But where was Lincoya?  Where was the youth whose mother mourned him as dead?  He was safe amid the top most boughs of a lonely tree, that now stood scorched and leafless in the midst of the smoldering plain, several miles from the safe retreat that had been gained by his friends.

The horse on which he rode that day, though fleet and active, was young, and uninured to long continued and violent exertion; and, at length, its foot getting entangled in some creeping plant that had grown across the pathway, it had fallen violently to the ground, and thrown its young rider among the prairie-grass, where he lay, stunned, and unable to rise, until all his companions had passed by.  Then he regained the path, and attempted to raise the exhausted creature from the earth:  but all in vain.  Its trembling limbs were unable to support it; and Lincoya saw that he could no longer look to his favorite steed for the safety of his own life, and must abandon it to perish in the flames.

But the boy was an Indian, and accustomed to Indian difficulties and Indian expedients.  He glanced rapidly around for some means of preservation; and, seeing a tree of some magnitude, and at no great distance, he resolved to try to reach it ere the coming fire had seized on the surrounding herbage, and seek for a refuge in its summit.  With much difficulty, he forced his way through the tall rank grass that waved above his head, and the wild vines that were entangled with it in every direction; and he reached the foot of the tree just as the flames were beginning to scorch its outmost branches.  He sprang upward; and, climbing with the agility of a squirrel, he was soon in the highest fork of the tree, and enabled to look down in security on the devastating fire beneath him.  All around was one wide sea of ruddy flames, that shot up in forked and waving tongues high amid the heavy clouds of smoke.  Happily for Lincoya, the herbage beneath his tree of refuge grew thin and scanty, and did not afford much food for the devouring elements; otherwise it must have consumed his retreat, and suffocated him even in its topmost boughs.  As it was, the lower branches only were destroyed, and the boy was able to endure the heat and smoke until the roaring flames had passed beneath him, and he watched them driving onward in the wake of his flying friends.

To follow his companions that night was hopeless, for how could he traverse that red-hot plain?  He, therefore, settled himself firmly among the sheltering branches, to one of which he bound himself with his belt of deer skin, and prepared to pass the night in that position, as he had passed many similar ones when he had been out on hunting expeditions with his father-in-law Jyanough.