ce more, and it told him that his party was watched. He lay in
dark woods in a vast wilderness, but he felt in every bone that near
them was an alien presence.

Wyatt raised himself upon his arm and looked at the two red sentinels.
Not a muscle of either had stirred. They were so much carven bronze.
Their rifles lay across their knees and they stared fixedly at the
forest. But he knew that their eyes and ears were of the keenest and
that but little could escape their attention. Yet they had not
discovered the presence. He rose finally to his feet. The Indians heard
the faint noise that he made and glanced at him. But he was their
commander and they said nothing, resuming in an instant their watch of
the forest.

Wyatt did not take his rifle. Instead, he kept his hand on the hilt of a
fine double-barreled pistol in his belt. After some hesitation he walked
to the river and looked at the boat. It was still there, tied securely.
No one had meddled with it. The moon was obscured and the surface of the
river looked black. No object upon it could be seen far away. He
listened attentively and heard nothing. But he could not rid himself of
the belief that they had been followed, that even now a foe was near. He
walked back to the little camp and looked at Early who was sleeping
soundly. He was impatient with himself because he could not do likewise,
and then, shrugging his shoulders, he went further into the forest.

The trees grew closely where Wyatt stood and there were bushes
everywhere. His concealment was good and he leaned against the trunk of
a huge oak to listen. He could not see fifteen feet away, but he did not
believe that any human being could pass near and escape his hearing. He
stood thus in the darkness for a full ten minutes, and then he was quite
sure that he did hear a sound as of a heavy body moving slightly. It was
not instinct or prescience, the product of a vivid fancy, but a reality.
He had been too long in the woods to mistake the fact. Something was
stalking something else and undoubtedly the stalker was a man.

What was the unknown stalking? Suddenly a cold sweat broke out on
Braxton Wyatt's face. It was he who was being stalked and he was now
beyond the sight of his own sentinels. He was, for the moment, alone in
the midnight woods, and he was afraid. Braxton Wyatt was not naturally a
coward, and he had been hardened in the school of forest warfare, but
superstitious terrors assailed him now. He wa