“You better hope they have,” replied Sam.  “He’s got it in for you.”

Dick shrugged his shoulders and laughed easily.

“That’s all right,” insisted the older man; “just the same, an Injun never forgets and never fails to get even.  You may think he’s forgotten, but he’s layin’ for you just the same,” and then, because they happened to be resting in the lea of a bank and the sun was at its highest for the day, Sam went on to detail one example after another from his wide observation of the tenacity with which an Indian pursues an obligation, whether of gratitude or enmity.  “They’ll travel a thousand miles to get even,” he concluded.  “They’ll drop the most important business they got, if they think they have a good chance to make a killing.  He’ll run up against you some day, my son, and then you’ll have it out.”

“All right,” agreed Dick, “I’ll take care of him.  Perhaps I’d better get organised; he may be laying for me around the next bend.”

“I don’t know what made us talk about it,” said Sam, “but funnier things have happened to me.”  Dick, with mock solicitude, loosened his knife.

But Sam had suddenly become grave.  “I believe in those things,” he said, a little fearfully.  “They save a man sometimes, and sometimes they help him to get what he wants.  It’s a Chippewa we’re after; it’s a Chippewa we’ve been talkin’ about.  They’s something in it.”

“I don’t know what you’re driving at,” said Dick.

“I don’t know,” confessed Sam, “but I have a kind of a hunch we won’t have to go back to the Nipissing.”  He looked gropingly about, without seeing, in the manner of an old man.

“I hope your hunch is a good one,” replied Dick.  “Well, mush on!”

The little cavalcade had made barely a dozen steps in advance when Sam, who was leading, came to a dead halt.

“Well, what do you make of that?” he asked.

Across the way lay the trunk of a fallen tree.  It had been entirely covered with snow, whose line ran clear and unbroken its entire length except at one point, where it dipped to a shallow notch.

“Well, what do you make of that?” Sam inquired again.

“What?” asked Dick.

Sam pointed to the shallow depression in the snow covering the prostrate tree-trunk.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Dick looked at his companion a little bewildered.

“Why, you must know as well as I do,” he said, “somebody stepped on top of that log with snow-shoes, and it’s snowed since.”

“Yes, but who?” insisted Sam.

“The trapper in this district, of course.”

“Sure; and let me tell you this,—­that trapper is the man we’re after.  That’s his trail.”

“How do you know?”

“I’m sure.  I’ve got a hunch.”

Dick looked sceptical, then impressed.  After all, you never could tell what a man might not learn out in the Silent Places, and the old woodsman had grown gray among woods secrets.