Big Fox turned and handed back the bow to Yellow Panther.

“Is it enough?” he asked gravely.  “Can the Shawnee belt bearers use the bow and arrow?”

“It is enough,” replied the chief, seeking in vain to hide his chagrin.

“It wuz great luck,” whispered The Bat to Brown Bear, a little later, “that the challenge to the bow an’ arrow should a-been made to perhaps the only white in all the West who could a-done sech a thing.”

The belt bearers spent a second night in the same lodge, and on the morning of the third day they announced that they must depart for their own village.  Gray Beaver hospitably, and Yellow Panther craftily, urged them to stay longer, but Big Fox replied that the Shawnees were going on a great hunt into the Northwest before the winter came, and the belt bearers would be needed.  Braxton Wyatt knew nothing of the projected hunt, but for the present he was silent.  Throughout the contest he had shown at a disadvantage against the diplomacy of Big Fox.  Now the belt bearers courteously invited him to return home with them, but he declined, replying that he would not depart for some days.  He did not say it aloud, but nothing could have induced him to go with the belt bearers.

Big Fox noticed that neither Yellow Panther nor Braxton Wyatt made any opposition to their going, and it was a fact that he did not forget, drawing from it his own inference.  His power to read the faces of men was scarcely inferior to his wonderful skill in reading every sign of the forest.

Gray Beaver, and behind him a rabble, accompanied the Shawnee belt bearers to the edge of the woods, and there the aged chief said graciously to Big Fox: 

“My son, my heart is warm toward you, and I am glad to have seen you in the lodges of the Miamis.”

“Farewell, Gray Beaver,” said Big Fox.

Then he and his two comrades turned, and disappeared like phantoms in the forest, so swiftly they went.

Autumn had made further advance.  The dying leaves were falling fast, and the wilderness was more open.  A crisp wind blew in the faces of the three belt bearers—­now belt bearers no longer, but Henry Ware, Tom Ross, and Solomon Hyde, white of skin and white of heart.  They sped forward on fleet foot many miles, and it was Shif’less Sol who spoke first.

“Shall we stop at this spring,” he said, “an’ wash the paint off our faces?  I want to look like a white man agin, jest ez I am.  I don’t feel nat’ral at all ez an Injun.”

“Neither do I,” said Tom Ross, “I don’t like to change faces, an’ right here I wash mine.”

The three stooped down to the spring, and as they rubbed off the paint they felt their right natures returning.

“I’m thankful I wuz born white,” said Shif’less Sol.  “Why, what is it, Henry?”

Henry Ware had raised his head in the attitude of one who listens.  His eyes were intent and nostrils distended like those of a deer that suspects an enemy.