d, to see some glimmering
of light.

"In course. And it come from yonder, didn't it?" pointing to the cavern
under the cliff. "More than that, 'twas cut wi' a hatchet--this fresh
end of it--no longer ago than last night, at the furdest; the pitch that
the fire fried out'n it is all soft and gummy, yit. Gentlemen all:
whenst we find where this here creek comes out into daylight again we're
a-going to find the hoss-captain and the whole enduring passel o'
redskins and redcoats, immejitly, _if_ not sooner!"

What comment this startling announcement would have evoked I know not,
for at the moment of its utterance the Catawba went flat upon the
ground, making most urgent signs for us to do likewise. What he had seen
we all saw a flitting instant later; the painted face of a Cherokee
warrior as a setting for a pair of fierce basilisk eyes peering out of
the low-arched cavern whence the stream issued, an apparition looking
for all the world like a dismembered head floating on the surface of the
outgushing flood.

'Twas the old borderer who took the initiative in the swift retreat,
and we followed his lead like well-drilled soldiers. A crook in the
stream, and the thickset underwood, screened us for the moment from the
basilisk eyes; and in a twinkling we had rolled one after another into
the mimic torrent and were quickly swept down to its mouth.

Here death lay in wait for us in the mad plungings of the main river;
but we made shift to catch at the overhanging branches of the willows in
passing, to draw ourselves out, to scramble up the gorge and to gain a
great boulder on the mountain side whence we could look down upon the
scene of our late surprisal.

By this we saw, from the wings, as it were, the setting of the stage for
a tragedy which might have been ours. One by one a score of heads with
painted faces floated silently out of the spewing rock-mouth. One by one
the glistening, bronze-red bodies appertaining thereto emerged from the
water, each to take its place in an ambuscade enclosing the
stream-crossing of the Indian path in a pocket-like line of crouching
figures, with the mouth of the pocket open toward the lower valley.

Ephraim Yeates chuckled under his breath and smote softly upon his
thigh.

"They tell ez how the good Lord has a mighty tender care for chillern
and simples," he whispered. "Whenst we was a-coming a-rampaging up the
trace a hour 'r two ago, I saw the moccasin track o' that there spy, and