on board.

He was inclined to charge Oscar Parton with desertion, attributing it to
the young man's zeal for Kate's welfare, for whom he--Oscar--preferred
perhaps to hunt alone.

"Well, let him go!" Catlett said at last, standing on the shore with the
daylight in his face. "If he does not like to trail with me, I am sure
that I will not lift a hand against him. He might have been a stumbling
block, any way, and on the whole I am not sorry that he has rid me of
himself."

Speaking thus--as the reader knows, unjustly--of Oscar Parton, the young
scout started up the river. A few steps brought him to a rifle which lay
on the ground. A glance told him that it belonged to the man whom he had
just charged with desertion; but now he regretted his words. The
discovery of the weapon told him that Parton was in trouble.

His keen eyes, used to the woods and their trails, could not show him
any signs of a struggle, for the tide had removed the stranding place of
the canoe, and after a long and unsuccessful search, Catlett looked
mystified. He looked at the rifle, but it told no story of its owner's
mishaps; it lay in his hands dumb--provokingly so.

"It beats me!" were the only audible words that escaped him, after a
long silence of study and conjecture.

Then he thrust the weapon into the hollow of a tree near by, and started
into the forest.

He had another mystery to solve besides Kate Merriweather's
abduction--Oscar Parton's whereabouts. He felt assured, however, that
the settler's daughter had fallen into Darknight's hands, and it was
known to him that the guide and James Girty were staunch friends.

It was toward the renegade's cabin, ten miles distant, that the scout
hastened. He examined the ground over which he walked, and the light
growing stronger, at last penetrated the forest.

The morning was not far advanced when a young man paused suddenly in a
glen where the trees had felt the fury of a hurricane, and looked into
the face of a person whose clothes were damp with still glistening dew.

The cold white face was upturned to the blue sky, and in the eyes was
the ghastly stare of the dead. Beside the body lay a dark-stocked rifle
clutched tightly by a rigid right hand. Under the left ear was a mass of
clotted blood, which proclaimed the gateway of the bullet of death.

"John Darknight!" exclaimed Harvey Catlett, stooping down to examine the
dead. "Little did I think that your trail would end so suddenly, and