s as comfortable as possible
in the boat and bearing Silent Tom's injunction in mind, talk in very
low tones, if they talked at all. But oftenest two of them slept while
the third watched.

They had been three days upon the tributary when it was Henry who
happened to be watching. Both Paul and the teacher slumbered very
soundly. Paul lay at the stern of the boat and Mr. Pennypacker in the
middle. Henry was in the prow, sitting at ease with his rifle across his
knees. The boat was amid a tall growth of canes, the stalks and blades
rising a full ten feet above their heads, and hiding them completely.
Henry had been watching the surface of the river, but at last the action
grew wholly mechanical. Had anything appeared there he would have seen
it, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His whole life, since he had
arrived, a boy of fifteen, in the Kentucky wilderness, was passing
before him in a series of pictures, vivid and wonderful, standing out
like reality itself. He was in a sort of twilight midway between the
daylight and a dream, and it seemed to him once more that Providence had
kept a special watch over his comrades and himself. How else could they
have escaped so many dangers? How else could fortune have turned to
their side, when the last chance seemed gone? No skill, even when it
seemed almost superhuman, could have dragged them back from the pit of
death. He felt with all the power of conviction that a great mission had
been given to them, and that they had been spared again and again that
they might complete it.

While he yet watched and saw, he visited a misty world. The wind had
risen and out of the dense foliage above him came its song upon the
stalks and blades of the cane. A low note at first, it swelled into
triumph, and it sounded clearly in his ear, bar on bar. He did not have
the power to move, as he listened then to the hidden voice. His blood
leaped and a deep sense of awe, and of the power of the unknown swept
over him. But he was not afraid. Rather he shared in the triumph that
was expressed so clearly in the mystic song.

The note swelled, touched upon its highest note and then died slowly
away in fall after fall, until it came in a soft echo and then the echo
itself was still. Henry returned to the world of reality with every
sense vivid and alert. He heard the wind blowing in the cane and nothing
more. The surface of the river rippled lightly in the breeze, but
neither friend nor enemy passed the