"I was paddling down this side of the lake when I heard the strangest
sounds I ever heard coming out of a bird or beast. Ye better believe,
Henry, that I sot and listened until I was nothing but ears. But nary a
thing could I make out of it. After awhile I said I would try to ambush
the creetur and find out what mouth had a language that old John Norton
couldn't understand. As I got nearer the shore, my boat just drifting in
the moonlight, I heerd a kind of crawling sound as if the brute was
a-trailing himself on the ground. The shake of a bush give me the line
on him, and I felt sure that in a minute I could let the lead drive
where it ought to go. I had my rifle to my face, when by the Lord of
marcy, Henry, I diskivered I had ambushed a man!

"And, Henry," he continued, "the words of the man was words of prayer.
Never in my life was I taken so unawares or was so unbalanced as when I
heard the voice of that man I had mistook for an animal break out in
prayer. For a minute the blood stopped in my heart and my hair moved in
my scalp; then I shook like a man with the chills. I had come that nigh
being a murderer, Henry!

"How that man prayed! He prayed for help as one calls to a comrade when
his boat has gone down under him in the rapids, and he knows he must
have help or die. This man's soul was struggling hard, I tell ye. The
words of his cry come out of his mouth like the words of one who is
surely lost unless somebody saves him. It's dreadful for a man to live
in such a way that he has to pray in that fashion; for we ought to live,
Henry, so that it is cheerful-like to meet the Lord, and pleasant to
hold converse with Him.

"I sot in my boat till his praying was done; then I hugged myself close
in under the bushes, for I heard him coming down toward the shore. And
he did come, and come close to me; and in his arms he carried something
very heavy. In a moment I heard him shove a boat out from the bushes;
then, getting in, he pushed off into the lake. He held for the center of
it; and when he had come nigh to the middle of it, he laid his paddle
down, and lifted something into the air. This he turned upside down, and
out streamed into the water something that glinted in the moonlight.
After that, he come paddling back for the shore. Myself--I kept shy of
the man that night, but the next morning I went to the stranger's camp.

"There was nothing in sight but an old ragged tent, sagging at every
seam. I called aloud s