As there was no need for them to hunt game, and the danger from bears, or wild cats, panthers or lynx small indeed, at that time of year, the boys had not burdened themselves with their guns, but Kalichigoogah wrapped his blanket about his new 16-shot winchester, which the boys accused him of taking along to shoot the ghosts. The Indian lad made no reply to their chaffing, but strode off in silence.
The Yellow river was waded on a sandbar, and the river flat, a mile or more in width, crossed. Here, the annual overflows had cut the soft alluvial soil into deep, wide ditches, so that the land looked like a succession of long breastworks. The flat was heavily timbered with oak and hickory and linden, with an occasional gigantic pine rearing its head high above the deciduous trees, like a sentinel of the forest. Here the woods-folk still dwelt in comparative safety from their most ferocious brother animal—man. It was going to be hard for Dauph and Rob to part from this paradise of the nature-lover.
Up, out of the river flats, they came upon the sandy plain which stretched eastward to the Wisconsin river, and then on to the shore of the old sea bed. Gnarled, stunted pines covered the ground, in some places growing in such profusion as to form almost impenetrable thickets, but generally in more open growths, so that walking was even less difficult than in the river “bottoms.”
Several times as they, boy-like, threshed through one of the thickets they would start up a doe and her half-grown fawn, and once they aroused a splendid buck, with the season’s antlers now full grown.
“Boys,” said Ed, “aren’t we somewhere in the neighborhood of the mounds?”
“I am not sure,” replied Dauph, who was taking the lead, “I have never come upon them from this direction, but unless I am mistaken, they lie just beyond that thicket of scrub pine. How about it, Kali?”
But the Indian boy would make no reply. Evidently the expedition was not at all to his liking.
In “Indian file” the boys entered the thicket of dwarfed pines, the deerskin cap of Dauphin, the leader, who was the tallest, just showing above the foliage. They had gone perhaps twenty rods into the thicket, when a rifle shot rang out sharp and clear, and Dauphin sprang high into the air with a loud cry, and fell in a crumpled heap at the feet of Kalichigoogah. Like a flash out came the winchester from beneath the blanket of the Indian boy, as he placed himself over the prostrate body of his white friend, ready to give his own life in defense, if need be.
For a moment Ed and Rob were paralyzed with fear. Who had fired the shot? Were they all about to be murdered? Then, as there was no second shot, their courage returned, and they crashed through the thicket to the opening on the side from which the report seemed to come, but there was not a soul in sight: neither was it possible, because of the bed of pine needles strewing the ground, to discover any track.
Thoroughly mystified, they hastened back to their wounded comrade. There they found Dauphin with his head raised upon the lap of the Indian lad, conscious, but rapidly weakening from loss of blood from an ugly wound in his side. Rob tore off his cotton shirt and as best he could applied a bandage to stop the flow of blood.