A movement on the part of the Indian put a stop to their conversation, and eagerly they bent their eyes upon him.
After pronouncing his war-like defiance, the warrior, with his tomahawk in one hand and his keen-edged scalping-knife in the other, remained motionless as a bronze statue.
Full five minutes he waited.
His eager eye, quick and piercing as the eye of a hawk, surveyed the forest before him.
He heard each rustling leaf that stirred in obedience to the soft night-wind’s commands; the noise of the pinions of the owl, winging its nocturnal flight through the dim aisles of the great, green wood; the cry of the tree-toad; the chirrup of the cricket, deep down in the earth. But, none of these stirred the senses of the Indian. He knew the voices of the night full well, for he was a child of the forest and had slept many an hour beneath the shadows of the spreading boughs.
He listened for a sound that he heard not—the tread of the great gray wolf, who wore the face of a man.
Impatient, the warrior uttered a guttural exclamation.
Again he addressed the silence and the gloom, called for the dread being to appear, at whose approach all living things of the earth or air fled.
“The warrior is weary of waiting. If the Wolf Demon is in the thicket let him come forth. The White Dog will strip off his hide, or else the Wolf Demon shall take his scalp and mark the totem of the Red Arrow on his breast.”
But the silence and the gloom replied not to the bold defiance.