“Our pony-riding Tuckaseges, doubtless,” was Richard’s ready answer.  “By all the chances, they should have met the Great Bear and his peace-offering out yonder on the trace—­which same they did not.  So when they bring this tale to camp there is the devil to pay and no pitch hot.  God help our tough old Ephraim and the Catawba if these bloodhounds win out in time to overtake them!”

“Aye,” said I; and then we crept out of our dodge-hole and made ready to go about our business with the sentries.

But when we came to peer again around the crooking elbow it would seem that the hurrying search party had fought our battle for us.  The watch-fire was there to light a little circle in the gloom, but the watchers were gone.  We chanced a guess that they had joined the hue and cry, and so we pressed forward, past the handful of embers and into the pit-black depths beyond.

Twenty paces farther on it came to playing blind man’s buff with the rocky walls again, and measured by the trippings and stumblings ’twas a long Sabbath day’s journey to that final turn in the great earth-burrow whence we could see the glimmering of the enemy’s camp-fires in the sunken valley.

“Now God be praised!” quoth Richard most fervently.  “Another hour in this cursed kennel with the fever on me and I should be a yammering loose-wit.”  And I, too, was glad enough to see the stars again, and to be at large beneath them.

Emerging from the subterranean way, we held to the camp side of the stream, making an ample circuit to the left to come down upon the enemy’s position from the wooded slope behind the encampment.  We met no let or hindrance in this approach.  Secure in their stronghold, the Indians had no patrols out; and as for the Englishmen, every mother’s son of them, it seemed, was basking in the light of a great fire built before the pine-bough shelters.

Favored by a dense thicketing of laurel we made a near-hand reconnaissance of the little wigwam which held our dear lady.  As I have said, this was pitched in the thinning of the forest which covered the steep slope behind the encampment, and so was the farthest removed from the stream, and from the Indian lodges disposed in a half-moon at the water’s edge.  Here all was quiet as the grave, and the clamor of the Indian camp came softened by the distance to a low monotonous humming like the buzzing of a bee-hive.  The flap of the tepee-lodge was closely drawn, and the bit of fire before it had burned out to a heap of white-ashed embers.

“They are safe as yet, thank God!” says Richard, heaving a most palpable sigh of relief.  Then, with the fever in his veins to whip his natural ardor into hasty action:  “’Twill be hours before Eph and the Catawba can come in by your upper ravine, Jack, and we shall never have a better chance than this.  Hold you quiet here, whilst I—­”

But I laid fast hold of him and would not hear to any such a foolhardy marring of Ephraim Yeates’s plan.