Fortunately he had left in his haversack a little salt and pepper with which he seasoned the broiling, hissing steak. In about ten minutes it was done to a turn. Cutting a long strip of bark from off one of the red river-birches which grew near, Pike squatted down on the ground and in fifteen minutes more there was nothing left of that savory, two-pound, broiled vegetable steak. With fifteen eggs and two pounds of beefsteak mushroom under his belt, the corporal felt like another man. He coiled himself up on the dry pine-needles in a little hollow which he found under the low-hanging boughs of a long-leaf pine and resolved to take a sleep to make up for what he had lost during the last two nights. It was early afternoon and everything was still and hot and the drowsy scent of the pine mingled with puffs of spicy fragrance from the great white blossoms of the magnolia with which the woods were starred. As he fell asleep the last thing the corporal heard was the drowsy call of flocks of golden-winged warblers on their way north. How long he slept he could not tell. He only knew that he awoke with a sudden consciousness of danger, that strange sixth sense which most Indians and a few white hunters sometimes develop. Perhaps he inherited it from old Zebulon Pike who, like Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, had the power of hearing and sensing the approach of an enemy even in their soundest sleep. The corporal was alert the second he opened his eyes, but made not a movement or a rustle. The sun was well down in the sky and there was nothing in sight, but the birds had stopped singing. Finally way down through the little tunnel which a near-by flowing stream had made through the hillocks came a sound which brought him to his feet in an instant. It was a ringing note that chimed like a distant bell. Three times it sounded and there was silence, then again three times, but a little nearer and louder, then again silence. A third time it came and this time it seemed around the bend of the bayou not half a mile away. Pike knew in a minute what it was. It was the bay of the dreaded bloodhounds, those man-hunters who had learned to trail their prey through forest and fen, no matter how much he doubled nor how fast he ran. There was but one thing to do if there was time. Springing up, the corporal ran down to the little stream and leaped in. It was hardly up to his knees, but he splashed along for a hundred yards, now and then plunging in up to his waist. It ran a hundred yards or so through the swamp and then emptied into a larger bayou. Along this Pike swam for his life as silently as a muskrat, for now he could hear the baying of the dogs close at hand and suddenly there was a chorus of deep raging barks followed by shouts and he knew that his pursuers had found his lair under the pine trees. Soon the stream ran into another one and then another until Pike had swam and waded and plunged through half a