d beneath.

It would be hard to imagine a more gloomy occupation than that of Ben
Ripley while engaged with this duty. The solemn murmur of the vast woods
around him, the world of darkness in which he slowly paced to and fro,
the memory of the sad scenes he had seen in the lovely Wyoming Valley,
the certainty that a good many miles must yet be traversed before they
could sit down in safety, the consciousness that several of the cruel
red men were near them, and the belief that they would start in pursuit
as soon as it was light--all this oppressed him with crushing weight,
and made him feel at times as if there was no escape for him and his
loved ones.

"There is only one way of hiding our trail," he mused. "If we could come
upon some river or large stream of water, where there was a boat, or we
could make a raft, we should be safe. A big rainstorm would do as well,
for it would wash out all signs of our footprints."

He paused in his walk and peeped up at a speck of sky shown through a
rift among the limbs.

"There is hardly a cloud; it looks as if it wouldn't rain for a week,
and I don't know of any river between here and the Delaware."

His senses were never more alert. He avoided the fatal mistake of
sitting down for a few minutes, or so much as leaning against a tree to
rest. He stopped, however, now and then and listened intently.

"I wonder whether I am mistaken, or whether I did hear something moving
over the leaves out there?"

The fact that the almost inaudible rustling was noticed only when
he himself was in motion inclined him to suspect it was a delusion,
accounted for by his tense nerves. But after a time he became certain of
a fact hardly less startling in its nature.

When walking back and forth with his face away from the spot where his
friends lay something gleamed a short distance off among the trees. Its
location showed it was on the ground, and, as nearly as he could judge,
less than a hundred feet off.

His first supposition was that it was a fungus growth known in the
country as "foxfire," which gives out a phosphorescent glow in the
darkness; but after watching and studying it for a long time, he was
convinced it was something else.

"I'm going to find out," he decided; "it won't take me long, and I ought
to know all about it, for it may concern us."

Stealing forward, he was not a little astonished to find it a real fire,
sunken to a glowing ember, left by someone.

"It must be as