It flowed out of mountains still
mysterious, and, for a few moments, Harry's thoughts floated from the
strife of the present to a time far back when the slightest noise in the
canebrake might mean to the hunter the coming of his quarry.
A faint musical sound, not more than the sigh of a stray breeze, came
from a point far up the stream. He listened and the sound pleased him.
The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood,
and presently he knew it. It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a
plaintive song of his own distant hills. Huge rafts launched on the
headwaters of the stream in the mountains in the eastern part of the
state came in great numbers down the river, but oftenest at this time of
the year. Some stopped at Frankfort, and others went into the Ohio for
the cities down that stream.
Harry waited, while the song grew a little in volume, and, penned now
between high banks, gave back soft echoes. But the raft came very
slowly, only as fast as the current of the river. He thought he would
see a light as the men usually cooked and slept in a rude little hut
built in the center of the raft. But all was yet in darkness.
The singer, however rude and unlettered a mountaineer he may have been,
had a voice and ear, and Harry still listened with the keenest pleasure
to the melodious note that came floating down the river.
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