The dusk deepened into the thick dark, and the night grew colder, but they were warm and at ease.  Robert was full of courage and hope.  The elements and all things had served them so much that he was quite sure they would succeed in everything they undertook.  By and by, he stretched himself on the blanket, and clothed from head to foot in the great robe he slept the deep sleep of one who had toiled hard and well.  An hour later Tayoga also slept, but in another hour he awoke and sat up, listening with all the marvelous powers of hearing that nature and cultivation had given him.

Something was stirring in the thicket, not any of the wild animals, big or little, but a human being, and Tayoga knew the chances were a hundred to one that it was a hostile human being.  He put his ear to the earth and the sound came more clearly.  Now his wonderful gifts of intuition and forest reasoning told him what it was.  Slowly he rose again, cleared himself of the blankets, and put his rifle upon them.  Then, loosening the pistol in his belt, but drawing his long hunting knife, he crept from the thicket.

Tayoga, despite his thorough white education and his constant association with white comrades, was always an Indian first.  Now, as he stole from the thicket in the dark, knife in hand, he was the very quintessence of a great warrior of the clan of the Bear, of the nation Onondaga, of the great League of the Hodenosaunee.  He was what his ancestors had been for unnumbered generations, a primeval son of the wilderness, seeking the life of the enemy who came seeking his.

He kept to his hands and knees, and made no sound as he advanced, but at intervals he dropped his ear to the ground, and heard the faint rustling that was drawing nearer.  He decided that it was a single warrior who by some chance had struck their trail in the dusk, and who, with minute pains and with slowness but certainty, was following it.

His course took him about thirty yards among the bushes and then through high grass growing luxuriantly in the open.  In the grass his eye also helped him, because at a point straight ahead the tall stems were moving slightly in a direction opposed to the wind.  He took the knife in his teeth and went on, sure that bold means would be best.

The stalking warrior who in his turn was stalked did not hear him until he was near, and then, startled, he sprang to his feet, knife in hand.  Tayoga snatched his own from his teeth and stood erect facing him.  The warrior, a Huron, was the heavier though not the taller of the two, and recognizing an enemy, a hated Iroquois, he stared fiercely into the eyes that were so close to his.  Then he struck, but, agile as a panther, Tayoga leaped aside, and the next instant his own blade went home.  The Huron sank down without a sound, and the Onondaga stood over him, the spirit of his ancestors swelling in fierce triumph.