tell her to run for
the woods with the children, and then you four must do the most of the
rest."

"Do you think you can do it, Henry?" asked Shif'less Sol.

"I can, as I will soon show you. I'm going to steal forward to the woman,
but the moment you four hear an alarm open with your rifles and pistols.
You can come a little nearer without being heard."

All of them moved up close to the Indian camp, and lay hidden in the
last fringe of bushes except Henry. He lay almost flat upon the ground,
carrying his rifle parallel with his side, and in his right hand. He
was undertaking one of the severest and most dangerous tests known to
a frontiersman. He meant to crawl into the very midst of a camp of the
Iroquois, composed of the most alert woodsmen in the world, men who
would spring up at the slightest crackle in the brush. Woodmen who,
warned by some sixth sense, would awaken at the mere fact of a strange
presence.

The four who remained behind in the bushes could not keep their hearts
from beating louder and faster. They knew the tremendous risk undertaken
by their comrade, but there was not one of them who would have shirked
it, had not all yielded it to the one whom they knew to be the best
fitted for the task.

Henry crept forward silently, bringing to his aid all the years of skill
that he had acquired in his life in the wilds. His body was like that
of a serpent, going forward, coil by coil. He was near enough now to see
the embers of the fire not yet quite dead, the dark figures scattered
about it, sleeping upon the grass with the long ease of custom, and then
the outline of the woman apart from the others with the children about
her. Henry now lay entirely flat, and his motions were genuinely those
of a serpent. It was by a sort of contraction and relaxation of the body
that he moved himself, and his progress was absolutely soundless.

The object of his advance was the woman. He saw by the faint light of
the moon that she was not yet asleep. Her face, worn and weather beaten,
was upturned to the skies, and the stony look of despair seemed to have
settled there forever. She lay upon some pine boughs, and her hands were
tied behind her for the night with deerskin.

Henry contorted himself on, inch by inch, for all the world like a great
snake. Now he passed the sleeping Senecas, hideous with war paint, and
came closer to the woman. She was not paying attention to anything about
her, but was merely looking up a