Oscar Parton began to despair. He had passed beyond the line of search marked out by his companion and was on the eve of returning when he came suddenly upon a canoe with its keel just beyond the reach of the tide. The sudden discovery startled the trail hunter, and he was about to advance upon and examine the craft, when a night owl flew by and swept its cold wings across his face, as if to keep him back. But the youth did not heed the omen of portending evil. He crept to the seemingly stranded and abandoned craft, and peered over its side. What did he see? A dark object lying on the bottom, a tuft of feathers, a face, deathly and covered here and there with clotted blood. He turned away, and looked again before he saw that an Indian lay beneath his gaze, rigid, as he believed, in death! "This is the result of Catlett's shot," he said. "I thank God that his bullet did not reach Kate's heart. 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.