f the landing?" he said to the five collectively.
"Can we force it now? What do you think?"

"I think we can," Henry replied for them all, "if the people in the fort
help--and listen to that! They are helping now!"

There was a sudden spurt of firing from the undergrowth on the southern
bank. Nor was it fitful. It continued rapid and heavy, and they knew
that a diversion of some kind had been created. It must be due to the
men from the fort, and now was the time to make the landing.

Adam Colfax stood upright on the deck of the _Independence_ at the risk
of sharpshooter's bullet, and looked eagerly along the Kentucky shore,
seeking some low place into which his boats could push their prows. His
was a practiced mariner's eye, and he saw it at last, a cove which was
the ending of the ravine in the high bank, and he said a few words to
his trumpeter. The silver peal rose once more, mellow, clear, and
reaching far, and the tired men rose, as usual, to its call. Steady
hands held the rifles, and strong arms bent the oars.

The _Independence_ and the boat of the five swung in toward the cove,
and the whole fleet followed hard at their heels.

The savages uttered a great cry when they saw the movement, and swarmed
anew for the attack, firing rapidly from the forest, while their canoes
pushed boldly out from the northern shore. But Henry judged that the
violence of the attack was less than when they had been in the pass, and
he inferred that a considerable part of their force was drawn off by the
diversion from the woods. He could mark by the rapid blaze of the rifles
in the forest the place where this contest was being waged with the
utmost courage and tenacity. His attentive ear noticed a sudden great
increase in the firing there, and it all seemed to come from one point.

"Somebody has been reinforced, and heavily, at that," he said to
Shif'less Sol.

"It's shorely so," said the shiftless one.

A faint sound, nay, hardly more than an echo, came to their ears. But it
was the echo of a deep, full-throated cry, the cry that white men give.

"It's friends," murmured Henry. "I don't know who they are, but they are
friends."

"It's shorely so," said the shiftless one.

Their boat and the _Independence_ were now not thirty feet from the
land, and in a few more moments they struck upon the shelving margin.
The five instantly leaped ashore, and after them came the men of the
fleet in a torrent. Now they heard that full-th