One by one he went over the bewildering incidents of the past two days.

At first they had stirred his blood with a certain exhilaration--a spice of excitement which was not at all unpleasant; but with this excitement there was now a peculiar sense of oppression.

The attempt that had already been made on his life together with the persistent warnings for him to return into the South began to have their effect.

But Howland was not a man to surrender to his fears, if they could be called fears.

He was satisfied that a mysterious peril of some kind awaited him at the camp on the Wekusko, but he gave up trying to fathom the reason for this peril, accepting in his businesslike way the fact that it did exist, and that in a short time it would probably explain itself.