"Then you are not as sharp set for breakfast as I am. Call up your woodcraft and we'll stalk it." And, suiting the action to the word, he dropped noiselessly on hands and knees to inch his way cautiously out of the thicket.
I followed at his heels, marveling at his skill in threading the maze with never a snapped twig to betray him. For though I have called him a youthling, he came of great, square-shouldered English stock, and was well upon fourteen stone for weight. Yet upon occasion, as now, he could be as lithe and cat-like as an Indian, stealthy in approach and tiger-strong to spring.
In due time our creeping progress brought us out of the thicket on the brink of the higher creek bank. Just here the stream ran in a shallow ravine with shelving banks of clay, and on its hither margin was a bit of grassy intervale big enough for a horse to roll upon. Though it was sadly out of season, the carcass of a deer, fresh killed, hung upon a branch of the nearest tree, with a rifle leaning against the trunk as if to guard it. In the middle of the bit of sward a tiny camp-fire burned; and at the fire, squatting with their backs to us and each toasting a cut of the deer's meat on a forked stick, were two men.
One of these men would pass by courtesy as a white. His hunting-shirt and leggings were of deer skin, well grimed and greasy, with leather fringes at the seams of leg and sleeve. For all the summer heat, he wore a cap fashioned of raccoon-skin with the fur on; and for this great cap his iron-gray hair, matted and unkempt, served as a fringe to keep the other tasselings in countenance. The hunting-shirt was belted at the waist, and in the belt was thrust a sheathless knife huge enough to serve a butcher's purpose. From two leather thongs crossed upon his shoulders hung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch; and these, with the knife and rifle, summed up his accoutrements.
The other was a red man, and his attire was simpler. Like all our southern Indians, he went naked to the waist; but the savage's love of ornament showed forth in the fringe of colored porcupine quills on his leggings and in his raven hair bestuck with feathers. For arms he had an arsenal in his belt; two great pistols, a tomahawk, and the scalping-knife, this last smaller than the white man's carving tool, but far more vicious looking.
For a moment or two we crouched irresolute on the brink of the ravine, neither of us recognizing the two below. Then my young rashling must needs let out a yell.
"Now, by all that's lucky!" he cried, and would have leaped to his feet. But at the instant the earth-edge gave way under him, and he was sent tumbling with the small landslide of clay down upon the twain at the fire.
It went within a trembling hair's-breadth of a tragedy. The two at the fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot brought his long rifle to his shoulder. But that the Indian was the quicker, Richard's life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I think. At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust the thick of his hand between stone and steel, and the flint bit, harmless for Jennifer, into the palm of the Indian.
"Wah!" he ejaculated, in his soft guttural. "No want kill Captain Jennif', hey?"
Ephraim Yeates lowered his weapon and released the pinched hand held fast by the gun-flint.