He now moved his paddle slightly--just enough to hold the boat motionless while he looked and listened. The stillness was profound; not even the soft sighing of the wind reaching his ears. He had peered around in the gloom only a few minutes when he discerned the reply to the signal already described, and so close that he was startled. Scarcely fifty feet below him, and on the edge of the bluff, several yards in height, a light flashed into view. A second glance showed him that it was a flaming torch held in the hand of an Indian, who began whirling it around his head with a swiftness that made it seem like a revolving wheel of fire. The rapid motion of the torch, as the reader may infer, caused an equally rapid increase of the flame upon it, so that it revealed the Indian himself; and the hunter, as he looked toward it, saw the figure of the warrior standing like some pyrotechnist in the center of his own display. A better target could not have been asked, and Tom, quick as thought, raised his rifle and sighted it; but with his finger upon the trigger, he refrained, lowered the piece and shook his head, muttering as he did so: "He deserves it, and I'd like to give it to him, but it won't do. They'd know what the rifle-crack meant, and I'd have a hornet's nest about my head quick as lightnin'." Tom was not certain of the meaning of the exhibition he had just seen, but believed that it was intended as a mere reply to the other--the same as if the Apache had shouted "All right!" in response to the notification. The Indian must have circled the torch in this manner for more than a score of times, when he threw it from his hand into the river, where it fell with a hiss, and was instantly extinguished. The scout was in a quandary. If he continued down stream he must pass directly beneath the spot where his foe was standing, and the shadow was by no means dense enough to make it possible for him to escape observation. He was confident, however, that if he could change places with the warrior, he could discern the canoe without any closer approach. He was at a disadvantage, for the bluff was perfectly perpendicular and so high that he could not reach the ground above without retreating up the river for at least a quarter of a mile, where the bluff was depressed enough to permit him to draw himself upward upon it. Had the bank been low and wooded, it would have been the easiest matter in the world to have shoved the canoe into the shelter, or to have circumvented the Indian by lifting it bodily from the water and going around him, and striking the river again below. But Tom hesitated only a few minutes. He was anxious to get forward, for delay was dangerous and he felt annoyed at the manner in which he was dogged. "Here goes," he exclaimed, starting the canoe forward again. "If that Apache is anxious for a scrimmage, he can have one." CHAPTER II. TOM HARDYNGE'S RUSE.