The afternoon wore slowly away, and until late in the day nothing further happened to disturb Alfred’s meditations, which consisted chiefly of different mental views and pictures of red lips and black eyes.  Just as he decided to return to the fort for his supper he heard the barking of a dog that he had seen running along the road some moments before.  The sound came from some distance down the river bank and nearer the fort.  Walking a few paces up the bluff Alfred caught sight of a large black dog running along the edge of the water.  He would run into the water a few paces and then come out and dash along the shore.  He barked furiously all the while.  Alfred concluded that he must have been excited by a fox or perhaps a wolf; so he climbed down the steep bank and spoke to the dog.  Thereupon the dog barked louder and more fiercely than ever, ran to the water, looked out into the river and then up at the man with almost human intelligence.

Alfred understood.  He glanced out over the muddy water, at first making out nothing but driftwood.  Then suddenly he saw a log with an object clinging to it which he took to be a man, and an Indian at that.  Alfred raised his rifle to his shoulder and was in the act of pressing the trigger when he thought he heard a faint halloo.  Looking closer, he found he was not covering the smooth polished head adorned with the small tuft of hair, peculiar to a redskin on the warpath, but a head from which streamed long black hair.

Alfred lowered his rifle and studied intently the log with its human burden.  Drifting with the current it gradually approached the bank, and as it came nearer he saw that it bore a white man, who was holding to the log with one hand and with the other was making feeble strokes.  He concluded the man was either wounded or nearly drowned, for his movements were becoming slower and weaker every moment.  His white face lay against the log and barely above water.  Alfred shouted encouraging words to him.

At the bend of the river a little rocky point jutted out a few yards into the water.  As the current carried the log toward this point, Alfred, after divesting himself of some of his clothing, plunged in and pulled it to the shore.  The pallid face of the man clinging to the log showed that he was nearly exhausted, and that he had been rescued in the nick of time.  When Alfred reached shoal water he slipped his arm around the man, who was unable to stand, and carried him ashore.

The rescued man wore a buckskin hunting shirt and leggins and moccasins of the same material, all very much the worse for wear.  The leggins were torn into tatters and the moccasins worn through.  His face was pinched with suffering and one arm was bleeding from a gunshot wound near the shoulder.

“Can you not speak?  Who are you?” asked Clarke, supporting the limp figure.

The man made several efforts to answer, and finally said something that to Alfred sounded like “Zane,” then he fell to the ground unconscious.