"You wait here," ordered Sam, "while I get two or three more men and we will soon look up that kettle."
Peleg suspected that the white Shawnee, in order to delay the quest of the hidden canoe and thereby give his foster-father and brother an opportunity to escape from the region, had suggested a visit to the tree where the cry of the owl had alarmed his father.
In a brief time, however, Sam and his companions returned, and the hunter roughly ordered the stranger to lead the way.
CHAPTER XIV
THE HIDDEN CANOE
While Sam Oliver had been gone to the fort to secure a few of his comrades to accompany him, the young Indian, or white, or white Indian—Peleg was uncertain to which class his visitor really belonged—entered with apparent confidence into conversation with the young scout. In his broken English he related many things concerning the life which he had lived in the wigwam of his foster father.
Peleg was impressed by the increasing facility with which the white Shawnee, as the young brave preferred to call himself, was using the language of the whites.
It may have been that the words he now heard recalled to his mind expressions which had almost faded from his memory. At all events he talked more freely and with an increasing ability to express himself.