“Poor lad! poor lad!” he murmured, with rough but genuine indications of sorrow. “I’m afraid he’s going to cross the river.” Then, standing in the water in the middle of the tributary, he stanched the blood that poured from the lacerated throat, which he bound with the soft linings of his grotesque cap. “There!” he cried, surveying his work. “That doctoring will do until I reach home. This young chap must not die. He’s too brave to perish in the springtime of his life. I wonder what brought him alone to these parts!” Then with the interrogative still quivering his lips, he towed the boat ashore, moored it to a clump of alder bushes, and raising the unconscious youth in his arms, darted away into the great forest, where strange fortunes and adventures awaited him and the human burden he bore. CHAPTER II. THE HERMIT AND HIS CAVE. Now and then a groan parted the lips of the unconscious Virginian, as the giant rapidly bore him through the wood, throughout the recesses of which the somber shades of night were gathering. At length the surface of the ground grew hilly, and the giant approached so near the Scioto that the swash of the waters against its new banks could be distinctly heard. He followed the course of the stream for some distance, when he turned aside, and darted into a small ravine once the bed of a tributary of the Scioto. In the banks of the ravine were just discernible several gloomy apertures, into one of which the backwoodsman disappeared. Five steps from the orifice brought him to a strong oaken door, seemingly imbedded in the limestone rock, and a short fumbling in the gloom above his head threw wide the portal. Dark as the night without was the gloom beyond the stone threshold; but a joyful bark greeted the giant’s ears, and a dog sprung forward to greet him. “Home again, Wolf,” said the man, securing the door. “And I’ve brought you a friend--a friend as near dead, I should judge, as you get them, for, with an arrow sticking near through one, and the awfulest torn throat you ever saw, things must look dangerous.” The speaker moved forward, and, without the aid of a light, tenderly placed Mayne Fairfax upon a couch, deep with soft dressed skins. Then he ignited a tiny pile of bark films, which soon communicated a warmth to a heap of sticks, which blazed and crackled with some fury. “Here, Wolf, quit smelling around the patient,” cried the giant, turning to his charge. “I’m the doctor in this case, and I’m about to see what can be done. May be he isn’t so badly hurt as I opine. That arrow,” he continued, after a long silence, during which he had critically examined the hunter’s wounds, “that arrow must be pulled through. I’m not much of a surgeon, but I reckon as how I have managed some pretty dangerous cases. Here goes! If that arrow ain’t taken out, a certain young man will never shoulder a rifle again.”