Had the Rabbit bounded out as soon as he saw the Fox coming he might have betrayed himself unnecessarily; had he gone straight away when the Fox leaped for him he might have been caught in three or four leaps, for the enemy was under full speed, but by biding his time he had courted no danger, and when it did come he had played the only possible offset, and “lives in the greenwood still.”

The Fox had to seek his supper somewhere else, and Yan went to camp happy in having learned another of the secrets of the woods.

XII

Indian Signs And Getting Lost

“What do you mean when you say Indian signs, Mr. Clark?”

“Pretty near anything that shows there’s Injuns round:  a moccasin track, a smell of smoke, a twig bent, a village, one stone a-top of another or a white settlement scalped and burned—­they all are Injun signs.  They all mean something, and the Injuns read them an’ make them, too, jest as you would writing.”

“You remember the other day you told us three smokes meant you were coming back with scalps.”

“Well, no; it don’t har’ly mean that.  It means ’Good news’—­that is, with some tribes.  Different tribes uses ’em different.”

“Well, what does one smoke mean?”

“As a rule just simply ‘Camp is here’”

“And two smokes?”

“Two smokes means ’Trouble’—­may mean, ’I am lost.’”

“I’ll remember that; double for trouble.”

“Three means good news. There’s luck in odd numbers.”

“And what is four?”

“Well, it ain’t har’ly ever used.  If I seen four smokes in camp I’d know something big was on—­maybe a Grand Council.”

“Well, if you saw five smokes what would you think?”

“I’d think some blame fool was settin’ the hull place a-blaze,” Caleb replied with the sniff end of a laugh.

“Just now you said one stone on another was a sign.  What does it mean?”

“Course I can’t speak for all Injuns.  Some has it for one thing an’ some for another, but usually in the West two stones or ’Buffalo chips’ settin’ one on the other means ‘This is the trail’; and a little stone at the left of the two would mean ’Here we turned off to the left’; and at the other side, ‘Here we turned to the right.’  Three stones settin’ one on top of another means, ’This is sure enough the trail,’ ‘Special’ or ‘Particular’ or ‘Look out’; an’ a pile of stones just throwed together means ’We camped here ‘cause some one was sick.’  They’d be the stones used for giving the sick one a steam bath.”

“Well, what would they do if there were no stones?”

“Ye mean in the woods?”

“Yes, or smooth prairie.”

“Well, I pretty near forget, it’s so long ago, but le’s see now,” and Yan worried Caleb and Caleb threshed his memory till they got out a general scheme, or Indian code, though Caleb was careful to say that “some Injuns done it differently.”