; jes' so. They was a-making tracks along hereaway, sartain, sure;
larruping them hosses to a keen jump, lickity-split. Now, says I to
myself, what's the tarnation hurry? Ain't they got all the time there is
to get where they're a-going, immejitly, _if_ not sooner?" Then he
turned upon me. "Cap'n John, can't you and the youngster lay your heads
side and side and make out what-all this here hoss-captain mought be up
to? It do look like he had some sort o' hatchet to grind, a-sending that
Afrikin back to raise a hue and cry, and then a-letting his Injuns leave
a trail like this here that any tow-head boy from the settlemints could
follow at a canter."

Richard said he could never guess the meaning of it all; and my mind was
to the full as blank as his. I made sure some deep-laid plot was at the
bottom of the mystery; but we had measured many weary miles in the
wilderness, and the plotter's trap had been fairly baited, set and
sprung, before the lightning flash of explication came to show us all
its devilish ingenuity.

But now "Forward," was the word, and we fell in line again, and again
the tireless running of the two guides stretched and held us on the rack
of weariness. Happily for us two who were out of training, the rainy-day
dusk came early; and though Yeates and the Indian, running now with
their bodies bent double and their noses to the ground, held on long
after Richard Jennifer and I were bat-blind for any seeing of the
hoof-prints, the end came at length and we bivouacked as we were,
fireless, and with the last of the cooked ration of deer's meat for a
scanty supper.

After the meal, which was swallowed hastily in the silence of utter
fatigue, we scooped a hollow in a last year's leaf bed and lay down to
sleep, wet to the skin as any four half-drowned water rats, and to the
full as miserable.

Fagged as I was, 'twas a long time before sleep came to make me forget;
a weary interval fraught with dismal mental miseries to march step and
step with the treadmill rackings of the aching muscles. What grievous
hap had befallen my dear lady? and how much or how little was I to blame
for this kidnapping of her by my relentless enemy? Was it a sharp
foreboding of some such resort to savage violence that had tortured her
into sending the appeal for help?

With this, I fell to dwelling afresh upon the wording of her message,
hungering avidly for some hint to give me leave to claim it for my own.
Though I made sure she