Taking time by the forelock, the old borderer had swept a circle of reconnaissance around our halting place, “to get the p’ints of the compass,” as he would say.  His first discovery was that the ford we had found in the darkness served as the river crossing of an ancient and well-used Indian trace.  Along this trace from the eastward the powder train had come, no longer ago than mid-afternoon of yesterday; and arguing from this that the night camp of the band would be but a short march to the westward, Yeates had pushed on to feel out the enemy’s position.

For a mile or more beyond the ford he had trailed the convoy easily.  The Indian trace or path, well-trampled by the numerous horses of the cavalcade, followed the up-stream windings of the swift river straight into the eye of the western mountains.  But in the eye itself, a rocky defile where the slopes on each hand became frowning battlements to narrow valley and stream, the one to a darkling gorge, the other to a thundering torrent, the trail was lost as completely as if the powder convoy had vanished into thin air.

Here was a fresh complication, and one that called for instant action.  We had counted upon a battle royal in any attempt to rescue the women; but that Falconnet, impeded as he was by the slow movements of the powder cargo, could slip away, was a contingency for which we were wholly unprepared.

So, as you would guess, the hunter breakfast was hurriedly despatched; and by the time the sun was shoulder high over the eastern hills we had broken camp and crossed the river, and were pressing forward to the gorge of disappearance.

On each hand the mountains rose precipitous, the one on the left swelling unbroken to a bald and rounded summit, forest covered save for its tonsured head high in air, while that on the right was steeper and lower, with a line of cliffs at the top.  As we fared on, the valley narrowed to a mere chasm, with the river thundering along the base of the tonsured mountain, and the Indian path hugging the cliff on the right.

In the gloomiest depths of this defile we came upon the hunter’s stumbling-block.  A tributary stream, issuing from a low cavern in the right-hand cliff, crossed the Indian path and the chasm at a bound and plunged noisily into the flood of the larger river.  On the hither side of this barrier stream the trail of the powder convoy led plainly down into the water; and, so far as one might see, that was the end of it.

As we made sure, we left no stone unturned in the effort to solve the mystery.  No horse, ridden or led, could have lived to cross the pouring torrent of the main river, or to wade up or down its bed; and if the cavalcade had turned up the barrier stream its progress must have ended abruptly against the sheer wall of the cliff at the entrance to the low-arched cavern whence the tributary came into being.  But if Falconnet and his following had ridden neither up nor down the bed of the barrier stream, it seemed equally certain that no horse of the troop had crossed it.  The Indian trace, which held straight on up the gorge and presently came out above into a high upland valley, was unmarked by any hoof print, new or old.