'No, no, sonny, we'll all go to sleep now if you please, and to-morrow we'll begin to work our way back to Rosebud,' said Wharton, and, suiting the action to the word, he lay down where he was, and slept or pretended to sleep.
When the boys opened their eyes it was broad daylight. Birds and insects hung over the pool, beasts had been down to it to drink in the night and had turned away frightened and disgusted at the human taint in the air. The hum and stir of life was all around them. It was quiet, perhaps, for earth, but how different from that dead, appalling silence through which they had sailed but yesterday! Frank almost wondered that the very sun's rays were not chilled and blighted in passing through so drear a region.
But where was Wharton? He certainly was not in sight. Had the old man gone for more food? if not, what had become of him? At the head of Towzer's bed, if a lair on the rough prairie may be so called, was a turnip cut in two, and on the smooth white surface was scratched with a burnt stick, 'Wait here, I'll be back soon'—that was all. Dick had guessed that the turnip would catch the hungry eye of Towzer as soon as he awoke, so he had made it his messenger. But it did not tell the boys much.
'It's not much good keeping this letter, is it, Frank?' asked Towzer.
'No,' replied his brother, 'why?'
'Well, you see there isn't much else for breakfast,' was Towzer's answer, 'let's halve it; do you prefer the page with the writing on, or the other?'
Frank laughed a very half-hearted and hollow laugh, and took the food offered him. He was older, and could not forget, even for the moment, as Towzer did.
'I wonder where Dick has gone to, young 'un,' he said after a minute or two of silence; 'I don't believe, now I come to think of it, that he did go to sleep when he pretended to last night. He didn't snore.'
'Well, then, he wasn't asleep,' asserted Towzer; 'but I can't tell you anything about Dick, for if he was shamming I wasn't.'
At that moment the quiet charm of the morning was roughly broken; a dozen rifle-shots echoed through the woods. Again and again came the sharp crack of the fire-arms and the rattling echoes and reverberations among the timber. Faint and far off, too, but still distinct, they heard the Indians' war-whoop, a sound weird as the wolf's call, and fierce as the Highlanders' slogan when the Camerons and Lochiels drove Leslie's pikes and Leven's troopers into the Garry's deepest pool. Man's hate or wild beasts' rage has found no note in which to express itself, more full of terror to those who hear it than the Blackfoots' war-whoop.