s the
keenest eye of them all, and just before landing he had noticed to the
southward and on the other side of the peninsula a faint, dark line
against the edge of the sunset. Few, even with an eye good enough to see
it, would have taken it for anything but a wisp of cloud, but the physical
sense of Henry Ware, so acute that it bordered upon intuition, was not
deceived.

"Sol," he said after they had eaten a little, "let's walk across this neck
of land and explore a bit."

"It's a dark night to be traveling," said Paul. But Henry only laughed.
Tom Ross may have had his suspicions, but he did not deem it worth while
to say anything. He knew that Henry and Shif'less Sol were quite competent
to achieve any task that they might be undertaking.

Henry and Sol strolled carelessly into the bush, but before they had gone
a dozen steps their whole manner changed. Each became eager and alert.

"What is it, Henry?" asked Shif'less Sol. "What have you seed?"

"Smoke! the smoke of a camp fire and it's on the other side of this neck.
I think it's the camp of Alvarez. He must have been going more slowly than
we thought."

"We'll soon find out," said Shif'less Sol, as they advanced.

But the task was not as easy as they had thought. The peninsula was very
low and the greater part of it had been overflowed recently. Their feet,
no matter how lightly they stepped, sank in the mire, and when they pulled
them out again the mud emitted a sticky sigh. An owl perched in a tree,
high above the marsh, began to hoot dismally, and Shif'less Sol uttered a
growl.

"I wish we had the big, dry woods o' Kentucky to go through," he whispered
to Henry. "I ain't much o' a mud-crawler."

"But as we haven't got those big, dry woods," Henry whispered back, "we'll
have to crawl, creep, or walk through the mud."

It was about two miles across the neck, and as they went very slowly for
fear of making noise, it took them a full hour to reach the other side, or
to come near enough to see what might be there. Then they found that
Henry's belief, or rather intuition, was right.

They could see quite well from the dense covert. All the Spanish boats
were tied up at the shore and two or three fires had been built for the
purposes of cooking. The soldiers in their picturesque costumes lounged
about. The hum of conversation and now and then a laugh arose.

Henry soon marked Francisco Alvarez. The Spanish leader sat on a little
heap of boughs on the high