Looking back upon the hazards and chance-takings of our adventure in the wilderness, I recall no more promising risk than that we ran by sleeping unsentried within rifle-shot, for aught we knew, of the camp of the enemy.

But touching this, 'tis only on the mimic stage of the romances that the players rise to the plane of superhuman sagacity and angel-wit, never faltering in their lines nor betraying by slip or tongue-trip their kinship with common humankind. Being mere mortals we were not so endowed; we were but four outwearied men, well spent in the long chase, with never a leg among us fit to pace a sentry beat nor a decent wakeful eye to keep it company. So, as I have said, we took the risk and slept; would have slept as soundly, I dare say, had the risk been twice as great.

We were astir at the earliest graying of the dawn, Richard and I, and were the laggards of the company at that, since the old hunter was already out and away, and the Indian had kindled a fire and was grinding more of the parched corn for the morning meal. Dick sat up in his leaf litter, yawning like a sleepy giant.

"Lord, Jack," said he; "if ever we win out of this coil with a full day to spare, I mean to sleep the clock hands twice around at a stretch, I promise you. 'Twas but a catch, this cat-nap; no more than enough to leave a bad taste in the mouth."

"Aye; but the taste may be washed out," said I. "I am for a dip in the river; what say you?"

He took me at the word, and we had an eye-opening plunge in the spring-cold flood of the swift little river at the mouth of our ravine. 'Twas most marvelous refreshing; and with appetites sharp set and whetted by the stripping and plunging we were back at the fire in time to give good day to Ephraim Yeates, at that moment returned with the hindquarters of a fine yearling buck, fresh-killed, across his shoulders.

Seeing the deer's meat, we would think the old hunter's thrift of the dawn sufficiently accounted for; but when the cuts were a-broil, we were made to know that the buck was merely a lucky incident in the early morning scouting.

Taking time by the forelock, the old borderer had swept a circle of reconnaissance around our halting place, "to get the p'ints of the compass," as he would say. His first discovery was that the ford we had found in the darkness served as the river crossing of an ancient and well-used Indian trace. Along this trace from the eastward the powder train had come, no longer ago than mid-afternoon of yesterday; and arguing from this that the night camp of the band would be but a short march to the westward, Yeates had pushed on to feel out the enemy's position.

For a mile or more beyond the ford he had trailed the convoy easily. The Indian trace or path, well-trampled by the numerous horses of the cavalcade, followed the up-stream windings of the swift river straight into the eye of the western mountains. But in the eye itself, a rocky defile where the slopes on each hand became frowning battlements to narrow valley and stream, the one to a darkling gorge, the other to a thundering torrent, the trail was lost as completely as if the powder convoy had vanished into thin air.

Here was a fresh complication, and one that called for instant action. We had counted upon a battle royal in any attempt to rescue the women; but that Falconnet, impeded as he was by the slow movements of the powder cargo, could slip away, was a contingency for which we were wholly unprepared.

So, as you would guess, the hunter breakfast was hurriedly despatched; and by the time the sun was shoulder high over the eastern hills we had broken camp and crossed the river, and were pressing forward to the gorge of disappearance.

On each hand the mountains rose precipitous, the one on the left swelling unbroken to a bald and rounded summit, forest covered save for its tonsured head high in air, while that on the right was steeper and lower, with a line of cliffs at the top. As we fared on, the valley narrowed to a mere chasm, with the river thundering along the base of the tonsured mountain, and the Indian path hugging the cliff on the right.

In the gloomiest depths of this defile we came upon the hunter's stumbling-block. A tributary stream, issuing from a low cavern in the right-hand cliff, crossed the Indian path and the chasm at a bound and plunged noisily into the flood of the larger river. On the hither side of this barrier stream the trail of the powder convoy led plainly down into the water; and, so far as one might see, that was the end of it.

As we made sure, we left no stone unturned in the effort to solve the mystery. No horse, ridden or led, could have lived to cross the pouring torrent of the main river, or to wade up or down its bed; and if the cavalcade had turned up the barrier stream its progress must have ended abruptly against the sheer wall of the cliff at the entrance to the low-arched cavern whence the tributary came into being. But if Falconnet and his following had ridden neither up nor down the bed of the barrier stream, it seemed equally certain that no horse of the troop had crossed it. The Indian trace, which held straight on up the gorge and presently came out above into a high upland valley, was unmarked by any hoof print, new or old.

"Well, now; I'll be daddled if this here ain't about the beatin'est thing I ever chugged up ag'inst," was the old borderer's comment, when we had flogged our wits to small purpose in the search for some clue to the mystery. "What's your mind about it, hey, Chief?"

Uncanoola shook his head. "Heap plenty slick. No go up-stream, no go down, no cross over, no go back. Mebbe go up like smoke—w'at?"

The hunter shook his head and would by no means admit the alternative. "Ez I allow, that would ax for a merricle; and I reckon ez how when the good Lord sends a chariot o' fire after sech a clanjamfrey as this'n o' the hoss-captain's, it'll be mighty dad-blame' apt to go down 'stead of up."

We were standing on the brink of the barrier stream no more than a fisherman's cast from the black rock-mouth that spewed it up from its underground maw. While the hunter was speaking, the Catawba had lapsed into statue-like listlessness, his gaze fixed upon the eddying flood which held the secret of the vanished cavalcade. Suddenly he came alive with a bound and made a quick dash into the water. What he retrieved was only a small piece of wood, charred at one end. But Ephraim Yeates caught at it eagerly.

"Now the Lord be praised for all His marcies!" he exclaimed. "It do take an Injun to come a-running whenst ever'body else is plumb beat out! Ne'er another one of us had an eye sharp enough to ketch that bit o' sign a-floating past. What say, Cap'n John?"

