By the time he dared to follow, Jeanne’s captors were a quarter of a mile ahead of him.  He no longer heard their paddles when he entered the stream at the upper end of the lake, and he bent to his work with greater energy and less caution.  Five minutes—­ten minutes passed, and he saw nothing, heard nothing.  His strokes grew more powerful and the canoe shot through the water with the swift cleavage of a knife.  A perspiration began to gather on his face, and a sudden chilling fear entered him.  Another five minutes and he stopped.  The river swept out ahead of him, broad and clear, for a quarter of a mile.  There was no sign of the canoes!

For a few moments he remained motionless, drifting back with the slow current of the stream, stunned by the thought that he had allowed Jeanne’s captors to escape him.  Had they heard him and dropped in to shore to let him pass?  He swung his canoe about and headed down-stream.  In that case he could not miss them, if he used caution.  But if they had turned into some creek hidden in the gloom—­were even now picking their way through a secret channel that led back from the river—­

A groan burst from his lips as he thought of Jeanne.  In that half mile of river he could surely find where the canoes had gone, but it might be too late.  He went down in mid-stream, searching the shadows of both shores.  His heart sank like lead when he came to the lake.  There was but one thing to do now, and he ran his canoe close along the right-hand shore, looking for an opening.  His progress was slow.  A dozen times he entangled himself in masses of reeds and rice, or thrust himself under over-hanging tree-tops and vines to investigate the deeper gloom beyond.  He had returned two-thirds of the distance to the straight-water where he had given up the pursuit when the bow of his canoe ran upon a smooth, sandy bar that shelved out thirty or forty feet from the shore.  Scarcely had he felt the grate of sand when with a powerful shove he sent his canoe back, and almost in the same instant Pierre’s rifle leveled menacingly shoreward.  Drawn up high and dry on the sand-bar were the two canoes.

For a space Philip expected that his appearance would be the signal for some movement ashore; but as he drifted slowly away, his rifle still leveled, he was filled more and more with the belief that he had not been discovered.  He allowed himself to drift until he knew that he was hidden in the shadows, and then quietly worked himself in to shore.  Making no sound, he pulled himself up the bank and crept among the trees toward the bar.  There was no one guarding the canoes.  He heard no sound of voice, no crackling of brush or movement of reeds.  For a full minute he crouched and listened.  Then he crept nearer and found where both reeds and brush were trampled down into a path that led away from the river.