There was little danger of exposure while I advanced through the shelter of the lodges, for I was always under partial cover.  But I waited and watched long before daring to pass across the wide open space in the centre of which the fire had been kindled.  The torture-post yet stood there, black and charred, while the ground beneath was littered with dead ashes.  The bodies of three white men, two of them naked and marked by fire, lay close at hand, just as they had been carelessly flung aside to make room for new victims; yet I dared not stop to learn who they might have been in life.  The sight of their foul disfigurement only rendered me the more eager to reach the living with a message of hope.

I moved like a snake, dragging my body an inch at a time by firmly grasping with extended hands the tough grass-roots, and writhing forward as noiselessly as if I were stalking some prey.  There were times when I advanced so slowly it would have puzzled a watcher to determine whether mine was not also the body of the dead.  At length, even at that snail’s rate of progress, I gained the protection of the tepees upon the other side of the camp, and skulked in among them.  The lodge just before me, blackened by paint and weather, must be the one I sought.  I rested close within its shadow, striving to assure myself there was no possibility of mistake.  As my eyes lifted, I could trace in dim outline the totem of the chief faintly sketched on the taut skin:  it was the same I had noted on the brawny breast of Little Sauk.

Never did I move with greater woodland skill, for I felt that all depended upon my remaining undiscovered; a single false move now would defeat all hope.  Who might be within, concealed by that black covering, was a mystery to be solved only by extremest caution.

Inch by inch I worked the skin covering of the tepee entrance up from the ground, screwing my eye to the aperture in an effort to penetrate the shrouded interior.  But the glare of the sun was so reflected into my eyeballs, that it left me almost blind in the semi-gloom beneath that dark roof, and I could distinguish no object with certainty.  Surely, nothing moved within; and I drew myself slowly forward, until half my body lay extended upon the beaten dirt-floor.  It was then that I caught a glimpse of a face peering at me from out the shadows,—­the face of Toinette; and, alas for my eager hopes of surprising her heart and solving its secrets! the witch was actually laughing in silence at my predicament.  The sight made my face flush in sudden indignation; but before I could find speech, she had hastily accosted me.

“Good faith, Master Wayland! but I greet you gladly!” she said, and her soft hand was warm upon mine; “yet it truly caused me to smile to observe the marvellous caution with which you came hither.”

“It must have been indeed amusing,” I answered, losing all my vain aspirations in a moment under her raillery; “though it is not every prisoner in an Indian camp who could find like cause for merriment.”