One of these men would pass by courtesy as a white.  His hunting-shirt and leggings were of deer skin, well grimed and greasy, with leather fringes at the seams of leg and sleeve.  For all the summer heat, he wore a cap fashioned of raccoon-skin with the fur on; and for this great cap his iron-gray hair, matted and unkempt, served as a fringe to keep the other tasselings in countenance.  The hunting-shirt was belted at the waist, and in the belt was thrust a sheathless knife huge enough to serve a butcher’s purpose.  From two leather thongs crossed upon his shoulders hung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch; and these, with the knife and rifle, summed up his accoutrements.

The other was a red man, and his attire was simpler.  Like all our southern Indians, he went naked to the waist; but the savage’s love of ornament showed forth in the fringe of colored porcupine quills on his leggings and in his raven hair bestuck with feathers.  For arms he had an arsenal in his belt; two great pistols, a tomahawk, and the scalping-knife, this last smaller than the white man’s carving tool, but far more vicious looking.

For a moment or two we crouched irresolute on the brink of the ravine, neither of us recognizing the two below.  Then my young rashling must needs let out a yell.

“Now, by all that’s lucky!” he cried, and would have leaped to his feet.  But at the instant the earth-edge gave way under him, and he was sent tumbling with the small landslide of clay down upon the twain at the fire.

It went within a trembling hair’s-breadth of a tragedy.  The two at the fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot brought his long rifle to his shoulder.  But that the Indian was the quicker, Richard’s life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I think.  At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust the thick of his hand between stone and steel, and the flint bit, harmless for Jennifer, into the palm of the Indian.

“Wah!” he ejaculated, in his soft guttural.  “No want kill Captain Jennif’, hey?”

Ephraim Yeates lowered his weapon and released the pinched hand held fast by the gun-flint.

“Well, I’m daddled, fair and square, Cap’n Dick!” he declared.  “Jest one more shake of a dead lamb’s tail, and I’d ‘a’ had ye on my mind, sartain sure!  I allowed ye knowed better than to come whammling down that-away behint a man whilst he’s a-cooking his ven’son.”

Dick laughed and called to me to follow as I could.  And his answer to the old borderer was no answer at all.

“’Tis to be hoped you and the chief don’t mean to be niddering with that deer’s meat.  We were guessing but a half-hour back, Captain Ireton and I, whether or no we’d have to take up belt-slack for our breakfast.”

At the word the Catawba whipped out his knife and fell to work hospitably on the meat supply.  Meanwhile I came upon the scene, something less hurriedly than Richard.  Ephraim Yeates looked me up and down with a sniff for my foreign-cut coat, another for my queue, and a third for the German ritter-boots I wore.