re he was; there was no sign of habitation--or even
occupation--anywhere. He had been too terrified to notice the direction
in which he had drifted--even if he had possessed the ordinary knowledge
of a backwoodsman, which he did not. He was helpless. In his bewildered
state, seeing a squirrel cracking a nut on the branch of a hollow tree
near him, he made a half-frenzied dart at the frightened animal, which
ran away. But the same association of ideas in his torpid and confused
brain impelled him to search for the squirrel's hoard in the hollow
of the tree. He ate the few hazel-nuts he found there, ravenously. The
purely animal instinct satisfied, he seemed to have borrowed from it a
certain strength and intuition. He limped through the thicket not
unlike some awkward, shy quadrumane, stopping here and there to peer
out through the openings over the marshes that lay beyond. His sight,
hearing, and even the sense of smell had become preternaturally acute.
It was the latter which suddenly arrested his steps with the odor
of dried fish. It had a significance beyond the mere instincts of
hunger--it indicated the contiguity of some Indian encampment. And as
such--it meant danger, torture, and death.

He stopped, trembled violently, and tried to collect his scattered
senses. Redwood Camp had embroiled itself needlessly and brutally with
the surrounding Indians, and only held its own against them by reckless
courage and unerring marksmanship. The frequent use of a casual
wandering Indian as a target for the practising rifles of its members
had kept up an undying hatred in the heart of the aborigines and
stimulated them to terrible and isolated reprisals. The scalped and
skinned dead body of Jack Trainer, tied on his horse and held hideously
upright by a cross of wood behind his saddle, had passed, one night,
a slow and ghastly apparition, into camp; the corpse of Dick Ryner had
been found anchored on the river-bed, disembowelled and filled with
stone and gravel. The solitary and unprotected member of Redwood Camp
who fell into the enemy's hands was doomed.

Elijah Martin remembered this, but his fears gradually began to subside
in a certain apathy of the imagination, which, perhaps, dulled his
apprehensions and allowed the instinct of hunger to become again
uppermost. He knew that the low bark tents, or wigwams, of the Indians
were hung with strips of dried salmon, and his whole being was new
centered upon an attempt to stealt