he
boy's years of wilderness training were concentrated on an escape. The
English officer meant to make him a lesson to the other voyageurs. And
he smiled as he thought of the race he could give the Sioux. All his
arms except his knife were left behind the bush; for fleet-ness was to
count in this venture. The game of life or death was a pretty one, to
be enjoyed as he shot from tree to tree, or like a noiseless-hoofed deer
made a long stretch of covert. He was alive through every blood drop.
The dewy glory of dawn had never seemed so great. Cool as the Sioux
whom he dodged, his woodsman's eye gathered all aspects of the strange
forest. A detached rock, tall as a tree, raised its colossal altar,
surprising the eye like a single remaining temple pillar.

Old logs, scaled as in a coat of mail, testified to the humidity of this
lush place. The boy trod on sweet white violets smelling of incense.

The wooded deeps unfolded in thinning dusk and revealed a line of high
verdant cliffs walling his course. He dashed through hollows where
millions of ferns bathed him to the knees. As daylight grew--though it
never was quite daylight there-so did his danger. He expected to hear
the humming of an arrow, and perhaps to feel a shock and sting and
cleaving of the bolt, and turned in recklessly to climb for the uplands,
where after miles of jutting spurs the ridge stooped and pushed out in
front of itself a round-topped rock. As the Canadian passed this rock a
yellow flare like candle-light came through a crack at its base.

He dropped on all-fours. The Indian was not in sight. He squirmed within
a low battlement of serrated stone guarding the crack, and let himself
down into what appeared to be the mouth of a cave. The opening was so
low as to be invisible just outside the serrated breastwork. He found
himself in a room of rock, irregularly hollow above, with a candle
burning on the stone floor. As he sat upright and stretched forth a hand
to pinch off the flame, the image of a sleeping woman was printed on his
eyeballs so that he saw every careless ring of fair hair around her head
and every curve of her body for hours afterwards in the dusk.

His first thought was to place himself where his person would intercept
any attack at the mouth of the cave. Knife in hand, he waited for a
horned, glittering-eyed face to stoop or an arrow or hatchet to glance
under that low rim, the horizon of his darkness. His chagrin at having
taken to a