e boy strove only to force
him beneath the lake and he fought and screamed with passion and horror
of imminent death.

"Be still! be still!" cried Enoch, well-nigh overcome himself by the mad
actions of the man. "Lie quiet or I cannot save you. Be still!"

Halpen did not hear him; or, if he heard, he would not believe. He tore
himself from Enoch's grasp, and as the youth tried to seize him again he
struck out wildly and his fist found lodgment against Enoch's jaw. The
blow stunned the latter and he sank. Halpen strove to reach the
overturned canoe. It was too far away. He felt himself going down for a
third time and his lungs were already half filled with water. A fearful
scream rent the night--the last cry of a terrified soul going to its
end--and he sank. He never rose to the surface after that third plunge
beneath the lake.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE DAWN OF THE TENTH OF MAY

Enoch Harding, after a moment of breathless agony beneath the water,
struggled to the air again. The blow he had received so dulled his
senses that, had the canoe not fortunately been within the reach of his
arm, he would have a second time gone down into the depths of the lake
and possibly shared the fate of his enemy. But when his hand, flung out
in that despair which is said to make a drowning person catch at even a
straw, came in contact with the boat he seized it with a grip that could
not be shaken. He had not the strength necessary to turn it over and to
climb into the craft; but fortunately rescue was near.

The sentinel had heard the voices out upon the water, and Simon Halpen's
despairing scream as he went down for the last time, echoed from the
wooded bluffs and reached the ears of the other Green Mountain Boys in
the neighborhood. The sentinel leaped into the big canoe which Enoch had
that morning secured from the Tory farmer up the lake, and paddled
rapidly toward the mouth of the cove. He suspected at once that the
escaped spy was trying to cross the lake and that some one of his
brother scouts had discovered him.

Suddenly the rescuer saw the upturned canoe and the almost exhausted boy
clinging to it. He drove his own craft alongside and reaching quickly
seized Enoch's shoulder, bearing him up as the youth's own hands slipped
from their resting-place on the keel of the canoe. "Courage--courage!"
cried the scout, heartily. "You are not goin' down yet, Nuck Harding!
Where's the other?"

"Gone--gone!" gasped Enoch, horrifi