Harrod had disappeared.
“Hillo! where is he?” exclaimed Harvey. “He ain’t carried away by the water, is he?”
“Come,” said Custa, again; “there is a trail in the swift water. Let your hand never leave the left rock. The eyes of an eagle could not see—we must feel like moles.”
Harvey obeyed, and found, by keeping his hand gliding along the rock, that he thus walked on a ledge, that was scarcely covered by the water, which swept furiously by, deep, within two inches of where he walked. They moved in utter darkness. They saw nothing but the rock they touched with their hands; they heard nothing but the swift current to their right.
Harvey was advancing, still wondering when all this groping in the dark would end, peering forward to try and catch a glimpse of those who preceded him, when suddenly his hand slipped from the damp, cold rock onto what appeared stubble, and he heard the voice of Custa by his side instead of before.
“Wagh,” said the Indian, whose manners, language, mien, actions, were one continual struggle between his savage and civilized instincts, those of childhood and those of manhood—“a beaver in a dam, a fox in a hollow tree, an otter in a hole, never made such a cache as this. Wagh! it is good.”
A torch which the Silent Hunter now lit with his tinder-box, revealed to Harvey the nature of the place. It was a niche in the rock, about fifteen feet high, ten across the mouth, and as many deep, overhung so by the two banks that even a fire could not betray it, while even in the daytime smoke would have been dispersed ere it reached the summit of the tall trees.
“It’s a rare burrow—a reg’lar fox’s hole. I expect many an old four-legged red-skin has done the dogs here, and will ag’in. My! It’s beautiful. This is your old cache, when you came up here afore there were any settlers in these parts.”
Harrod bowed his head.