Through this lower end, as we made no doubt, the powder train had come, turning from the Indian path in the gorge up the bed of the barrier stream, turning again at the outer cavern mouth to squeeze in single file between the thickly matted undergrowth and the cliff’s face, and so to pass around the split-off mass and come into the crevice rift.

How the sharp eyes of the old hunter, and those of the Catawba as well, had missed the finding of this squeezing place where the cavalcade had left the stream-bed, we could never guess; but on the chance that we might yet need to know all the crooks and turnings of this outlet, we felt our way quite around the masking cliff and down to the stream’s edge in the gorge.

That done we were ready for a farther advance, and clambering back into the crevice we once more took the stream for our guide and were presently deep in the natural tunnel piercing the mountain proper.  This extension of the subterranean waterway proved to be a noble cavern, wide and high enough to pass a loaded wain, as we determined by tossing pebbles against the arching roof.  None the less, ’twas full of crooks and windings; and in the sharpest elbow of them all, where we were like to lose our way by blundering into one of the many branching side passages, Richard stopped me with a hand thrust back.

“Softly!” he cautioned; “here are their vedettes!”

Just beyond the crooking elbow the dull red glow from a tiny fire gone to coals showed us two Indian sentries set to keep the pass.  Dick drew his claymore, but he was chilling again and the hand that grasped the great blade was shaking as with a palsy.  Yet he would mutter, as the teeth-chattering suffered him: 

“What say you, Jack?  Shall we rush them?  There’s naught else for it.”  And then, with a gritting oath:  “Oh, damn this cursed chilling!”

I whispered back that we would wait till he was better fit.  He was loath to admit the necessity, but, as it chanced, the momentary delay saved our lives in that strait.  While we paused, hugging the shadows in the crooking elbow, the gloomy depths beyond the sentries were suddenly starred with flaring flambeaux lighting the way for a hasting rabble of savages; and had we been entangled in the struggle with the two sentinels we should have been taken red-handed.

As it was, we had to make the quickest play to save ourselves.  In the same breath we both remembered the narrow side passage just behind in which we were nigh to losing our way, and into this we plunged, reckless of possible pitfalls.  We were no more than safely out of the main corridor when the runners, some score of them, as we guessed, trooped past our covert in full cry, leaving us half smothered in the smoky trail of their pitch-pine flambeaux.

“Now what a-devil has set this hornet’s nest of theirs abuzz so suddenly?” I whispered, when the smoke-choke gave us liberty to speak without coughing to betray ourselves.