"That is the place," said Curumilla, with a nod.
"Yes," Moukapec confirmed him; "it is easy to see."
In fact, the spot was admirably adapted for landing without leaving any signs. The bank was bordered for nearly one hundred yards with large flat rocks, shaped like tombstones, where the horses could rest their hoofs without any fear of leaving a mark. These atones extended for a considerable distance into the plain, and thus formed a species of natural highway, nearly half a mile in width.
Still, a thing had happened which no one could have foreseen, and which would have passed unnoticed, save for Valentine's watchful eye. One of the horses, in climbing on to the rock, had miscalculated its distance and slipped, so that an almost imperceptible graze, left by its hoof on the stone, showed the quick-sighted hunter where the party struck the bank.
The hunters followed the same road; but, so soon as they had landed, the trail disappeared anew. Although the scouts looked around with the most minute attention, they found nothing that would indicate to them the road followed by the enemy on leaving the water.
Valentine, with his hands resting on the muzzle of his rifle, was thinking deeply, at one moment looking on the ground, at another raising his eyes to the sky, like a man busied with the solution of a problem which seems to him impossible, when suddenly he perceived a white headed eagle soaring in long circles over a mass of rocks, situated a little to the right of the spot where he was standing.
"Hum," the hunter said to himself, as he watched the eagle, whose circles were growing gradually smaller, "what is the matter with that bird? I am curious to know."
Summoning his two comrades, he threw his rifle on his back, and hurried toward the spot above which the bird of prey still continued to hover. Valentine imparted to the Indians the suspicions that had sprung up in his mind, and the three men began painfully climbing up the mass of rocks strangely piled up one on the other, and which rose like a small hill in the middle of the prairie.
On reaching the top the hunters stopped to pant; the eagle, startled by their unexpected appearance, had flown reluctantly away. They found themselves on a species of platform, which must infallibly have once served as a sepulchre to some renowned Indian warrior, for several shapeless fragments lay here and there, near a rather wide cavity, some ten yards in width.
Valentine bent over the edge of this hole, but the obscurity was so dense, owing to the shape of the cavity, that he could perceive nothing, though his sense of smell was most disagreeably assailed by a fetid odour of decaying flesh.