on to the ashes of a campfire that was still smoking. My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never waited for to look further, but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever I could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the thick leaves and listened, but my breath come so hard I couldn’t hear nothing else. I slunk along another piece further, then listened again; and so on, and so on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man; if I trod on a stick and broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two and I only got half, and the short half, too. When I got to camp I warn’t feeling very brash; there wasn’t much sand in my craw; but I said, this ain’t no time to be fooling around. So I got all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last year’s camp, and then climbed a tree. I reckon I was up in the tree for two hours; but I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing—I only thought I heard and seen as much as a thousand things. Well, I couldn’t stay up there forever; so at last I got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the time. All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from breakfast.
By the time it was night I was pretty hungry. So when it was good and dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the Illinois bank—about a quarter of a mile. I went out into the woods and cooked supper, and I had about made up my mind I would stay there all night when I heard a plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunk, and said to myself, horses are coming; and next I hear people’s voices. I got everything into the canoe as quick as I could, and then went creeping through the woods to see what I could find out. I hadn’t gone far when I heard a man say:“We better camp here if we can find a good place; the horses are about beat out. Let’s look around.” I didn’t wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy. I tied up in the old place, and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe. I didn’t sleep much. I couldn’t, somehow, for thinking. And every time I woke up I thought somebody had me by the neck. So the sleep didn’t do me no good. By-and-by I said to myself, I can’t live this way; I’m going to find out who it is that’s here on the island with me; I’ll find it out or bust. Well, I felt better right off. So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and then let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows. The moon was shining, and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked along well onto an hour, everything still as rocks and sound asleep. Well, by this time I was almost down to the foot of the island. A little ripply, cool breeze began to blow, 

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