sible, but the impossible sometimes comes true. It was
the merest of fleeting glimpses that he had caught of that face, but his
eye was uncommonly quick, and his mind equally retentive.

His mind would not let go of the idea; an impression at first, it
quickly became a belief and then a conviction. He was lying on his
chest, and, raising his head a little, he emitted the call of the
night-owl, soft, long, and weird. He uttered the cry twice and waited.
From the woods fifty yards away came the answering hoot of an owl, once,
twice, thrice. Henry gave the cry twice again, and the second reply came
from the same place, once, twice, thrice.

Henry, without hesitation, sprang up to his full length, and walked
boldly forward. A second tall figure had risen and was coming to meet
him. The moonlight streamed down in a silver shower upon the man who had
stalked him so long, and revealed Shif'less Sol.

"Sol!" exclaimed Henry. "And I shot at you, thinking that you were a
Wyandot."

"You did not shoot any harder at me than I did at you," said Shif'less
Sol, "an' me all the time thinkin' that you wuz one o' them renegades!"

"Thank God we both missed!" said Henry, fervently.

"An' thank God that you're here, an' not tied down back thar in the
Wyandot village," said Shif'less Sol.

Their hands met in the strong firm clasp of those who have been friends
through the utmost dangers.

"It's fine to see you again, Sol," said Henry. "Are the others well?"

"When I last saw 'em," replied the shiftless one.

"Tell me how you ran across my trail and what went before," said Henry,
as they sat down on a fallen log together.

"You'll ricolleck," said Shif'less Sol, "that you told us not to hunt
you ef you didn't come back, but to go on with the fleet. I reckon it
wuz easier fur you to give that advice than for us to keep it. We knowed
from what the others said that you wuz captured, but we hoped that you'd
escape. When you didn't come, we agreed right quick among ourselves that
we had more business huntin' you than we had with that fleet.

"We didn't have much to go by. We guessed thar was a Wyandot village
somewhar in these parts, an' we hunted fur it. Last night me an' Tom
Ross saw some Injuns who wuz in camp an' who wuz rather keerless fur
them. Some white men wuz with 'em, an' we learned from scraps o' talk
that we could pick up that you had escaped, fur which news we wuz
pow'ful glad. We heard, too, that they wuz goin' to the