“And meanwhile,” said Neil, “Arbor Croche’s men—­”

“Will be as dead as herring floaters if they show up!” he cried, leaping two feet off the ground in his enthusiasm.  “I’ve got twelve of the damnedest fighters aboard my ship that ever lived and ten of them will be in the edge of the woods!”

Neil’s eyes were shining with something that made Nathaniel turn his own to the loading of his pipe.

“Captain Plum, I hope I will be able to repay you for this,” he said.  There was a trembling break in his voice and for a moment Nathaniel did not look up.  His own heart was near bursting with the new life that throbbed within it.  When he raised his eyes to his companion’s face again there was a light in them that spoke almost as plainly as words.

“You haven’t accepted my price, yet, Neil,” he replied quietly.  “I asked you if you’d—­be—­a sort of brother—­”

Neil sprang to his side with a fervor that knocked the pipe out of his hand.

“I swear that!  And if Marion doesn’t—­”

Suddenly he jerked himself into a listening attitude.

“Hark!”

For a moment the two ceased to breathe.  The sound had come to them both, low, distant.  After it there fell a brief hush.  Then again, as they stared questioningly into each other’s eyes, it rolled faintly into the swamp—­the deep, far baying of a hound.

“Ah!” exclaimed Neil, drawing back with a deep breath.  “I thought they would do it!”

“The bloodhounds!”

Horror, not fear, sent an involuntary shiver through Nathaniel.

“They can’t reach us!” assured Neil.  There was the glitter of triumph in his eyes.  “This was to have been my way of escape after I killed Strang.  A quarter of a mile deeper in the swamp I have a canoe.”  He picked up the gun and box and began forcing his way through the dense alder along the edge of the stream.  “I’d like to stay and murder those dogs,” he called back, “but it wouldn’t be policy.”

For a time the crashing of their bodies through the dense growth of the swamp drowned all other sound.  Five minutes later Neil stopped on the edge of a wide bog.  The hounds were giving fierce tongue in the forest on their left and their nearness sent Nathaniel’s hand to his pistol.  Neil saw the movement and laughed.

“Don’t like the sound, eh?” he said.  “We get used to it on Beaver Island.  They’re just about at the place where they tore little Jim Schredder to pieces a few weeks back.  Schredder tried to kill one of the elders for stealing his wife while he was away on a night’s fishing trip.”

He plunged to his knees in the bog.

“They caught him just before he reached the swamp,” he flung back over his shoulder.  “Two minutes more and he would have been safe.”

Nathaniel, sinking to his knees in the mire, forged up beside him.

“Lord!” he exclaimed, as a breath of air brought a sudden burst of blood-curdling cries to them.  “If they’d loosed them on us sooner—­”