The boy was troubled and, despite his life in the woods, he had full right
to be. This was the great haunted forest of _Kain-tuck-ee_, where the red
man made his most desperate stand, and none ever knew when or whence
danger would come. Moreover, he was lost, and the forest told him nothing;
he was not like his friend, Henry Ware, born to the forest, the heir to
all the primeval instincts, alive to every sight and sound, and able to
read the slightest warning the wilderness might give. Paul Cotter was a
student, a lover of books, and a coming statesman. Fate, it seemed, had
chosen that he and Henry Ware should go hand in hand, but for different
tasks.

Paul gazed once more around the circle of the glowing forest, and the
shadow in his eyes deepened. Henry and the horses, loaded with powder for
the needy settlement, must be somewhere near, but whether to right or left
he could not tell. He had gone to look for water, and when he undertook to
return he merely went deeper and deeper into the forest. Now the boughs,
as they nodded before the gentle breeze, seemed to nod to him in derision.
He felt shame as well as alarm. Henry would not laugh at him, but the born
scholar would be worth, for the time, at least, far less than the born
trailer.

Yet no observer, had there been any, would have condemned Paul as he
condemned himself. He stood there, a tall, slender boy, with a broad, high
brow, white like a girl's above the line of his cap, blue eyes, dark and
full, with the width between that indicates the mind behind, and the firm,
pointed chin that belongs so often to people of intellect.

Paul and Henry were on their way from Wareville, their home, with horses
hearing powder for Marlowe, the nearest settlement, nearly a hundred miles
away. The secret of making powder from the nitre dust on the floors of the