hot. God help our tough old Ephraim and the Catawba if these bloodhounds
win out in time to overtake them!"

"Aye," said I; and then we crept out of our dodge-hole and made ready to
go about our business with the sentries.

But when we came to peer again around the crooking elbow it would seem
that the hurrying search party had fought our battle for us. The
watch-fire was there to light a little circle in the gloom, but the
watchers were gone. We chanced a guess that they had joined the hue and
cry, and so we pressed forward, past the handful of embers and into the
pit-black depths beyond.

Twenty paces farther on it came to playing blind man's buff with the
rocky walls again, and measured by the trippings and stumblings 'twas a
long Sabbath day's journey to that final turn in the great earth-burrow
whence we could see the glimmering of the enemy's camp-fires in the
sunken valley.

"Now God be praised!" quoth Richard most fervently. "Another hour in
this cursed kennel with the fever on me and I should be a yammering
loose-wit." And I, too, was glad enough to see the stars again, and to
be at large beneath them.

Emerging from the subterranean way, we held to the camp side of the
stream, making an ample circuit to the left to come down upon the
enemy's position from the wooded slope behind the encampment. We met no
let or hindrance in this approach. Secure in their stronghold, the
Indians had no patrols out; and as for the Englishmen, every mother's
son of them, it seemed, was basking in the light of a great fire built
before the pine-bough shelters.

Favored by a dense thicketing of laurel we made a near-hand
reconnaissance of the little wigwam which held our dear lady. As I have
said, this was pitched in the thinning of the forest which covered the
steep slope behind the encampment, and so was the farthest removed from
the stream, and from the Indian lodges disposed in a half-moon at the
water's edge. Here all was quiet as the grave, and the clamor of the
Indian camp came softened by the distance to a low monotonous humming
like the buzzing of a bee-hive. The flap of the tepee-lodge was closely
drawn, and the bit of fire before it had burned out to a heap of
white-ashed embers.

"They are safe as yet, thank God!" says Richard, heaving a most palpable
sigh of relief. Then, with the fever in his veins to whip his natural
ardor into hasty action: "'Twill be hours before Eph and the Catawba can
come in by your up