Richard said he could never guess the meaning of it all; and my mind was to the full as blank as his.  I made sure some deep-laid plot was at the bottom of the mystery; but we had measured many weary miles in the wilderness, and the plotter’s trap had been fairly baited, set and sprung, before the lightning flash of explication came to show us all its devilish ingenuity.

But now “Forward,” was the word, and we fell in line again, and again the tireless running of the two guides stretched and held us on the rack of weariness.  Happily for us two who were out of training, the rainy-day dusk came early; and though Yeates and the Indian, running now with their bodies bent double and their noses to the ground, held on long after Richard Jennifer and I were bat-blind for any seeing of the hoof-prints, the end came at length and we bivouacked as we were, fireless, and with the last of the cooked ration of deer’s meat for a scanty supper.

After the meal, which was swallowed hastily in the silence of utter fatigue, we scooped a hollow in a last year’s leaf bed and lay down to sleep, wet to the skin as any four half-drowned water rats, and to the full as miserable.

Fagged as I was, ’twas a long time before sleep came to make me forget; a weary interval fraught with dismal mental miseries to march step and step with the treadmill rackings of the aching muscles.  What grievous hap had befallen my dear lady? and how much or how little was I to blame for this kidnapping of her by my relentless enemy?  Was it a sharp foreboding of some such resort to savage violence that had tortured her into sending the appeal for help?

With this, I fell to dwelling afresh upon the wording of her message, hungering avidly for some hint to give me leave to claim it for my own.  Though I made sure she did not love me,—­had never loved me as other than a make-shift confidant, whose face and age would set him far beyond the pale of sentiment,—­yet I had hoped this friendship-love would give her leave to call upon me in her hour of need.

Was I the one to whom her message had been sped?  Suddenly I remembered what Richard had said; that the arrow was the Catawba’s.  If Uncanoola were the bearer of the parchment, he would surely know to whom he had been sent.

His burrow in the leaf bed chanced to be next to mine, and I could hear his steady breathing, light and long-drawn, like that of some wild creature—­as, truly, he was—­sleeping with all the senses alert to spring awake at a touch or the snapping of a twig.  A word would arouse him, and a single question might resolve the doubt.

I thought of all this, and yet, when I would have wakened the Indian, a shaking ague-fit of poltroon cowardice gave me pause.  For while the doubt remained there was a chance to hope that she had sent to me, making the little cry for help a token, not of love, perchance, but of some dawning of forgiveness for my desperate wronging of her.  And in that hesitant moment it was borne in upon me that without this slender chance for hope I should go mad and become a wretched witling at a time when every faculty should be superhuman sharp and strong for spending in her service.