I whispered back that we would wait till he was better fit. He was loath to admit the necessity, but, as it chanced, the momentary delay saved our lives in that strait. While we paused, hugging the shadows in the crooking elbow, the gloomy depths beyond the sentries were suddenly starred with flaring flambeaux lighting the way for a hasting rabble of savages; and had we been entangled in the struggle with the two sentinels we should have been taken red-handed. As it was, we had to make the quickest play to save ourselves. In the same breath we both remembered the narrow side passage just behind in which we were nigh to losing our way, and into this we plunged, reckless of possible pitfalls. We were no more than safely out of the main corridor when the runners, some score of them, as we guessed, trooped past our covert in full cry, leaving us half smothered in the smoky trail of their pitch-pine flambeaux. "Now what a-devil has set this hornet's nest of theirs abuzz so suddenly?" I whispered, when the smoke-choke gave us liberty to speak without coughing to betray ourselves. "Our pony-riding Tuckaseges, doubtless," was Richard's ready answer. "By all the chances, they should have met the Great Bear and his peace-offering out yonder on the trace--which same they did not. So when they bring this tale to camp there is the devil to pay and no pitch hot. God help our tough old Ephraim and the Catawba if these bloodhounds win out in time to overtake them!" "Aye," said I; and then we crept out of our dodge-hole and made ready to go about our business with the sentries. But when we came to peer again around the crooking elbow it would seem that the hurrying search party had fought our battle for us. The watch-fire was there to light a little circle in the gloom, but the watchers were gone. We chanced a guess that they had joined the hue and cry, and so we pressed forward, past the handful of embers and into the pit-black depths beyond. Twenty paces farther on it came to playing blind man's buff with the rocky walls again, and measured by the trippings and stumblings 'twas a long Sabbath day's journey to that final turn in the great earth-burrow whence we could see the glimmering of the enemy's camp-fires in the sunken valley. "Now God be praised!" quoth Richard most fervently. "Another hour in this cursed kennel with the fever on me and I should be a yammering loose-wit." And I, too, was glad enough to see the stars again, and to be at large beneath them. Emerging from the subterranean way, we held to the camp side of the stream, making an ample circuit to the left to come down upon the enemy's position from the wooded slope behind the encampment. We met no let or hindrance in this approach. Secure in their stronghold, the Indians had no patrols out; and as for the Englishmen, every mother's son of them, it seemed, was basking in the light of a great fire built before the pine-bough shelters.