TRACKING THE ENEMY. 271 



but carrying his canoe on shore, filled it with moss, and laid down 

 in it with his dog at his side. 



At the far upper end of the St. John's, after the explorer has 

 passed through innumerable expansion-like lakes, and crossed the 

 beautiful waters of Lake Poinsett, he will find the St. John's wind- 

 ing and twisting, overflowing the prairie here in shallow marshes, 

 and running off into deep long tributary lagoons, fringed with 

 canes, reeds, and flags of the most graceful shapes and dense 

 growth. Some of the canes totter over, leaning their tall tips 

 against the others for support, and so they reach entirely across 

 the narrow creeks, shutting out the sun and air, and leaving the 

 boatman to push his canoe as through a sewer. One such branch 

 of the St. John's turned eastward and reached nearly to the coast. 

 This was the course taken by the Indians when making their jour- 

 neys from the interior to the sea, and it carried them so near 

 Indian Eiver, a broad inlet of the sea that margins the Atlantic, that 

 they had but a very short carry to get across. Mike was follow- 

 ing this outlet. He had seen old fires a day or two back, and 

 thought them, judging by the brands, about as old as the interval 

 of time which he had taken to reach there after Tiger Tail had 

 passed, providing the chief had come this way immediately after 

 visiting Lake George. 



Mike examined the narrow passage up which he was paddling 

 with the instinct of a tracker without any positive signs, merely 

 led on by his suspicion. Every scratch on the canes he noticed, 

 and floating bits of wood he picked up from the water to look at 

 them, and then toss them back again. Where a flag had been 

 broken, and half withered hung from its stem, he floated past with 

 upraised paddle, calculating the number of days it would take a 

 flag to wither that much. 



At length a dint in the oozy bank he marked as made by the 

 blade of a paddle, and marked it so exactly that when he saw 

 another on the same bank he knew they were the blades of dif- 

 ferent paddles, and that there were more boats than one that had 

 recently preceded him. By the inclination of the hole in the mud, 

 he knew the direction of the stroke, and therefore the way the 

 paddlers who left the marks were going. When there was an 



