His eager spirit, always impatient for action, found relief in the continuous walking, and the steady enlargement of the circle in which he traveled, acquiring soon a radius of several hundred yards.  On the western perimeter he was beyond the deep thicket, and within a magnificent wood, unchoked by undergrowth.  Here the trees stood up in great, regular rows, ordered by nature, and the brilliant moonlight clothed every one of them in a veil of silver.  On such a bright night in summer the wilderness always had for him an elusive though powerful beauty, but he felt its danger.  Among the mighty trunks, with no concealing thickets, he could be seen easily, if prowling savages were near, and, as he made his circles, he always hastened through what he called to himself his park, until he came to the bushes, in the density of which he was well hidden from any eye fifty feet away.

It was an hour until midnight, and the radius of his circle had increased another fifty yards, when he came again to the great spaces among the oaks and beeches.  Halfway through and he sank softly down behind the trunk of a huge oak.  Either in fact or in a sort of mental illusion, he had heard a moccasin brush a dry leaf far away.  The command of Tayoga, though spoken in jest, had been so impressive that his ear was obeying it.  Firm in the belief that his own dark shadow blurred with the dark trunk, and that he was safe from the sight of a questing eye, he lay there a long time, listening.

In time, the sound, translated from fancy into fact, came again, and now he knew that it was near, perhaps not more than a hundred yards away, the rustling of a real moccasin against a real dry leaf.  Twice and thrice his ear signaled to his brain.  It could not be fancy.  It was instead an alarming fact.

He was about to creep from the tree, and return to his comrades with word that the enemy was near, but he restrained his impulse, merely crouching a little lower that his dark shadow might blend with the dark earth as well as the dark trunk.  Then he heard several rustlings and the very low murmur of voices.

Gradually the voices which had been blended together, detached themselves and Robert recognized those of Tandakora and De Courcelles.  Presently they came into the moonlight, followed by the savage band, and they passed within fifty yards of the youth who lay in the shelter of the trunk, pressing himself into the earth.

The Frenchman and the Ojibway were talking with great earnestness and Robert’s imagination, plumbing the distance, told him the words they said.  Tandakora was stating with great emphasis that the three whose trail they had found had gone on very fast, obviously with the intention of warning the garrison at the fort, and if they were to be cut off the band must hasten, too.  De Courcelles was replying that in his opinion Tandakora was right, but it would not be well to get too far ahead.  They must throw out flankers as they marched, but there was no immediate need of them.  If the band spread out before dawn it would be sufficient.