Across a little open glade, whereon the moonbeams fell—kissing the earth as though they loved it—dashed the deer, and then, entering again the dark recesses of the forest, the brown coat of the wood-prince was lost in the inky gloom.
Then in the trail of the buck, guided by the noise of the rustling branches, came a dark form.
As the form stole, with noiseless tread, across the moonlit glade, it displayed the person of an Indian warrior.
A red brave, decked out in deer-skin garb, stained with the pigments of the earth in many colors, and fringed in fanciful fashion.
The warrior was a tall and muscular savage, one of Nature’s noblemen. A son of the wilderness untrammeled by the taint of civilization—a brave of the great Shawnee tribe, the lords of the Ohio valley from the oil “licks” of the Alleghany stream to the level prairies where the Wabash and the White pour their muddy tide into the great river of the New World, the winding, smiling Ohio.
Fast on the trail of the deer he followed, although the chase was almost hopeless.
Hardly had the warrior crossed the glade and entered the thicket, when, on his track—following him as he was following the deer—came another form through the forest.
A form that moved with noiseless steps; a form that cast behind it a shadow gigantic in its hight.
The form did not pass across the glade, but skulked around it in the shadow, as though it feared the moonlight.
The warrior penetrated into the thicket beyond the glade, but a hundred yards or so. Then satisfied that the deer was thoroughly alarmed and had sought safety in flight, the warrior began to retrace his steps. The Shawnee brave dreamed not of the dark and fearful form—that seemed neither man nor beast—that lurked in his track.