Half-way—­and he stopped.

“Go on, Muky,” urged Wabi, who was pressing close behind.

There came no answer from the old Indian.  For a full minute he remained poised there, as motionless as a stone, as silent as death.

Then, very slowly—­inch by inch, as though afraid of awakening a sleeping person, he lowered himself to the ground.  When he turned toward the young hunters it was with an expression that Rod had never seen upon Mukoki’s face before.

“What is it, Mukoki?”

The old Indian gasped, as if for fresh air.

“Cabin—­she filled with twent’ t’ousand dead men!” he replied.

[Illustration:  “Knife—­fight—­heem killed!”]

CHAPTER VII

RODERICK DISCOVERS THE BUCKSKIN BAG

For one long breath Rod and Wabi stared at their companion, only half believing, yet startled by the strange look in the old warrior’s face.

“Twent’ t’ousand dead men!” he repeated.  As he raised his hand, partly to give emphasis and partly to brush the cobwebs from his face, the boys saw it trembling in a way that even Wabi had never witnessed before.

“Ugh!”

In another instant Wabi was at the window, head and shoulders in, as Mukoki had been before him.  After a little he pulled himself back and as he glanced at Rod he laughed in an odd thrilling way, as though he had been startled, but not so much so as Mukoki, who had prepared him for the sight which had struck his own vision with the unexpectedness of a shot in the back.

“Take a look, Rod!”

With his breath coming in little uneasy jerks Rod approached the black aperture.  A queer sensation seized upon him—­a palpitation, not of fear, but of something; a very unpleasant feeling that seemed to choke his breath, and made him wish that he had not been asked to peer into that mysterious darkness.  Slowly he thrust his head through the hole.  It was as black as night inside.  But gradually the darkness seemed to be dispelled.  He saw, in a little while, the opposite wall of the cabin.  A table outlined itself in deep shadows, and near the table there was a pile of something that he could not name; and tumbled over that was a chair, with an object that might have been an old rag half covering it.

His eyes traveled nearer.  Outside Wabi and Mukoki heard a startled, partly suppressed cry.  The boy’s hands gripped the sides of the window.  Fascinated, he stared down upon an object almost within arm’s reach of him.

There, leaning against the cabin wall, was what half a century or more ago had been a living man!  Now it was a mere skeleton, a grotesque, terrible-looking object, its empty eye-sockets gleaming dully with the light from the window, its grinning mouth, distorted into ghostly life by the pallid mixture of light and gloom, turned full up at him!

Rod fell back, trembling and white.