You will not think it strange that I should have but dim and misty memories of this fainting time.  Of all privations famine soonest blunts the senses, making a man oblivious of all save that which drives him onward.  The happenings that I remember clearest are those which turned upon some temporary bridging of the hunger gulf.  One was Yeates’s killing of a milch doe which, with her fawn, ran across our path when we had fasted two whole days.  By this, a capital crime in any hunter’s code, you may guess how cruelly we were nipped in the hunger vise.  Also, I remember this:  as if to mock us all the glades and openings on the hillsides were thicketed with berry bushes, long past bearing.  And, being too late for these, we were as much too early for the nuts of the hickory and chestnut and black walnut that pelted us in passing.

The doe’s meat, coming at a time of sharpest need, set us two days farther on the march; and when that was spent or spoiled we did as we could, being never comfortably filled, I think, and oftener haggard and enfeebled for the want of food.  Since we dared not stop to go aside for game, the Catawba would set over-night snares for rabbits; and for another shift we cut knobbed sticks for throwing and ran keen-eyed along the trace, alert to murder anything alive and fit to eat.  In this haphazard hunting nothing ever fell to Jennifer’s skilless clubbing, or to mine; but the old borderer and the Indian were better marksmen, and now and then some bird or squirrel or rabbit sitting on its form came to the pot, though never enough of all or any to more than sharpen the famine edge of hunger.

For all the sharp privations of the forced march there was no hint on any lip of turning back.  With Margery’s desperate need to key us to the unflinching pitch, Richard and I would go on while there was strength to set one foot before the other.  But for the old borderer and the Indian there was no such bellows to blow the fire of perseverance.  None the less, these two did more than second us; they set the strenuous pace and held us to it; the Catawba Spartan-proud and uncomplaining; the old hunter no whit less tireless and enduring.  At this far-distant day I can close my eyes and see the gaunt, leather-clad figure of Ephraim Yeates, striding on always in the lead and ever pressing forward, tough, wiry and iron to endure, and yet withal so elastic that the shrewdest discouragement served only to make him rebound and strike the harder.  Good stuff and true there was in that old man; and had Richard or I been less determined, his fine and noble heroism in a cause which was not his own would have shamed us into following where he led.

We had been ten days in this starving wilderness, driving onward at the pace that kills and making the most of every hour of daylight, before Yeates and the Indian began to give us hope that we were finally closing in upon our quarry.

The dragging length of the chase grew upon two conditions.  From the beginning the kidnappers were able to increase their lead by stretching out the days and borrowing from the nights; also, they were doubtless well provisioned, and they had horses for the captives and their impedimenta.  But as for us, we could follow only while the daylight let us see the trail; and though we ran well at first, the lack of proper food soon took toll of speed.