t. The other abandoned the canoe here,
and Kate is with him somewhere in the forest."

As he uttered the last word he touched the Indian, and what was his
surprise to see the limbs move and a flash light up the deathly eyes.
Oscar Parton saw the terrible embrace that was preparing for him, and
tried to avoid it; but the red arms flew up as if impelled by electric
mechanism, and closed around his body.

He struggled and tried to signal his companion, but in vain; his face
was pressed to his foe's, and he felt the death grip of the Wyandot
crushing out his very life.

But for all that, he tried the harder to free himself from the loathsome
grip. Was his young life to be given up so ignominiously? And that, too,
with Kate Merriweather's fate veiled by obscurity? The thought was
awful, horrid.

Not a word fell from the Indian's lips; the young hunter did not know
that the scout's ball had passed through the cheek, mangling the tongue
whose words had been heard in the council and on the trail.

The struggle with the dying went on, and, as was natural, the canoe was
pushed nearer the river, until the tide caught it and it was afloat! Out
into the starlight went the craft with the combatants on board; down the
stream toward the rapids, and each succeeding moment farther from
assistance by the white scout.

All things must end, and life, like the rest, reaches the shadow of
death. A sudden gurgling in the throat, a quivering of the limbs,
announced to Oscar Parton that his enemy was dead. Then again he tried
to escape; but the limbs did not relax; they seemed destined to hold him
there forever.

"God help me!" he groaned. "Must I die now, and in the arms of a dead
Indian?"

The situation was so tainted with the horrible that the youth almost
gave up in despair, and the boat swept down the river.

But help reached him at the eleventh hour. The boat was checked in its
course, and he heard voices above the dead arms that, like great cords
of steel, held him down. He groaned to tell some one, he knew not who,
that he still lived, and then he felt the Indian's arms torn apart. He
was saved.

With an ejaculation of joy at his deliverance the young settler looked
up, to start with a cry of amazement. For the canoe that lay against his
own contained a brace of Indians, plumed and painted for the warpath!

From the clutches of the dead into those of the living did not seem to
Oscar Parton, at that hour, a change for the be