PAGE "'THE PRECIOUS WAMPUM BELT, SANDY!' HE CRIED" (_See page 332_) _Frontispiece_ "HE WAS BEING STALKED BY ONE OF THE MOST DREADED ANIMALS OF THE FOREST, A GRAY PANTHER" 12 "MADE A SPRING FOR THE SAFETY OF THE LOG THAT HAD DONE THE DAMAGE" 35 "AT LAST THEY WERE AFLOAT ON THE OHIO, BOUND INTO THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY THAT LAY FAR AWAY TO THE WESTWARD" 136 "THEY COULD NOW PLAINLY DISCERN THE FIGURE UNDER THE WOLFSKIN" 230 "'YES, YOU ARE RIGHT, SANDY, IT _IS_ A BOAT'" 291 [Illustration] The Pioneer Boys of the Mississippi CHAPTER I CAUGHT IN HIS OWN TRAP "PADDLE harder, brother. The current is stronger than I ever knew it to be before." "But, Bob, we must be very near the place where we always land when we come over to look after our traps?" "Once we are in the lee of that point ahead, Sandy, we can go ashore. The river is so high that it's hard to recognize the old landmarks." "Both together, then, Bob. There! that looks like business! and, just as you say, our dugout can lie safely under the shelter of that tongue of land, while we're off 'tending our traps. Another week, and we must stop setting any snares, for the fur will be getting poor; so Pat O'Mara said the last time he came to the settlement." Five minutes later, the two Armstrong boys sprang ashore on the Ohio side of the river, at a little distance below the spot where, across the now unusually wide stream, their parents, together with other bold pioneers from Virginia, had, not more than a year before, started a frontier settlement.[1] The clumsy, but staunch boat, fashioned from the trunk of a tree, was drawn partly out of the water. They had made the passage of the river with considerable hard labor, because of the vast volume of water which the heavy spring rains had brought out of the hills all the way up to and beyond old Fort Duquesne.[2] Both boys were dressed after the fashion of that time among hunters and trappers, who, scorning the homespun clothes of the Virginia settlers, found garments made of buckskin, not unlike those worn by many of the Indians, to give them the best service when roaming the great forests that stretched from the Alleghanies, off to the border of the mighty Mississippi, in the "Land of the Setting Sun."