forced to keep up with them, stride for stride.

Their terror did not diminish at all until the daylight came. Red Eagle
and Yellow Panther, great chiefs, were glad to see the glow over the
eastern forest that told of the rising sun. Even then they did not stop,
but kept on at high speed, until the morning was flooded with light,
when they stopped for fresh breath.

The English officers threw themselves upon the ground and gasped. They
were not ashamed to show now to the Indians that they were weary almost
to death.

"I think I left at least twenty pounds in that cursed forest," said
Alloway.

"I'm not anxious for another such march," said Cartwright with sympathy.
"But, sir, you can see a big smoke rising not more than a mile ahead.
That must be the main camp."

"It is," said Braxton Wyatt, "and there are some of the scouts coming to
meet us."

Far behind them rose the long hoot of the owl, but Wyatt knew that they
would hear it no more that day. He regarded the English officers grimly.
They had patronized him and Blackstaffe, and now they made the poorest
showing of all. In the woods they were lost.

Alloway and Cartwright rose after a long rest and limped into the camp.
The colonel reflected that he had lost prestige but there were the
cannon. The warriors could not afford to march against Kentucky without
them, and only he and his men knew how to use them. In a huge camp, with
a brilliant sun driving away many of the fancies that night and the
forest brought, his full sense of importance returned. He began to talk
now of pushing forward at once with the guns, in order that they might
strike before the settlers were aware.

CHAPTER VI

THE KING WOLF

When the two chiefs, Alloway and the smaller force, were driven into the
great camp, Henry turned aside into the forest and felt that he had done
well. All the fanciful spirit of the younger world created by the Greeks
had been alive in him that night. He had been a young Hercules at play
and he had enjoyed his grim jokes. He was not only a young Hercules, he
was a primeval son of the forest to whom the wilderness was a book in
which he read.

He went back a little on their path, and he marked where the European
leader had fallen twice through sheer weariness or because he could not
see well enough in the dusk to evade trailing vines. A red thread or two
on a bush showed that he had torn his uniform in falling, and the young
woods rover laughed. H