"Did you not suspect that your friend, Henri here, might have taken a notion to take the belt and hide it?" asked Bob, as soon as he could recover from the shock which this declaration gave him. "Zat is exact vat pass through my mind!" exclaimed Jacques, eagerly. "He, himself, tell you ze same, because him I accuse. But hold on, he say, let us then examine ze ground, and know ze truth. So zat is vat ve do, accordingly. Great is our amazement to learn zat an Indian, he crawl into our camp as ve sleep. I know ze tracks only too vell to believe zat it can be a white man. And I gif you my vord, Monsieur O'Mara, zat ees ze truth, ze whole truth, and nossings but ze truth." Bob and Sandy were grievously disappointed. Whether, as Larue declared, some unknown Indian had really crept upon them while they slept, and were wholly off their guard, taking only the sacred wampum belt, as though that were the single object of his mission; or whether, on the other hand, Larue had secreted the belt for reasons of his own, the result was all the same so far as they were concerned, since the belt was gone. After talking it over, they decided that the two prisoners should be taken to the new settlement. They hardly felt in a condition to declare what measure of punishment should be meted out to such scoundrels; and would much rather a council of the elder men decided this question. Jacques and Henri seemed very much cast down. They belonged to a class of bordermen who believed in the old adage, "an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth;" and under the circumstances had reason to expect nothing in the way of mercy from Mr. Armstrong, whom they had attempted to injure many times. So the return march was taken up, it being the desire of the boys to reach their destination that day, even though the journey continued into the hours of darkness. Pat knew that, by taking a bee-line route across country, they could cut off a considerable distance. When a bee is loaded with honey it always rises up, as if to take an observation, and then makes a direct line for its hive, even though a full mile away from it at the time. Many claim that it is a peculiar "homing instinct" that guides the little insect at such times; but this, on the other hand, seems far from being the case; since, if the hive be moved in the night time, the bees, starting out in the morning, will not return to the old position, but fly straight to the new. To lose Pat O'Mara in any woods would be next to impossible, because he was perfectly at home there, and, although they were now passing over ground which he saw for the first time that afternoon, the accuracy of his deduction was made manifest just about dusk, when Sandy declared that he certainly heard the well-known sound of an axe being used upon firewood, somewhere ahead. Half an hour later, they walked in on the sentry who stood guard, and whose quick hearing, detecting their advance, caused a peremptory challenge.