From time to time Blue-fox stopped, took a peering glance around, and then, when he felt assured that all was quiet, and nothing had revealed his position, he began crawling again on his hands and knees in the direction of the forest covert, from which he was now but a short distance.
He then reached a spot entirely devoid of trees, where the grass, lightly trodden down at various spots, led him to suppose he was reaching the place where the men who fired must have been ambushed.
The Indian stopped, in order to investigate more closely the trail he had discovered.
It apparently belonged to only one man; it was clumsy, wide, and made without caution, and rather the footsteps of a white man ignorant of the customs of the prairie, than of a hunter or Indian.
The bushes were broken as if the person who passed through them had done so by force, running along without taking the trouble to part the brambles; while at several spots the trampled earth was soaked with blood.
Blue-fox could not at all understand this strange trail, which in no way resembled those he was accustomed to follow.
Was it a feint employed by his enemies to deceive him more easily by letting him see a clumsy trail intended to conceal the real one? Or was it, on the other hand, the trail of a white man wandering about the desert, of whose habits he was ignorant?
The Indian knew not what opinion to adhere to, and his perplexity was great. To him it was evident that from this spot the shot was fired which saluted him at the moment when he was about to begin his speech; but for what object had the man, whoever he was, that had chosen this ambush, left such manifest traces of his passage? He must surely have supposed that his aggression would not remain unpunished, and that the persons he selected as a target would immediately start in pursuit of him.
At length, after trying for a long time to solve this problem, and racking his brains in vain to arrive at a probable conclusion, Blue-fox adhered to his first one, that this trail was fictitious, and merely intended to conceal the true one.
The great fault of cunning persons is to suppose that all men are like themselves, and only employ cunning; hence they frequently deceive themselves, and the frankness of the means employed by their opponent completely defeats them, and makes them lose a game which they had every chance of winning.