The heroic struggle sustained by this man alone against a swarm of obstinate enemies, his herculean strength, the skill with which he managed his horse—all in this strange man seemed to him to border on the marvellous.
During bivouac watches on the prairie he had frequently heard the most extraordinary and exaggerated stories told about this hunter by the Indians with, a terror, the reason of which he comprehended, now that he had seen the man; for this individual who laughed at weapons directed against his chest, and ever emerged safe and sound from the combats he engaged in, seemed rather a demon than a being appertaining to humanity. John Davis felt himself shudder involuntarily at this thought, and congratulated himself in having so miraculously escaped the danger he had incurred in his encounter with the Scalper.
We will mention, in passing, that no people in the world are more superstitious than the North Americans. This is easy to understand: this nation—a perfect harlequin's garb—is an heterogeneous composite of all the races that people the old world; each of the representatives of these races arrived in America, bearing in his emigrants' baggage not only his vices and passions, but also his creed and his superstitions, which are the wildest, most absurd, and puerile possible. This was the more easily effected, because the mass of emigrants, who have at various periods sought a refuge in America, was composed of people for the most part devoid of all learning, or even of a semblance of education; from this point of view, the North Americans, we must do them the justice of saying, have not at all degenerated; they are at the present day at least as ignorant and brutal as were their ancestors.
It is easy to imagine the strange number of legends about sorcerers and phantoms which are current in North America. These legends, preserved by tradition, passing from mouth to mouth, and with time becoming mingled one with the other, have necessarily been heightened in a country where the grand aspect of nature renders the mind prone to reverie and melancholy.
Hence John Davis, though he flattered himself he was a strong-minded man, did not fail, like all his countrymen, to possess a strong dose of credulity; and this man, who would not have recoiled at the sight of several muskets pointed at his breast, felt himself shiver with fear at the sound of a leaf falling at night on his shoulder.
Moreover, so soon as the idea occurred to John Davis that the White Scalper was a demon, or, at the very least, a sorcerer, it got hold of him, and this supposition straightway became an article of belief with him. Naturally, he found himself at once relieved by this discovery; his ideas returned to their usual current, and the anxiety that occupied his mind disappeared as if by enchantment; henceforth his opinion was formed about this man, and if accident again brought them face to face, he would know how to behave to him.
Happy at having at length found this solution, he gaily raised his head, and took a long searching look around him at the landscape he was riding through.
He was nearly in the centre of a vast rolling prairie, covered with tall grass, and with a few clumps of mahogany and pine trees scattered here and there.
Suddenly he rose in his stirrups, placed his hand as a shade over his eyes, and looked attentively.
About half a mile from the spot where he had halted, and a little to the right, that is to say, exactly in the direction he intended to follow himself, he noticed a thin column of smoke, which rose from the middle of a thicket of aloe and larch trees.