“None, as I knows on.”

“Then it’s meself that thanks yees for the offer and respectfully declines to accept the nomination.  I’ll jist elict meself to the office of sheriff an’ go about these regions wid a s’arch-warrint in my shoes that’ll niver let me rist until Miss Cora is found.”

“Wal, I ‘spose we’ll part in the mornin’ then.  As yer say this are the first time you’ve got as fur north, I’ll say I think you’re nearer the trail than yer ever war yit.”

“What might be the reason for that?” eagerly asked Teddy.

“I can’t say what it is, only I kind o’ feel it in my bones.  Thar’s a tribe of copperskins about a hundred miles to the north’ard, that I’ll lay can tell yer somethin’ about the gal.”

“Indians?  An’ be what token would they be acquaint with her?”

“They’re up near the Hudson Bay Territory line, and be a harmless kind of people.  I stayed among ’em two winters and found ’em a harmless lot o’ simpletons that wouldn’t hurt a hair o’ yer head.  Thar’s allers a lot of white people staying among ’em.”

“I fails yit to see what they could be doing with Miss Cora.”

“Mind I tells yer only what I thinks—­not what I knows.  It’s my private opine, then, that that hunter has took the gal up among them Injins, and they’re both living thar.  If that be so, you needn’t be afeard to go right among ’em, for the only thing yer’ll have to look out fur will be the same old hunter himself.”

This remark made a deep impression upon Teddy.  He sat smoking his pipe, and gazing into the glowing embers, as if he could there trace out the devious, and thus far invisible, trail that had baffled him so long.  It must be confessed that the search of the Hibernian thus far had been carried on in a manner that could hardly be expected to insure success.  He had spent weeks in wandering through the woods, sleeping upon the ground or in the branches of some tree, fishing for awhile in some stream, or hunting for game—­impelled onward all the time by his unconquerable resolve to find Cora Richter and return her to her husband.  On the night that the five Sioux returned to the village, and announced their abandonment of the pursuit, Teddy told the missionary that he should never see him again, until he had gained some tidings of his beloved mistress, or had become assured that there could be no hope of her recovery.  How long this peculiar means of hunting would have gone on, it is impossible to tell, but most probably until Teddy himself had perished, for there was not the shadow of a chance of his gaining any information of the lost one.  His meeting with the trapper was purely accidental, and the hint thrown out by the latter was the reason of setting the fellow to work in the proper way.