Then came a most exasperating moment, when I hugged the ground so close that my body felt no thicker than a playing card. The men, each picking up a rifle, stepped into the punt and paddled to our side. Two of them climbed the bank, one going about a hundred yards to our left, and the other, passing within ten feet of us, went the opposite way. We could not follow him with our eyes but knew, by counting his steps, that he stopped at about an equal distance. Then the punt glided back and disappeared behind the little island. Guards! Sentinels! We were trapped, as well as those whom we had come to save! The firm fingers of Smilax had never left my arm, a continuous caution for silence that I minded well. Ten minutes passed, and the trees had all but lost their shapes. In another ten minutes the night wholly enveloped us, and then the black man moved so that his lips were at my ear, while he barely whispered: "Me go; noise in camp will help. You wait still like dead; me come back soon." I did not attempt to answer, for there was nothing to say. Flanked by the two sentinels, I was pretty sure to wait, and wait like dead, too. He began to move then, yet he did not seem to move. But as I watched--more with my senses than my eyes--I knew that he had worked his head and shoulders out of our shelter, and was edging himself along at the rate of perhaps a foot a minute. Soon I realized that he had entirely gone; that, free of the saw-palmetto--a most difficult stuff in which to move silently--he was topping the bank. I could imagine how he glided now, alligator fashion, head downward to the water; and I could almost feel the moment he slid noiselessly into it. I waited for the owl call--"two times, then stop soft in middle." And now an electric torch flashed where the sentry on my right was posted, and I froze, wondering if it were directed at Smilax. But no challenge came. In a very short interval it flashed again, and the fellow called in military style: "Post one, seven o'clock, and all's well!" The voice at my left took it up: "Post two, seven o'clock, and all's well!" From somewhere beyond Sylvia's island the third guard called post three, and silence followed. I was glad to find that they called their posts. It told us that there were only three, and gave a very fair idea of their positions. Of course, we could not hope, with this military precaution, to have one of them fall asleep at a convenient moment. Especially would this not happen with a newly placed guard--and these fellows were on watch to-night for the first time, else we would have seen them, or they us, when we came that morning. Smilax, also, would have discovered them the night before. Sylvia and Echochee, therefore, had just come under suspicion of intending to escape--and we were in the nick of time, although I felt staggered by the job ahead of us.