“Perhaps he’s spying about, and will come into the woods where we are,” whispered Henry.  “Maybe he has those maps and plans upon him, and it would be a great thing to get them.  I don’t believe he could make a new set soon.”

“It’s a risky thing to try,” said Shif’less Sol, “but ef he comes in here, an’ you think it the best thing to do, I’m ready to help.”

The two crouched a little lower and remained breathless.  Braxton Wyatt strolled on.  He was making a sort of vague inspection of the camp, but he was really thinking more about the great triumph that he saw ahead.  Since he had turned renegade, leaving his own white race to join the Indians, a thing that was sometimes done, he had been stung by many defeats and he wished a great revenge that would pour oil upon all these wounds.

A bad nature grows worse with failure.  Seeking to injure his former people and failing at every turn, Braxton Wyatt hated them more and more all the time.  His wrath was particularly directed against the five who had been such great instruments in sending his careful plans astray.  His scheme with the Indian league had failed chiefly through them, but he felt that he could now come with a Spanish force that would prove irresistible.  That was why he glowed with internal warmth and pride.  The settlements would be destroyed and he, in fact, would be the destroyer.

Braxton Wyatt entered the edge of the woods, still occupied with the cruel triumph that was to be his.  He did not notice that the foliage was gradually shutting out the firelight.  Presently he saw, or believed that he saw, a shadowy but terrible figure.  It was the figure of the one whom he dreaded most on earth.

It was but a glimpse of a form, seen through the bushes, but Wyatt’s blood turned cold in every vein.  He uttered a half-choked cry, and running back through the bushes, sprang into the firelight.  Two or three Spanish soldiers looked at him in amazement, but he was not a coward, and he had pride of a kind.  As soon as he leaped back into the firelight he felt that he had made a fool of himself.  Henry Ware could not have been there—­he and his comrades had been left behind long ago.  Coming suddenly out of his thoughts, he had been deceived in the dark by a bush and imagination had done the rest.  Yes, it was only fancy!

“A rattlesnake!  I nearly trod on him,” he said in broken Spanish words that he had picked up, and then walked in as careless a manner as he could assume toward the mound where Francisco Alvarez sat.  But he could not wholly control himself—­the shock had been too great—­and his body yet trembled.  He did not know it, but the pallor of his face showed through the tan, and Alvarez noticed it.

“You have had a fright, Senor Wyatt,” he said in his precise, cold English.  “What is it?”

“Not a fright,” replied Wyatt in tones that he sought to make indifferent, “but a start.  I nearly trod on a rattlesnake that lay coiled ready to strike, and I got away just in time.”