Late in the afternoon they entered a dense forest, and walked through it about two hours, when Paul saw an opening among the trees.  It was a great flash of silver that all at once greeted his eyes.  But as he looked it turned to gold under the late sun.

“Another of those little prairies,” he said.

Henry laughed.

“No, Paul,” he said, “that’s not a prairie.  The sun and the sky together have fooled you.  It’s a lake, and we’re going to live in it for a little while.”

“A lake,” echoed Paul, “and we’re going to live in it?  Come on, I want to see it!”

Kentucky was not a country of lakes, and Paul did not know much about them.  Hence, as he hastened forward, he was thinking more of the lake itself than of Henry’s somewhat enigmatic words, “We’re going to live in it.”

They soon reached its margin, and Paul uttered a little cry of delight.  It was a splendid sheet of water, shaped like a half moon, seven miles long, perhaps, and two miles across at the center.  But at the widest part stood a gem of a wooded island, covered with giant trees.  High hills, clothed with magnificent forest, rose all around the lake.

The beauty of the scene penetrated the souls of all.  Uneducated men like Shif’less Sol and Jim Hart felt it as well as Paul.  The five stood in silence, gazing at the lake and the gem of a wooded island.  The light from the sinking sun gleamed in red and gold flame across the silver waters, and on the wooded island the boughs of the trees seemed to be touched with fire.

“That’s where we are to stay,” said Henry, pointing to the little island.  “No Indian will ever trouble us there.”

“Why?” asked Paul, looking at him questioningly.

“Wait and you’ll see,” replied Henry.

Henry led the way along the shore, and from a dense thicket at the water’s edge he took a light canoe.

“I captured this once,” he said; “brought it across the woods and hid it here, thinking it might be useful some day, and now you see I am right.  Get in!  Light as it is, it will hold us all.”

Henry and Ross took the paddles, and they pushed out into the lake.  Shif’less Sol uttered a long and deep sigh of satisfaction.

“Now, this jest suits a tired man,” he said.  “Henry, you an’ Tom can paddle jest ez long ez you please.  I’d like to do all my travelin’ this way.”

“An’ you’d get so lazy you’d want somebody to come an’ feed you with a spoon,” said Jim Hart.

“An’ it would jest suit me to have you do it.  That’s jest the kind uv a job you’re fit fur, Jim Hart.”

“Shet up, you two,” said Ross.  “You hurt my ears, a-buzzin’ an’ a-buzzin’.”

Shif’less Sol sank back a little and closed his eyes.  An expression of heavenly luxury and ease came over his face, but it could not last long because in a few minutes the boat reached the wooded island.  Shif’less Sol opened his eyes, to find that the sun was almost gone, and that the shadows had come among the great trees.