CHAPTER XV--LOST IN THE WOODS

Even as Sergeant Dick went down under the redskin armed with the tomahawk, he had whipped out his revolver and retained a firm grip of the butt.

His antagonist aimed a furious stroke at his head, but the blow missed through his falling, and the keen blade only bit deep into the mold beside his left ear.

Swift as thought the young police officer clapped the revolver to the broad, naked, painted chest lying over him and pressed the trigger.

The crack of the weapon was instantaneously followed by the death-shriek of the foeman, who rolled limply off him, and lay spread-eagled, face upward, upon the ground alongside.

John Dick was on his knees in a flash, pointing the revolver at the Indian whom he had only sent staggering on his left hand, and who was now rushing at him with clubbed rifle.

A swift stab of flame, accompanied by the whip-like report, and the redman crumpled up in his tracks, and tumbled on top of his dead companion.

Only one more enemy in sight remained to be dealt with--the man on the right, whom Sergeant Dick had tripped up. The fourth savage, the one in front of him, was still _hors de combat_--too winded and stunned to take a hand in the fight as yet.

A shot through the brain ended the life of the third man, while in the act of sighting at him with a rifle. Then the sergeant scrambled upright, and looked wildly about him, with smoking revolver ready to pot at the first fresh assailant he saw.

He meant to rush back to the aid of those in the scow, feeling that to do so was his duty--that he could not consider his own safety and leave them to be butchered possibly.

But in the same instant, through an opening in the trees before him, he saw the ark some fifteen feet away from the bank. The craft was slipping swiftly out towards the middle of the lake, with three dark figures in the stern--almost indistinguishable from the background of the cabin--spitting fire rapidly, evidently with automatics, at a howling pack of plumed forms waist-high, and deeper, in the water.

The squatter and his sons were safe, and there was no hope of his rejoining them. He must consult his own safety by immediate and headlong flight in the opposite direction.

Wheeling promptly, therefore, Sergeant Dick fled away through the timber, and only in the nick of time. Half a dozen braves, alarmed by the shooting and death-shrieks of their comrades in the rear, were rushing back to learn the cause.

They just caught sight of his vanishing red coat, and with yells of rage sent a hasty, scattered volley after him, ere starting in hot and furious pursuit.

One of the bullets went through the skirts of his red tunic, but all the other messengers of death only smacked against the trees behind or around him, or went swishing, equally as harmlessly, through the bushes.

Sergeant Dick ran as he probably never ran before in his life. He could not pick his way in the intense darkness of the woods, nor had he time or the inclination to do so.

He just hurled himself bodily at the thick, high-growing bushes, burst through them anyhow, leaving fragments of his garments attaching to them, and sustaining pricks and scratches all over his body and legs, even through his clothing.

He protected his face with his hands and rifle held up before him, and his keen eyes were just able to discern the trunks of the trees--a blacker black than the darkness itself.

Guided by the crashing he thus unavoidably made, the Indians followed hard on his heels, uttering the most blood-curdling war-whoops and threats of vengeance, occasionally firing in the direction of the sounds ahead of them.

They were so close upon him he could hear what they threatened to do to him quite plainly in the otherwise still night air; and he did not need any better incentive to try and increase the distance between them.

Presently the dense, tangled undergrowth came to an end. Such is generally found only on the outskirts of colonial forests.

In the deeper depths there is hardly any, and the great boles of the trees stand up nakedly like so many mighty poles stuck in the ground, often rising to an immense height before a single branch juts out.

Now his boots made next to no noise on the soft pine-needles, and he flitted as noiselessly as a shadow through the thick-growing trees and the darkness. Even though running at top speed, he trod with the caution and silence he had learnt to do on many a trail farther north--the stealth his like and all backswoodsmen have picked up from the redmen themselves.

Here, therefore, his pursuers were at fault--could not longer follow him by the sounds he made; and so they halted to make torches of the pine wood around, with which to try and follow his tracks.

This was so much loss of time, which the quarry made good use of in covering ground; and very shortly he came to some hard and rocky ground on which his feet would leave no impression.

The trees here were fewer, but the night was so dark he felt he might safely trust to its screen, and he ran forward at increased speed, still as softly as possible, the ground all the time rising under his feet and growing more rugged and difficult.

He stumbled suddenly down a deep water-course, which he did not discover until he was over its edge.

It ran at right angles to the way he was making. But as he had already lost all sense of locality, knew not in which direction--north, east, west or south--that he was making, he decided at once to keep to the stream and walk up it.

To go down it, he knew would take him back to the lake, for no doubt the stream ran into the lake.

He wanted to put as wide a distance between himself and the lake as he could before daylight, and run no risk of capture by the redmen.

If he had no longer any real idea as to where he was, he had also lost all trace of his pursuers, left them far in the rear; and he could breathe more freely and take things more quietly.

The stream did not reach to his knees, and so his service boots kept him dry. But it was running very fast, its rocky bed rising steadily in a steep incline.

Soon he came to where the water boiled and frothed and roared in a great cauldron-like basin, above which was a positive slide of water, the stream pouring down a smoothly-worn slope of rock at something like thirty degrees.

Sergeant Dick could not see the top of this slope or slide of water with the darkness, and the fact that the banks were shut in by trees which completely over-arched it.

The banks themselves, too, were high and rocky, in places beetling. Just beside him they overhung the water to a height of twenty feet or more.

“I’ve come to the cliffs of the Wonderful Echo, that’s evident,” he murmured; “but it would be madness to try and follow them to the right now. Besides I’d have a job just here I should say, and I’m dead beat--just about done up. And for another thing, I might only blunder into the arms of the redskins I have escaped from. Better stay where I am until the morning’s light, anyway. ‘Go farther and fare worse’ is an old saying I believe in. Still, I can’t stay here exactly. I’ll have to go back a bit and scale the bank.”

He did so, and climbed out where the ground was easy. Then, satisfied that he had thrown off all pursuit, he hunted about him among the rocks for some sort of a niche or cave into which he might crawl, and so be safe, while he slept, from any prowling bear or equally to be dreaded bull-moose.

By the greatest good fortune, he came across a kind of grot formed by two mighty, tabular-shaped fragments of rock having been thrown up against each other at some time in the world’s history. A triangular shaped archway ran between the two rocks, and strewn all round in front of it were a number of fair-sized boulders, some as much as he could roll along, others smaller.

“Eureka! The very thing,” he crowed jubilantly at sight of the place, “it might have been made for me.”

He crawled inside the archway, and found that it went back for about twenty feet, then narrowed so much that nothing bigger than a rat could possibly get in at that end.

Delighted beyond measure, he returned to the entrance, and, rolling some of the heavier stones in front of it, made himself a bed of dry leaves and brushwood within it.

He piled more stones on top of his barricade, and then, with his rifle and revolver beside him, stretched himself comfortably on his litter and composed himself for sleep.

Dead tired as he was, hardly able indeed within the past quarter of an hour or so to keep his eyes open or prevent himself sinking exhausted to the ground, he was immediately in the land of dreams--slumbering heavily and soundly.

When he opened his eyes again, he lay for some minutes in a pleasant half doze, unable to realize fully, and, in fact, careless of, where he was, too comfortable to move.

And then gradually, as his wits came together, he became conscious of a bright reddish golden glow surrounding him.

He opened his eyes again, saw the slanting rocks above, and comprehended where he was, and that the reddish light filling the cave must come from the sun _setting again in the west_.

“Great Scott!” he exclaimed, as he pushed some of the stones of his barricade over, and looked out for confirmation of his belief, “I have slept the clock round nearly--been asleep, let me see, a good sixteen hours at least.”