assailed him. One of two things had happened. Paul was either
killed or too badly wounded to walk, and somehow in the darkness they
had missed him. The schoolmaster's face blanched at the news. Paul had
been his favorite pupil.

"My God!" he groaned, "to think of the poor lad in the hands of those
devils!"

Henry Ware stood beside the master, when he uttered these words,
wrenched by despair from the very bottom of his chest. Pain shot through
his own heart, as if it had been touched by a knife. Paul, the
well-beloved comrade of his youth, captured and subjected to the
torture! His blood turned to ice in his veins. How could they ever have
missed the boy? Paul now seemed to Henry at least ten years younger than
himself. It was not merely the fault of a single man, it was the fault
of them all. He stared back into the thickening darkness, where the
flashes of flame burst now and then, and, in an instant, he had taken
his resolve.

"I do not know where Paul is," he said, "but I shall find him."

"Henry! Henry! what are you going to do?" cried his father in alarm.

"I'm going back after him," replied his son.

"But you can do nothing! It is sure death! Have we just found you to
lose you again?"

Henry touched his father's hand. It was an act of tenderness, coming
from his stoical nature, and the next instant he was gone, amid the
smoke and the vapors and the darkness, toward the Indian army.

Mr. Ware put his face in his hands and groaned, but the hand of Ross
fell upon his shoulder.

"The boy will come back, Mr. Ware," said the guide, "an' will bring the
other with him, too. God has given him a woods cunnin' that none of us
can match."

Mr. Ware let his hands fall, and became the man again. The retreating
force still fell back slowly, firing steadily by the flashes at the
pursuing foe.

Henry Ware had not gone more than fifty yards before he was completely
hidden from his friends. Then he turned to a savage, at least in
appearance. He threw off the raccoon-skin cap and hunting shirt, drew up
his hair in the scalp lock, tying it there with a piece of fringe from
his discarded hunting shirt, and then turned off at an angle into the
woods. Presently he beheld the dark figures of the Shawnees, springing
from tree to tree or bent low in the undergrowth, but all following
eagerly. When he saw them he too bent over and fired toward his own
comrades, then he whirled again to the right, and sprang about as if he
wer