He did not hear a light step behind him, but he did feel a powerful arm grasp him around the waist, pinning his own arms to his side, while a hand was clasped over his mouth, checking the ready cry that could not pass his lips.  Then before his starting eyes a figure rose out of the bushes whence the hiss had come.  It was not that of a rattlesnake, but that of a man, a tall man with powerful shoulders, blue eyes, and yellow hair, undoubtedly one of the ferocious Americans.

The sentinel felt that his hour had come, and he began to patter his prayers in his throat, but the two Americans, the one before him, and the one who had grasped him from behind, did not slay him at once.  Instead they said words together in their harsh tongue.  Then they tore pieces from the sentinel’s clothing, made a wad of it and pressed it into his mouth.  They also tied a strip from the same clothing over his mouth and behind his head, and, still despoiling his clothing, they bound him hand and foot and laid him in the bushes, where he was invisible to his comrades and could only see a sky in which a few dim stars danced.  But on the whole he was glad.  They had not killed him as he had expected, and the gag in his mouth was soft.  Moreover, his comrades would surely find him in time and release him.

Henry and Shif’less Sol turned away and smiled again at each other.

“Not much trouble, that,” whispered the shiftless one.  “He wuz shorely a skeered Spaniard ef I kin read a man’s face.  Guess he wuz glad to get off ez easy ez he did.  Now fur the boat!”

“Here we are,” said Henry.  “We must pitch out the two men sleeping in it—­you take one and I’ll take the other—­and then we must seize the oars and pull like mad, because the whole camp will be up.”

The boat was tied with a rope to a stout sapling and two Spanish soldiers slumbered in great peace inside.  The oars lay beside them.  Henry cut the rope with one sweep of his long-bladed hunting-knife, and then he and Shif’less Sol sprang into the boat.  Each seized a man by the shoulders and lifted him in his powerful arms.  It was a chance that one of the sleepers was Luiz, and, when he was snatched suddenly from blissful dreams to somber fact, he opened his eyes to see bending over him the same grave, tanned being who had rescued him from the raging buffalo.

But it was not a beneficent spirit, because Luiz was tossed bodily the next moment into three feet of muddy water.  He uttered a cry of terror and despair as he went down, and another Spaniard uttered a similar cry at the same moment.  Both cries were cut off short by mouthfuls of the Mississippi, but the two Spaniards came up a moment later, and began to wade hastily to the shore.  Each cast a frightened glance behind him, and saw their boat disappearing on the river’s bosom, carrying the two evil spirits with it.

“I shorely enjoyed that,” said Shif’less Sol, as the oars bent beneath his powerful stroke.  “That Spaniard’s face as he woke up an’ found hisself whirled out into the Mississippi wuz the funniest thing I ever seed, an’ I had the fun, too, without hurting him.  It ain’t often, Paul, that you kin do what you need to do an’ be full o’ laugh, too, an’ so when the time comes I make the most o’ it.”