Presently he came to a halt, nosing the farther shore like a lean and suspicious hound at gaze; and stood so minute after minute.

Mayaro, crouching beside me, slowly nodded.

“He has seen something,” I whispered.

“And I, too,” returned the Mohican quietly.

I looked in vain until the Sagamore, laying his naked arm along my cheek, sighted for me a patch of sand and water close inshore—­ a tiny bay where the current clutched what floated, and spun it slowly around in the sunshine.

A dead fish, lying partly on the shore, partly in the water, was floating there.  I saw it, and for a moment paid it no heed; then in a flash I comprehended.  For the silvery river-trout lying there carried a forked willow-twig between gill and gill-cover.  Nor was this all; the fish was fresh-caught, for the gills had not puffed out, nor the supple body stiffened.  Every little wavelet rippled its slim and limber length; and a thread of blood trailed from the throat-latch out over the surface of the water.

Suddenly the young Oneida in mid-stream shrank aside, flattening his yellow painted body against a boulder, and almost at the same instant a rifle spoke.

I heard the bullet smack against the boulder; then the Mohican leaped past me.  For an instant the ford boiled under the silent rush of the Oneidas, the Stockbridge Indian, and the Mohican; then they were across; and I saw the willows sway and toss where they were chasing something human that bounded away through the thicket.  I could even mark, without seeing a living soul, where they caught it and where it was fighting madly but in utter silence while they were doing it to death—­ so eloquent were the feathery willow-tops of the tragedy that agitated each separate slender stem to frenzy.

Suddenly I turned and looked at the Wyandotte, squatting motionless beside me.  Why he had remained when the red pack started, I could not understand, and with that confused thought in mind I rose, ran down to the water’s edge, the Wyandotte following without a word.

A few yards below the ford a giant walnut tree had fallen, spanning the stream to a gravel-spit; I crossed like a squirrel on this, the burly Wyandotte padding over at my heels, sprang to the bottom sand, and ran up the willow-gully.

They were already dragging out what they had killed; and I came up to them and looked down on the slain man who had so rashly brought destruction upon his own head.

He wore no paint; he was not a warrior but a hunter.  “St. Regis,” said the Mohican briefly.

“The poor fool,” I said sadly.

The young Oneida in yellow clapped the scalp against a tree-trunk carelessly, as though we could not easily see by his blazing eyes and quivering nostrils that this was his first scalp taken in war.  Then he washed the blade of his knife in the river, wiped it dry and sheathed it, and squatted down to braid the dead hair into the hunters-lock.