The javelins with which death had been inflicted had vanished, and the footprints of some creature with a cloven foot were plainly visible by the side of the corpses.

The light of day, instead of dispelling the mystery, only served to render it deeper. The hussar could not tell where he was, for the thick woods, but he noticed that the ground rose to the right of the camp, with a steepness that told he was at the foot of a mountain.

Now, unwatched by human eye, he rolled himself near the body of an Indian, and using the latter’s knife with his own fettered hands, soon cut the cords that bound his feet together. His own handcuffs remained, but they were not an incumbrance to his further escape. Moreover, it was not hard to find weapons. They lay by the bodies, or scattered in terror over the ground, and a heap of abandoned horse[Pg 35] equipments, at the foot of a tree, showed where the demoralized rangers had fled on barebacked horses. Lying among these equipments he found his own weapons as they had been thrown there, and it was with great joy that he resumed them, one by one.

[Pg 35]

Putting on a sword-belt, when the person is handcuffed, is by no means an easy operation, but Adrian managed it somehow, and then took his departure for the mountain, presenting the strange spectacle of a fully armed hussar roaming the woods, handcuffed like a prisoner.

The irons were decidedly inconvenient, but he had no means to unlock them. The key in his saber-tasche had been taken by his captors of the evening to extricate their chief, and the latter had fled, carrying it with him.

In a short time the young officer had reached the ascent which he judged to be the side of a mountain, and beheld his expectations verified. A lofty mountain indeed was before him, and a break in the woods, higher up, promised him a prospect of the surroundings.

After some minutes of hard climbing he reached a flat rock that jutted out many feet from the mountain-side, and around which the trees had gradually thinned away, leaving a view of the usual sea of mountains and valleys.

Something in the scene seemed familiar to the hussar, who yet could not exactly ascertain where he was. Casting his eyes to the right, over a sea of foliage, he caught sight of a thin wreath of blue smoke curling in the air, and at the same time, beheld a peculiar shaped cliff, with a stream falling over its side, which he instantly 

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