Then Wade resumed his noiseless and stealthy course through the woods.  He began a descent, leading off somewhat to the right of the point where the smoke had arisen.  The presence of the rustlers in the cabin was of importance, yet not so paramount as another possibility.  He expected Jack Belllounds to be with them or meet them there, and that was the thing he wanted to ascertain.  When he got down below the little valley he swung around to the left to cross the trail that came up from the main valley, some miles still farther down.  He found it, and was not surprised to see fresh horse tracks, made that morning.  He recognized those tracks.  Jack Belllounds was with the rustlers, come, no doubt, to receive his pay.

Then the change in Wade, and the actions of a trailer of men, became more singularly manifest.  He reverted to some former habit of mind and body.  He was as slow as a shadow, absolutely silent, and the gaze that roved ahead and all around must have taken note of every living thing, of every moving leaf or fern or bough.  The hound, with hair curling up stiff on his back, stayed close to Wade, watching, listening, and stepping with him.  Certainly Wade expected the rustlers to have some one of their number doing duty as an outlook.  So he kept uphill, above the cabin, and made his careful way through the thicket coverts, which at that place were dense and matted clumps of jack-pine and spruce.  At last he could see the cabin and the narrow, grassy valley just beyond.  To his relief the horses were unsaddled and grazing.  No man was in sight.  But there might be a dog.  The hunter, in his slow advance, used keen and unrelaxing vigilance, and at length he decided that if there had been a dog he would have been tied outside to give an alarm.

Wade had now reached his objective point.  He was some eighty paces from the cabin, in line with an open aisle down which he could see into the cleared space before the door.  On his left were thick, small spruces, with low-spreading branches, and they extended all the way to the cabin on that side, and in fact screened two walls of it.  Wade knew exactly what he was going to do.  No longer did he hesitate.  Laying down his rifle, he tied the hound to a little spruce, patting him and whispering for him to stay there and be still.

Then Wade’s action in looking to his belt-guns was that of a man who expected to have recourse to them speedily and by whom the necessity was neither regretted nor feared.  Stooping low, he entered the thicket of spruces.  The soft, spruce-matted ground, devoid of brush or twig, did not give forth the slightest sound of step, nor did the brushing of the branches against his body.  In some cases he had to bend the boughs.  Thus, swiftly and silently, with the gliding steps of an Indian, he approached the cabin till the brown-barked logs loomed before him, shutting off the clearer light.