I shook my head, seeing no special significance in the token; and Dick asked: "What will it be, Ephraim, now that it is caught?"

The old man looked his pity for our dullard wit, and then set a moiety of it in words.

"Well, well, now; I'm fair ashamed of ye! What all d'ye reckon blackened the end o' this bit o' pine-branch?"

"Why, fire," says Richard, beginning, as I did, to see some glimmering of light.

"In course. And it come from yonder, didn't it?" pointing to the cavern under the cliff. "More than that, 'twas cut wi' a hatchet—this fresh end of it—no longer ago than last night, at the furdest; the pitch that the fire fried out'n it is all soft and gummy, yit. Gentlemen all: whenst we find where this here creek comes out into daylight again we're a-going to find the hoss-captain and the whole enduring passel o' redskins and redcoats, immejitly, if not sooner!"

What comment this startling announcement would have evoked I know not, for at the moment of its utterance the Catawba went flat upon the ground, making most urgent signs for us to do likewise. What he had seen we all saw a flitting instant later; the painted face of a Cherokee warrior as a setting for a pair of fierce basilisk eyes peering out of the low-arched cavern whence the stream issued, an apparition looking for all the world like a dismembered head floating on the surface of the outgushing flood.

'Twas the old borderer who took the initiative in the swift retreat, and we followed his lead like well-drilled soldiers. A crook in the stream, and the thickset underwood, screened us for the moment from the basilisk eyes; and in a twinkling we had rolled one after another into the mimic torrent and were quickly swept down to its mouth.

Here death lay in wait for us in the mad plungings of the main river; but we made shift to catch at the overhanging branches of the willows in passing, to draw ourselves out, to scramble up the gorge and to gain a great boulder on the mountain side whence we could look down upon the scene of our late surprisal.

By this we saw, from the wings, as it were, the setting of the stage for a tragedy which might have been ours. One by one a score of heads with painted faces floated silently out of the spewing rock-mouth. One by one the glistening, bronze-red bodies appertaining thereto emerged from the water, each to take its place in an ambuscade enclosing the stream-crossing of the Indian path in a pocket-like line of crouching figures, with the mouth of the pocket open toward the lower valley.

Ephraim Yeates chuckled under his breath and smote softly upon his thigh.

"They tell ez how the good Lord has a mighty tender care for chillern and simples," he whispered. "Whenst we was a-coming a-rampaging up the trace a hour 'r two ago, I saw the moccasin track o' that there spy, and was too dad-blame' biggity in my own consate to ax what it mought mean."

"What spy?" says Dick, matching the hunter's low whisper.

"Why, the varmint that tracked me back from here 'twixt dawn and daybreak, to be sure. He waited till we broke camp and then took out up here ahead of us to tell his chief 'twas e'ena'most time to set the trap for three white simples and a red one. Friends, I'm a-telling ye plain that the sperrit's a-moving me mighty powerful to get down on my hunkers and—"

"For heaven's sake, don't do it here and now!" gasped Dick. "Let's get out of this spider's-web while we may."

The old hunter postponed his prayerful motion, most reluctantly, as it would seem, and led the way in a silent withdrawal from the dangerous neighborhood of the ambushment. When we had pushed on somewhat higher up the gorge and stood on the confines of the upland valley for which it served as the approach, there was a halt for a council of war.

Since it was now evident that the powder convoy was encamped in some hidden gorge or valley to which the cavern of the underground stream was one of the approaches, 'twas plain that we must climb to some height whence we could command a wider view.

We were all agreed that the cavern entrance could not have been used by the entire company: this though the conclusion left the vanishing trail an unsolved riddle. For if the women could have been dragged through the low-springing arch of the waterway, we knew the horses could not—to say nothing of the certain destruction of the powder cargo in such a passage.

So we addressed ourselves to the ascent of the northern mountain; though Richard and I would first beg a little space in which to drain the water from our boots, and to wring some pounds' weight of it from our clothes. That done, we fell in line once more; and being so fortunate as to hit upon a ravine which led to the cliff-crowned summit, the climb was shorn of half its toil and difficulty. Nevertheless, by the sun's height it was well on in the forenoon before we came out, perspiring, like sappers in a steam bath, upon the mountain top.

As Yeates had guessed, this northern mountain proved to be a lofty table-land. So far as could be seen, the summit was an undulating plain, less densely forested than the valley, but with a thick sprinkling of pines to make the still, hot air heavy with their resinous fragrance. As it chanced, our ravine of ascent headed well back from the cliff edge, so we must needs fetch a compass through the pine groves before we could win out to any commanding point of view.

The old borderer took his bearings by the sun and laid the course quartering to bring us out as near as might be on the heights above the gorge. But when we had gone a little way, a thinning of the wood ahead warned us that we were approaching some nearer break in the table-land.

Five minutes later we four stood on the brink of a precipice, looking abroad upon one of nature's most singular caprices. Conceive if you can a segment of the table-land, in shape like a broad-bilged man o' war, sunk to a depth of, mayhap, six or seven hundred feet below the general level of the plateau. Give this ship-shaped chasm a longer dimension of two miles or more, and a breadth of somewhat less than half its length; bound it with a wall-like line of cliffs falling sheer to steep, forested slopes below; prick out a silver ribbon of a stream winding through grassy savannas and well-set groves of lordly trees from end to end of the sunken valley; and you will have some picture of the scene we looked upon.

But what concerned us most was a sight to make us crouch quickly lest sharp eyes below should descry us on the sky-line of the cliff. Pitched on one of the grassy savannas by the stream, so fairly beneath us that the smallest cannon planted on our cliff could have dropped a shot into it, was the camp of the powder train.