Deciding to await a third shot from his enemy, he made his position behind the stump a little easier, poised, as it were, ready to throw every faculty, physical and mental, into his reply to that expected third shot.  He was quite sure, too, that he would have a chance, because the man had exposed so much more of himself at the second shot than at the first, and his escape from the bullets would make him expose yet more at the third.  His heart began to throb hard, and his pulses were beating fast.  The battle was still going on about him, but he forgot all the rest of it, the shots, the shouts, the flashes, and remembered only his own part.  He judged that in another minute the man would show himself.  So believing, he laid his rifle across his stump, cocked it, and was ready to take aim and fire in a few seconds.

His foe’s head appeared, after just about the delay that he had expected, and Robert’s hand sprang to the trigger at the very moment the man pulled his own.  The bullet hummed by his cheek.  His finger contracted and then it loosened.  A sudden acuteness of vision, or a chance thinning of the fog at that point, enabled him to see the man’s face, and he recognized the French partisan, Charles Langlade, known also to the Indians as the Owl, who, with his wife, the Dove, had once held him in a captivity by no means unkind.

His humane instincts, his gratitude, his feeling for another flared up even in that moment of battle and passion, when the man-hunting impulse was so strong.  His aim, quick as it was, had been sure and deadly, but, deflecting the muzzle of the rifle a shade, his finger contracted again.  The spurt of fire leaped forth and the bullet sang by the ear of Langlade, singing to him a little song of caution as it passed, telling such a wary partisan as he that his stump was a very exposed stump, dangerous to the last degree, and that it would be better for him to find one somewhere else.

Robert did not see the Owl go away, but he was quite sure that he had gone, because it was just the sort of thing that such a skilled forest fighter would do.  The fog thickened again, and, in a few more minutes, both lines shifted somewhat.  Then he had to watch new stumps at new points, and his thoughts were once more in tune with those about him, concentrated on the battle and the man-hunt.

A bullet tipped his ear, and he saw that it came from a stump hardly visible in the fog.  The sharpshooter was not likely to be Langlade again, and, at once, it became Robert’s ambition to put him out of action.  No consideration of mercy or humanity would restrain him now, if he obtained a chance of a good shot, and he waited patiently for it.  Evidently this new sharpshooter had detected his presence also, and the second duel was on.