"I didn't notice anything—in fact, I was so much taken up with looking for a jolly place to bunk tonight that I reckon I never once glanced back. How about you, Owen?" asked Cuthbert, turning to the new comrade.
He knew the other had seen the smoke even before Owen spoke, because something like a flash spread over his swarthy face, though his eyes looked straight at Cuthbert without a sign of flinching.
"Yes, I saw it—in fact, I had turned my head a dozen times in the last half-hour, expecting something of the sort," he remarked, composedly.
"It wasn't a forest fire—not near dense enough for that; and yet it looked queer for a campfire—as near as I could make out there were several of 'em, all in a row, and climbing straight up like columns," declared Eli, wagging his head mysteriously.
"Just three," added Owen, gloomily, and yet with a gritting of his teeth that excited Cuthbert's curiosity more than a little.
"Three smokes in a row—I declare, that sounds like a signal; the Indians down in Florida always communicate in that way, and have a regular code, so that they can send long messages across the swamps and pine forests," he remarked.
"That's just what it was, a smoke signal; and the Cree Indian we met on the river sent it to others of his race upstream," observed the young Canadian.
Cuthbert immediately remembered that he had seen the lone paddler turn a look that was a mingling of surprise and displeasure upon Owen when the canoes passed in midstream, and his former thought that these two had met before, and that the husky lad might even have had to do with the mournful black eye of the aborigine, came back with added force just now; still, he was not the one to ask questions, and unless the other chose to take his new friends fully into his confidence, whatever the mystery that lay in his past must always remain so.
"Yes," went on Owen, bitterly, "it was meant to give notice to one who is interested in my movements that I had apparently changed my mind, and did not intend to leave the neighborhood as speedily as had been expected—that's all."