The two warriors talked together a little, and then, seeming to change their minds, they unbound the boy’s feet.  One touched him on the shoulder, and, pointing to the north, started in that direction.  Paul understood, and, rising to his feet, followed.  The second warrior came close behind, and Paul was as securely a prisoner as if he were in the midst of a band of a hundred.  Once or twice he looked around at the silent woods and thought of running, but it would have been the wildest folly.  His hands tied, he could have been quickly overtaken, or, if not that, a bullet.  He sternly put down the temptation, and plodded steadily on between the warriors, the broad, brown back of the one in front of him always leading the way.

It seemed to him that they sought the densest part of the undergrowth, where the night shadows lay thickest, and he was wise enough to know that they did it to hide their trail from possible pursuit.  Then he thought of Henry, his comrade, the prince of trailers!  He might come!  He would come!  Paul’s blood leaped at the thought, and his head lifted with hope.

Clouds swept up, the moon died, and in the darkness Paul had little idea of direction.  He only knew that they were still traveling fast amid the thick bushes, and that when he made too much noise in passing one or other of the brown savages would prod him with the muzzle of a gun as a hint to be more careful.  His face became bruised and his feet weary, but at last they stopped in an opening among the trees, by the side of a little brook that trickled over shining pebbles.

The warriors wasted little time.  They rebound Paul’s feet in such tight fashion that he could scarcely move, and then, lying down near him, went to sleep so quickly that it seemed to Paul they accomplished the feat by some sort of a mechanical arrangement.  Tired as he was, he could not close his own eyes yet, and he longed for his comrade.  Would he come?

Paul’s sensitive nerves were again keenly alive to every phase of his cruel situation.  The warriors, lying almost at his feet, were monsters, not men, and this wilderness, which in its finer aspects he loved, was bristling in the darkness with terrors known and unknown.  Yet his clogged and weary brain slept at last, and when he awoke again it was day—­a beautiful day of white and gold light, with the autumnal tints of the forest all about him, and the leaves rustling in a gentle wind.

But his heart sank to the uttermost depths when he looked at the warriors.  By day they seemed more brutal and pitiless than at night.  From their long, narrow eyes shone no ray of mercy, and the ghastly paint on their high cheek bones deepened their look of ferocity.  It was not the appearance of the warriors alone, it was more the deed for which they were preparing that appalled Paul.  They were raking dead leaves and fallen brushwood of last year around a small but stout sapling, and they went on with their task in a methodical way.