ably bartered with some passing squaw for the pair. But the size
looked encouraging, and with a little ripping and cutting, I managed to
work it on. Pinned to the toe of the other, I found a note. It ran like
this: 'Two Indians are trailing you. I sent them down-stream, but they
will come back. They told me about that poor little papoose.'

"I saw she must have followed me that morning, while searching for her
cow, or perhaps to satisfy herself I had left the clearing, and so
discovered my hiding-place. The broader track of her skirts must have
covered mine through the fern."

Tisdale paused. The _Aquila_ had come under the lee of Bainbridge Island.
The Olympics were out of sight, as the yacht, heeling to the first tide
rip, began to turn into the Narrows, and the batteries of Fort Ward
commanded her bows; a beautiful wooded point broke the line of the
opposite shore. It rimmed a small cove. But Mrs. Weatherbee was not
interested; her attention remained fixed on Tisdale. Indeed he held the
eyes of every one. Then Marcia Feversham relieved the tension. "And the
Indians came back?" she asked.

"Oh, yes, that was inevitable; they had to come back to pick up my trail.
But you don't know what a different man that rest and the moccasins made
of me. In five minutes I was on the road and making my best time up the
gorge, in the opposite direction. The woman was standing in her door as I
passed the cabin; she put a warning finger to her lips and waved me on. In
a little while the ground began to fall in short pitches; sometimes it
broke in steps over granite spurs where the exposed roots of fir and
hemlock twined; then I came to a place where an immense boulder, big as a
house, moving down the mountain, had left a swath through the timber, and
I heard the thunder of the Duckabush. I turned into this cut, intending to
cross the river and work down the canyon on the farther side, and as I
went I saw the torrent storming below me, a winding sheet of spray. The
boulder had stopped on a level bluff, but two sections, splitting from it,
had dropped to the bank underneath and, tilting together in an apex,
formed a small cavern through which washed a rill. It made a considerable
pool and, dividing, poured on either side of the uprooted trunk of a fir
that bridged the stream. The log was very old; it sagged mid-channel, as
though a break had started, and snagged limbs stretched a line of
pitfalls. But a few yards below the river plunged