"It's a wonderful, a noble wilderness!" said Robert. "I'm glad I'm here, even if there are Frenchmen and Indians in it, seeking our lives. Why, Tayoga, I can feel myself growing in such an atmosphere! Tell me, am I not an inch taller than I was when I left that hollow in the rocks?"
"You do look taller," said the Onondaga, "but maybe it's because you stand erect now. Dagaeoga, since the wolves have been defeated, has become proud and haughty again."
"At any rate, your wonderful cure is still going on at wonderful speed. You use your left arm pretty freely and you seem to have back nearly all your old strength."
"Yes, Tododaho still watches over me. He is far better to me than I deserve."
They pushed on at good speed, returning on the path they had taken, when Tayoga received his wound, and though they slept one night on the way, to give Tayoga's wound a further chance, they came in time to the place where the rangers and the Mohawks had met St. Luc's force in combat. The heavy rains long since had wiped out all traces of footsteps there, but Robert hoped that the keen eyes of the Onondaga would find other signs to indicate which way the battle had gone. Tayoga looked a long time before he said anything.
"The battle was very fierce," he said at last. "Our main force lay along here among these bushes."
"How do you know, Tayoga?" asked Robert.
"It is very simple. For a long distance the bushes are shattered and broken. It was rifle balls and musket balls that did it. Indians are not usually good marksmen, and they shot high, cutting off twigs above the heads of the Mohawks and rangers."
"Suppose we look at the opposing ridge and line of bushes where St.
Luc's warriors must have stationed themselves."
They crossed the intervening space of sixty or seventy yards and found that the bushes there had not been cut up so much.