“Well, now; I’ll be daddled if this here ain’t about the beatin’est thing I ever chugged up ag’inst,” was the old borderer’s comment, when we had flogged our wits to small purpose in the search for some clue to the mystery.  “What’s your mind about it, hey, Chief?”

Uncanoola shook his head.  “Heap plenty slick.  No go up-stream, no go down, no cross over, no go back.  Mebbe go up like smoke—­w’at?”

The hunter shook his head and would by no means admit the alternative.  “Ez I allow, that would ax for a merricle; and I reckon ez how when the good Lord sends a chariot o’ fire after sech a clanjamfrey as this’n o’ the hoss-captain’s, it’ll be mighty dad-blame’ apt to go down ’stead of up.”

We were standing on the brink of the barrier stream no more than a fisherman’s cast from the black rock-mouth that spewed it up from its underground maw.  While the hunter was speaking, the Catawba had lapsed into statue-like listlessness, his gaze fixed upon the eddying flood which held the secret of the vanished cavalcade.  Suddenly he came alive with a bound and made a quick dash into the water.  What he retrieved was only a small piece of wood, charred at one end.  But Ephraim Yeates caught at it eagerly.

“Now the Lord be praised for all His marcies!” he exclaimed.  “It do take an Injun to come a-running whenst ever’body else is plumb beat out!  Ne’er another one of us had an eye sharp enough to ketch that bit o’ sign a-floating past.  What say, Cap’n John?”

I shook my head, seeing no special significance in the token; and Dick asked:  “What will it be, Ephraim, now that it is caught?”

The old man looked his pity for our dullard wit, and then set a moiety of it in words.

“Well, well, now; I’m fair ashamed of ye!  What all d’ye reckon blackened the end o’ this bit o’ pine-branch?”

“Why, fire,” says Richard, beginning, as I did, to see some glimmering of light.

“In course.  And it come from yonder, didn’t it?” pointing to the cavern under the cliff.  “More than that, ‘twas cut wi’ a hatchet—­this fresh end of it—­no longer ago than last night, at the furdest; the pitch that the fire fried out’n it is all soft and gummy, yit.  Gentlemen all:  whenst we find where this here creek comes out into daylight again we’re a-going to find the hoss-captain and the whole enduring passel o’ redskins and redcoats, immejitly, if not sooner!”

What comment this startling announcement would have evoked I know not, for at the moment of its utterance the Catawba went flat upon the ground, making most urgent signs for us to do likewise.  What he had seen we all saw a flitting instant later; the painted face of a Cherokee warrior as a setting for a pair of fierce basilisk eyes peering out of the low-arched cavern whence the stream issued, an apparition looking for all the world like a dismembered head floating on the surface of the outgushing flood.