They had been three days upon the tributary when it was Henry who happened to be watching. Both Paul and the teacher slumbered very soundly. Paul lay at the stern of the boat and Mr. Pennypacker in the middle. Henry was in the prow, sitting at ease with his rifle across his knees. The boat was amid a tall growth of canes, the stalks and blades rising a full ten feet above their heads, and hiding them completely. Henry had been watching the surface of the river, but at last the action grew wholly mechanical. Had anything appeared there he would have seen it, but his thoughts were elsewhere. His whole life, since he had arrived, a boy of fifteen, in the Kentucky wilderness, was passing before him in a series of pictures, vivid and wonderful, standing out like reality itself. He was in a sort of twilight midway between the daylight and a dream, and it seemed to him once more that Providence had kept a special watch over his comrades and himself. How else could they have escaped so many dangers? How else could fortune have turned to their side, when the last chance seemed gone? No skill, even when it seemed almost superhuman, could have dragged them back from the pit of death. He felt with all the power of conviction that a great mission had been given to them, and that they had been spared again and again that they might complete it.
While he yet watched and saw, he visited a misty world. The wind had risen and out of the dense foliage above him came its song upon the stalks and blades of the cane. A low note at first, it swelled into triumph, and it sounded clearly in his ear, bar on bar. He did not have the power to move, as he listened then to the hidden voice. His blood leaped and a deep sense of awe, and of the power of the unknown swept over him. But he was not afraid. Rather he shared in the triumph that was expressed so clearly in the mystic song.
The note swelled, touched upon its highest note and then died slowly away in fall after fall, until it came in a soft echo and then the echo itself was still. Henry returned to the world of reality with every sense vivid and alert. He heard the wind blowing in the cane and nothing more. The surface of the river rippled lightly in the breeze, but neither friend nor enemy passed there. The stream was as lonely and desolate as if man had never come. He shook himself a little, but the spiritual exaltation, born of the song and the misty region that he had visited, remained.