He plied the oars deftly and noiselessly, and kept in the middle of the stream. Ever and anon he glanced upward at the ragged cliffs that hung over the murky and turbulent waters like the hand of doom. But, at last, he passed beyond the precipitous banks, and gained the mouth of the Scioto’s nosiest tributary. Here he rested upon his oars a moment, as if to decide a mental debate, then ran his canoe up the new stream, toward the left bank of which he presently steered. “So far without accident,” he murmured in an audible tone, not before glancing furtively around. “Simon Kenton may be a great hunter; but he is a sorry prophet. What! did he think I would wait until he returned from the hazardous expedition he is about to undertake, and leave Eudora the while in Jim Girty’s hands? And when, in the ebullition of anger, as I will admit--I called him a lunatic, and told him that I would rescue the girl without the aid of his potent arm, he said, with a sneer I shall never forget: ‘Go, rash boy, and meet the reward for spurning the counsels of your elders. Go to the death prepared for you by the Wolf-Queen.’” “The Wolf-Queen!” the young man continued, after a sneer for the prophecy of the king of backwoodsmen. “If such a creature exists, I want to meet her; and I have no reason for doubting her existence, for Simon Kenton says he once trembled in her presence. And Simon Kenton never lies. I will pit my strength against the Amazon, and her wolfish guard. Though rash and young in the ways of the woods, Mayne Fairfax is not a coward, else why came he from cultivated Virginia to the dark death-paths of Ohio? No; I--My God!” The exclamation was called into being by the terrible sight that suddenly burst upon the young hunter’s vision. Scarce the distance of a hundred yards up-stream, a canoe shot from the bush-fringed bank, and bore down upon the young Virginian. In the center of the bark stood the very person he had lately expressed a desire to meet--the dreaded Wolf-Queen--dreaded alike by Indians and whites. She towered six feet above her moccasins, and her frame seemed built of iron. She wore a frock of tanned doe-skin, the fringes of which touched her knees. The leggins which fitted her nether limbs to a fault, were composed of panther skins, secured to the moccasins by painted strips of deer-hide. Over all these garments she wore a long, dark robe whose ample folds disappeared in the canoe, and lent a royal aspect to its strange wearer. Her head was surrounded by a dress, composed of white heron-feathers, and among her raven locks, which streamed over her shoulders, and covered her beaded bosom, were curiously, but not distastily, woven the gaudy feathers of the North American oriole. The features, more than the dress of the singular being so suddenly encountered on the swollen stream, commanded the hunter’s attention.