The five had remained in their hut when the rain came down, but two days later Henry and Ross were rowed over in the canoe, and went away to spy out the country.  When they returned they said that the great war party of the allied tribes would soon be in motion, and it was time for the five to take their flight.

A warm sun had been shining for days, and the earth had dried again.  The turbulent brooks and creeks had withdrawn to their accustomed beds, and faint touches of green were beginning to show in the wilderness.

“We’ll leave our house just as we have built it,” said Henry.

“Unless a white man should come wandering here, and that isn’t likely, it won’t be disturbed.  It’s been a good place for us.”

“Yes,” said Paul, “it has been a good home to us.  I’ve spent a happy winter here, and I want to see it again.”

But they had little time for sentiment.  They were making the fast touches of preparation for the second stage of the great war trail—­arranging clothing, light supplies of food, and, above all, ammunition.  Then they left at night in their canoe.  As they approached the mainland, all, as if by involuntary impulse, looked back at the haunted island, looming darkly in the night.

“It was no haunted island for us,” said Paul.

“No,” said Henry.

They landed, hid the canoe, and then, plunging into the forest, sped far to the south and east on tireless feet.

CHAPTER XIX

THE WARNING

Meanwhile war belts were passing through all the forest, from tribe to tribe, to Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Wyandot—­to every band, large or small.  Another great effort would be made to drive back the thin white vanguard that was now entering the finest hunting ground savages had ever known—­the vast green wilderness of the Mississippi Valley, where the warriors had roamed and killed game for unknown generations.  Northern and southern tribes had often met and fought in Kain-tuck-ee, but always each retreated after the conflict to north or to south, leaving Kain-tuck-ee as it was before—­a land of forest and canebrake, inhabited only by the wild beast.

Now, every warrior felt that the coming of the white stream over the mountains, however slender it might be at first, threatened a change, great and disastrous to them, unless checked at once.  These white men cut down the forest, built houses that were meant to stay in one place—­houses of logs—­and plowed up the fields where the forest had been.  They felt in some dim, but none the less certain, way that not only their favorite hunting grounds, but they and their own existence, were threatened.

They had failed the year before in a direct attack upon the new settlements, but these little oases in the wilderness must in time perish unless the white stream coming over the mountains still reached them, nourishing them with fresh bone and sinew, and making them grow.  A great wagon train was coming, and this they would strike, surprising it in the vast, dark wilderness when it was not dreaming that even a single warrior was near.