As Joe lay there hoping for Whispering Winds’ return, his reflections were not pleasant.  Fortunate, indeed, he was to be alive; but he had no hope he could continue to be favored by fortune.  Odds were now against his escape.  Girty would have the Delawares on his trail like a pack of hungry wolves.  He could not understand the absence of Whispering Winds.  She would have died sooner than desert him.  Girty had, perhaps, captured her, and was now scouring the woods for him.

“I’ll get him next time, or he’ll get me,” muttered Joe, in bitter wrath.  He could never forgive himself for his failure to kill the renegade.

The recollection of how nearly he had forever ended Girty’s brutal career brought before Joe’s mind the scene of the fight.  He saw again Buzzard Jim’s face, revolting, unlike anything human.  There stretched Silvertip’s dark figure, lying still and stark, and there was Kate’s white form in its winding, crimson wreath of blood.  Hauntingly her face returned, sad, stern in its cold rigidity.

“Poor girl, better for her to be dead,” he murmured.  “Not long will she be unavenged!”

His thoughts drifted to the future.  He had no fear of starvation, for Mose could catch a rabbit or woodchuck at any time.  When the strips of meat he had hidden in his coat were gone, he could start a fire and roast more.  What concerned him most was pursuit.  His trail from the cabin had been a bloody one, which would render it easily followed.  He dared not risk exertion until he had given his wound time to heal.  Then, if he did escape from Girty and the Delawares, his future was not bright.  His experiences of the last few days had not only sobered, but brought home to him this real border life.  With all his fire and daring he new he was no fool.  He had eagerly embraced a career which, at the present stage of his training, was beyond his scope—­not that he did not know how to act in sudden crises, but because he had not had the necessary practice to quickly and surely use his knowledge.

Bitter, indeed, was his self-scorn when he recalled that of the several critical positions he had been in since his acquaintance with Wetzel, he had failed in all but one.  The exception was the killing of Silvertip.  Here his fury had made him fight as Wetzel fought with only his every day incentive.  He realized that the border was no place for any save the boldest and most experienced hunters—­men who had become inured to hardship, callous as to death, keen as Indians.  Fear was not in Joe nor lack of confidence; but he had good sense, and realized he would have done a wiser thing had he stayed at Fort Henry.  Colonel Zane was right.  The Indians were tigers, the renegades vultures, the vast untrammeled forests and plains their covert.  Ten years of war had rendered this wilderness a place where those few white men who had survived were hardened to the spilling of blood, stern even in those few quiet hours which peril allowed them, strong in their sacrifice of all for future generations.