The cloud was still over the moon, but was rapidly growing less and less dense, and the silver rays were beginning to struggle feebly through it.
“By jingo!” muttered Boone, in dismay, although he still kept steadily on in his stealthy way, “that confounded moon will be out, ’most as clear as daylight, in a minute. I shall be in a worse fix than I was under the bank. I shall have to lie still and hug the yearth. Then s’pose that heathen takes it into his head to return to the center of the village, or any of the other red devils comes to the river’s bank for water? They’ll diskiver me, sure. Well, now, I am in a scrape!”
By this time the hunter had completed about half of the semicircle, and was some hundred paces from the Indian. A straight line drawn from the chief to the center of the village would have touched Boone.
Suddenly, almost without warning, the cloud parted and the moonbeams shone brightly over the earth.
Boone crouched to the ground, lying flat upon his face. The back of the savage was toward him, so that, unless the Indian turned around, he was in no danger of being discovered for the present.
The breath of the scout came quick and hard.
Anxiously he looked up to the sky. The remainder of the cloud had broken into fragments, and these, in passing over the face of the “mistress of the night,” though somewhat dimming the luster of her smile, yet did not hide the light from the earth.
The second black cloud seemed, also, likely to break into pieces like the first, thus destroying the hope that Boone had of escaping from his present dangerous condition when its mantle should hide the rays of the moon.
“Oh, ’tarnal death!” groaned Boone; “to come so fur, and now to be stopped! If I could only get near enough to give that pesky critter a clean dig—but what am I talking about? I ain’t got any we’pon. The ’tarnal heathens took good care of ’em for me. If this ain’t a fix, then I never was in one.”
Boone looked upward to the heavens, but there could not see any thing that seemed to favor his escape. Then his glance wandered restlessly over the earth around him. He looked to the Indian village; he could just distinguish the forms of the warriors as they passed to and fro in the circle of light thrown out by the blazing fires. Then he looked to the river, and there sat the brawny Shawnee chief.