We found his still smouldering fire and some split fish baking in green leaves; nets, hooks, spears, and a bark shoulder-basket.  And he had been a King’s savage truly enough, foraging, no doubt, for Brant or Butler, who had great difficulty in maintaining themselves in a territory which they had so utterly laid waste—­ for we found in his tobacco pouch a few shillings and pennies, and some pewter buttons stamped, “Butler’s Rangers.”  Also I discovered a line of writing signed by old John Butler himself, recommending the St. Regis to one Captain Service, an uncle of Sir John Johnson, and a great villain who recently had been shot dead by David Elerson, one of my own riflemen, while attempting to brain Tim Murphy with an axe.

“The poor fool,” I repeated, turning away, “Had he not meddled with war when his business lay only in hunting, he had gone free or, if we had caught him, only as a prisoner to headquarters.”

Mayaro shrugged his contempt of the St. Regis hunter; the Oneida youth sat industriously braiding his first trophy; the others had rekindled the embers of the dead man’s fire and were now parching his raw corn and dividing the baked river-trout into six portions.

Mayaro and I ate apart, seated together upon a knoll whence we could look down upon the river and upon the fire, which I now ordered to be covered.

From where I sat I could see the burly Wyandotte, squatting with the others at his feed, and from time to time my glance returned to him.  Somehow, though I knew not why, there was about this Indian an indefinable something not entirely reassuring to me; yet, just what it might be I was not able to say.

Truly enough he had a most villainous countenance, what with his native swarthiness and his broken and dented nose, so horridly embellished with a gash of red paint.  He was broad and squat and fearfully powerful, being but a bulk of gristly muscle; and when he leaped a gully or a brook, he seemed to strike the earth like a ball of rubber and slightly rebound an the light impact.  I have seen a sinewy panther so rebound when hurled from a high tree-top.

The Oneida youth had now braided and oiled his scalp and was stretching it on a willow hoop, very busy with the pride and importance of his work.  I glanced at Mayaro and caught a gleam of faint amusement in his eyes; but his features remained expressionless enough, and it seemed to me that his covert glance rested on the Wyandotte more often than on anybody.

The Mohican, as was customary among all Indians when painted for war, had also repainted his clan ensign, although it was tatooed on his breast; and the great Ghost Bear rearing on its hind quarters was now brilliantly outlined in scarlet.  But he also wore what I had never seen any other Indian wear when painted for any ceremony in North America.  For, just below the scarlet bear, was drawn in sapphire blue the ensign of his strange clan-nation—­ the Spirit Wolf,