elusively in the
pallid sky; shadows mustered thick along the bank. Suddenly a sound,
sharp, discordant, split the air, and a rifle-ball whizzed past between
the two officers and struck the water on the further side of the boat.
The unarmed orderly seemed for a moment as if he would plunge into the
river.

"Steady--steady--give way," said Stuart. Then to Demere, who had his
hand on his pistol, and was casting a keen glance along the shore
preparatory to taking aim,--"Why do you return the fire, Paul? To make
our fate certain? We should be riddled in a moment. I have counted
nearly fifty red rascals in those laurel bushes."

Why the menace was not repeated, whether the skulking braves feared the
displeasure of their own authorities, or the coolness of the little
group extorted their admiration, so quick to respond to an exhibition of
stoical courage, no further demonstration was offered, and the boat was
pulled down the five miles from Chote to Fort Loudon in better time
perhaps than was ever made with the same weight on that river. The
landing was reached, to the relief even of the phlegmatic-seeming
Stuart.

"So ends so much," he said, as he stepped out of the boat. "And I go to
Chote--old town--no more."

But he was destined one day to retrace his way, and, sooth to say, with
a heavier heart.

The season waxed to ripeness. The opulent beauty of the early
summer-tide was on this charmed land. Along the heavily-wooded mountain
sides the prodigal profusion of the blooming rhododendron glowed with a
splendor in these savage solitudes which might discredit the treasures
of all the royal gardens of Europe. Vast lengths of cabling grape-vines
hung now and again from the summit of one gigantic tree to the ground,
and thence climbed upward a hundred feet to the topmost boughs of
another, affording ambush for Indians, and these da