It faded there as the great chief had boasted it would.

Wetzel searched the burnt ground; he crawled on his hands and knees; again and again he went over the surroundings.  The fact that one moccasin-print pointed west and the other east, showed that the Delaware had turned in his tracks, was the most baffling thing that had ever crossed the hunter in all his wild wanderings.

For the first time in many years he had failed.  He took his defeat hard, because he had been successful for so long he thought himself almost infallible, and because the failure lost him the opportunity to kill his great foe.  In his passion he cursed himself for being so weak as to let the prayer of a woman turn him from his life’s purpose.

With bowed head and slow, dragging steps he made his way westward.  The land was strange to him, but he knew he was going toward familiar ground.  For a time he walked quietly, all the time the fierce fever in his veins slowly abating.  Calm he always was, except when that unnatural lust for Indians’ blood overcame him.

On the summit of a high ridge he looked around to ascertain his bearings.  He was surprised to find he had traveled in a circle.  A mile or so below him arose the great oak tree which he recognized as the landmark of Beautiful Spring.  He found himself standing on the hill, under the very dead tree to which he had directed Girty’s attention a few hours previous.

With the idea that he would return to the spring to scalp the dead Indians, he went directly toward the big oak tree.  Once out of the forest a wide plain lay between him and the wooded knoll which marked the glade of Beautiful Spring.  He crossed this stretch of verdant meadow-land, and entered the copse.

Suddenly he halted.  His keen sense of the usual harmony of the forest, with its innumerable quiet sounds, had received a severe shock.  He sank into the tall weeds and listened.  Then he crawled a little farther.  Doubt became certainty.  A single note of an oriole warned him, and it needed not the quick notes of a catbird to tell him that near at hand, somewhere, was human life.

Once more Wetzel became a tiger.  The hot blood leaped from his heart, firing all his veins and nerves.  But calmly noiseless, certain, cold, deadly as a snake he began the familiar crawling method of stalking his game.

On, on under the briars and thickets, across the hollows full of yellow leaves, up over stony patches of ground to the fern-covered cliff overhanging the glade he glided—­lithe, sinuous, a tiger in movement and in heart.

He parted the long, graceful ferns and gazed with glittering eyes down into the beautiful glade.

He saw not the shining spring nor the purple moss, nor the ghastly white bones—­all that the buzzards had left of the dead—­nor anything, save a solitary Indian standing erect in the glade.

There, within range of his rifle, was his great Indian foe, Wingenund.