it. He goes off, regardless of its convulsive struggles to set
itself free, with accompanying yelps, by which the betrayed quadruped
seems to protest against such unexpected as ill-deserved, captivity.

Not five minutes time has all this action occupied. In less than five
more a second chapter is complete, by the carrying of Clancy's body--it
may be his corpse--to the creek, and laying it along the bottom of the
canoe.

Notwithstanding the weight of his burden, the mulatto, a man of uncommon
strength, takes care to make no footmarks along the forest path, or at
the point of embarkation. The ground, thickly strewn with the leaves of
the deciduous _taxodium_, does not betray a trace, any more than if he
were treading on thrashed straw.

Undoing the slip-knot of his painter, he shoves the canoe clear of its
entanglement among the roots of the tree. Then plying his paddle,
directs its course down stream, silently as he ascended, but with look
more troubled, and air intensely solemnal. This continuing, while he
again shoulders the insensible form, and carries it along the causeway
of logs, until he has laid it upon soft moss within the cavity of the
cypress--his own couch. Then, once more taking Clancy's wrist between
his fingers, and placing his ear opposite the heart, he feels the pulse
of the first, and listens for the beatings of the last.

A ray of joy illuminates his countenance, as both respond to his
examination. It grows brighter, on perceiving a muscular movement of
the limbs, late rigid and seemingly inanimate, a light in the eyes
looking like life; above all, words from the lips so long mute. Words
low-murmured, but still distinguishable; telling him a tale, at the same
time giving its interpretation. That in this hour of his
unconsciousness Clancy should in his speech couple the names of Richard
Darke and Helen Armstrong is a fact strangely significant, he does the
same for many days, in his delirious ravings; amid which the mulatto,
tenderly nursing him, gets the clue to most of what has happened.

Clearer when his patient, at length restored to consciousness, confides
everything to the faithful fellow who has so befriended him. Every
circumstance he ought to know, at the same time imparting secrecy.

This, so closely kept, that even Blue Bill, while himself disclosing
many an item, of news exciting the settlement, is not entrusted with one
the most interesting, and which would have answered the