While he relaxed his own care not at all, he felt that the bird was a wary sentinel for him.  He knew that if an enemy came in haste through the undergrowth it would fly away before him.  He had been warned in that manner in another crisis and he had full faith now in the caution of the valiant little singer.  His trust, in truth, was so great that he rose from his covert and bent down for a third drink of the clear cool water.  Then he stood up, his figure defiant, and took long, deep breaths, his heart now beating smoothly and easily, as if it had been put to no painful test.  Still no sound of a foe, and he thought that perhaps the pursuit had died down, but he knew enough of the warriors of the woods to make sure, before he resumed a flight that would expose him in the open.

He crept back into the thicket, burying himself deep, and was careful not to break a twig or brush a leaf which to the unerring eyes of those who followed could mark where he was.  Hidden well, but yet lying where he could see, he turned his gaze back to the bird.  It was now pouring out an unbroken volume of song as it swayed on a twig, like a leaf shaken in the wind.  Its voice was thrillingly sweet, and it seemed mad with joy, as its tiny throat swelled with the burden of its melody.  Robert, in the thicket, smiled, because he too shared in so much gladness.

A faint sound out of the far west came to him.  It was so slight that it was hard to tell it from the whisper of the wind.  It barely registered on the drum of the ear, but when he listened again and with all his powers he was sure that it was a new and foreign note.  Then he separated it from the breeze among the leaves, and it seemed to him to contain a quality like that of the human voice.  If so, it might be hostile, because his friends, Willet, the hunter, and Tayoga, the Onondaga, were many miles away.  He had left them on the shore of the lake, called by the whites, George, but more musically by the Indians, Andiatarocte, and there was nothing in their plans that would now bring them his way.  However welcome they might be he could not hope for them; foes only were to be expected.

The faint cry, scarcely more than a variation of the wind, registered again though lightly on the drum of his ear, and now he knew that it came from the lungs of man, man the pursuer, man the slayer, and so, in this case, the red man, perhaps Tandakora, the fierce Ojibway chief himself.  Doubtless it was a signal, one band calling to another, and he listened anxiously for the reply, but he did not hear it, the point from which it was sent being too remote, and he settled back into his bed of bushes and grass, resolved to keep quite still until he could make up his mind about the next step.  On the border as well as elsewhere it was always wise, when one did not know what to do, to do nothing.