We grew hot upon it, Richard and I; he with a young lover’s unrecking rashness, and I with an old campaigner’s foresight to make me stubborn; and Ephraim Yeates and the Catawba drew aside and let us have it out.  Dick argued angrily that time was the all-important item, and was not above taunting me bitterly, flinging the reproach of cold-blooded age in my face and swearing hotly that I knew not so much as the alphabet of love.

The taunts were passed in silence, since I would set them over against the irrevocable wrong I had done him, saying in my heart that nothing he could say or do should again tempt me to give place to the devil of jealous wrath.

But when he would give me space I set the hopelessness of pursuit, all unprepared as we were, in plainest speech.  The chase might well be a long one, and we were but scantily armed and without provisions.  The hunter’s rifle must be our sole dependence for food, and in the summer heat we would be forced to kill daily.  On the other hand, with horses, a bag of corn apiece, firearms and ammunition, we should be in some more hopeful case; and, notwithstanding the delay in starting, could make far better speed.

For all the good it did I might have spared my pains and saved my breath.  Jennifer broke me in the midst, crying out that I was even now killing the precious minutes; and so our ill-starred venture had its launching in the frenzied haste that seldom makes for speed.  One small concession I wrung out of his impatience—­this with the help of Yeates and the Catawba.  We went back to the breakfast camp, rekindled the fire, and cooked what we could keep and carry of the venison.

In spite of this delay it was yet early in the forenoon of that memorable Sunday, the twentieth of August, when we set our faces southward and took up the line of march to the ford of the ambushment.  By now the sky was wholly overcast, and the wind was blowing fresher in the tree-tops; but though as yet the storm held off, the air was the cooler for the threatened rain and this was truly a blessing, since the old hunter put us keen upon our mettle to keep pace with him.

We marched in Indian file, Ephraim Yeates in the lead, Uncanoola at his heels, and the two of us heavier-footed ones bringing up the rear.  Knowing the wooded wilderness by length and breadth, the old man held on through thick and thin, straight as an arrow to the mark; and so we had never a sight of the road again till we came out upon it suddenly at the ford of violence.

Here I should have been in despair for the lack of any intelligible hint to point the way; and I think not even Jennifer, with all his woodcraft, could have read the record of the onfall as Yeates and the Catawba did.  But for all the overlapping tangle of moccasin and hoof prints neither of these men of the forest was at fault, though ten minutes later even their skill must have been baffled, inasmuch as the first few spitting raindrops were pattering in the tree-tops when we came upon the ground.