But as the wind continued to blow lightly from the south, the dread odor passed away and the air became pure and fresh again.  Back in the deeps of the forest the timid creatures found courage once more, and they crept down to the water’s edge to slake their thirst.  But they were small, and the ambushed marksmen in the boat still waited, silent and motionless.  Paul saw them sometimes, and sometimes he did not.  Then his eyes would wander to the surface of the lake, now pale, heaving silver in the moonlight, and to the wall of black forest that circled it round.

A heavier step came again, and a light puff! puff!  Paul knew now that a great animal was approaching, and that the timid little ones would give it room.  He looked with all his eyes, and a magnificent stag stepped into the moonlight, antlers erect, waiting and listening for a moment before he bowed his head to drink.  Paul almost leaped up in the boat as a rifle cracked beside him, and he saw the stag spring into the air and fall dead, with his feet in the water.

Henry and Ross promptly shoved the boat from the bushes, and the three of them lifted the body into it, disposing it in the center with infinite care.  Then, with food enough to last for days, they rowed back across the lake to the haunted island.  Shif’less Sol and Jim Hart, with their rude tackle, had succeeded in catching four fish, of a species unknown to Paul, but large and to all appearances succulent.

“We’ll eat the fish to-morrow, because they won’t keep,” said Sol, “but Jim Hart here kin jerk the venison.  It will give him somethin’ to do, an’ Jim is a sight better off when he has to work.  He ain’t got no time fur foolishness.”

“An’ you can tan its hide,” growled Jim Hart, “although your own needs tannin’ most.”

A few minutes later the two were amicably dressing the body of the stag, but Paul was already asleep.  He assisted the next morning at a conference, and then he learned what Henry and Ross intended to do.  The powder for Marlowe, as Paul had surmised, must be left for the present in its hidden place while they spied upon the great northern confederacy, now being formed for the destruction of the white settlements, and they would do what they could to impede it.  Henry, Ross, and Sol would leave that night on an expedition of discovery, while Paul and Jim Hart held the haunted island.  Paul, in this case, did not object to being left behind, because he had, for the present at least, enough of danger, and he knew that he was better suited to other tasks than the one on which the three great woodsmen were now departing.

Jim Hart was to row them over to the mainland, and they were to signal their return with three plaintive, long-drawn cries of the whip-poor-will.  They departed at the first coming of the dusk with short good-bys, leaving Paul alone on the island.  He stood near the margin under the foliage of a great beech and watched them go.  The boat, as it left a trailing wake of melting silver, became a small black dot at the farther shore, and then vanished.