“That squirrel is a fool. He must be silenced. Shoot him.”
The Hunter strung his bow and fitted an arrow to the string. Sitting up he drew and aimed; he loosed. The bow twanged, the blunt arrow streaked through the air and with a thud knocked the squirrel far.
“Wah!” uttered Aroas. “That was well done.”
The sun was about to rise. Peering ahead, as Silver Heels and White Thunder were peering, Robert could see the Catawba Trail which opened clearly and crossed the stream down there in front of the ledge. Now a doe came, mincing and craning, through the trees. She did not smell them, for she paused at the stream, and drank. Suddenly she lifted her head, with long ears set forward, and sniffed. She wheeled about and away she leaped, and was gone.
“They come,” whispered White Thunder to Aroas. The two cocked their muskets, and settled motionless; and behind them Robert the Hunter glued more flatly, his heart beating.
Nothing was to be heard, for a few minutes. Then around a curve of the narrow trail a warrior trotted, and another and another. The Catawbas! There were six dark, round-faced men, in red-fringed buckskin, with turkey-feathered head-dresses and with guns. This was the first time that the Hunter had seen a Catawba.
Before they arrived at the stream they stopped. They seemed to suspect the ledge as an ambush place. But Aroas gave the call of a blue-jay, as if the blue-jay were seeing the Catawbas and was giving an alarm. The jay had not cried before. The Catawbas would think they were the only strangers here. They came on.
The muskets of White Thunder and Silver Heels had been thrust forward. The first Catawba stooped, to drink at the stream, when with a terrible whoop White Thunder fired. Aroas whooped and fired. Robert the Hunter whooped and sent an arrow whizzing. All the forest echoed to the whoops and the shots, as if a dozen men had attacked; and still whooping while they reloaded in a jiffy, drawing their hatchets White Thunder and Aroas ran boldly down. But the Catawbas had vanished; the last of them could just be heard bolting through the brush up the trail. The warrior at whom White Thunder had fired lay at the edge of the stream; the warrior at whom Aroas had fired had left blood.
“Wah!” exclaimed Aroas. “Let him go.”
“And we will go, too, before they stop to think,” said White Thunder. So he took the scalp of the dead Catawba. Then, they hurried on, and travelled all day without a stop.