“Of course it couldn't be him,” maliciously interfered Collins, who had so far conquered his first disgust, as to take the object of discussion into his own hands, “for you know he was a Pottawattamie, and therefore wouldn't scalp for the world.”
“But whose can it be?” resumed Jackson, “and how did it get here, I am sure its that of a boy.”
“Could it have floated here from the farm?” half questioned Green musingly.
“Somethin' struck me like shots from that quarter, about an hour before the Injin swam across, and dash me, now I recollect it, I'm sure I heard a cry, just after the corporal left us to go after that bear.”
“Nonsense,” said the Virginian, “how could it float against the stream, and as for the shots you think you heard, you most have taken Ephraim Giles's axe blows for them. Besides, you couldn't hear shots at that distance. If you did, it most be from some of the hunters.”
“But the cry, corporal,” urged Jackson, “what say you to the cry Green says he heard when you left us?”
“All stuff; did anybody else hear it besides Green, you were all sitting on the bank with him?”
No one answering in the affirmative, Corporal Nixon declared the thing to be impossible, or he should have heard it too; nor could he see what connection there was between that cry—supposing there had been one—and the facts that had come immediately under their own observation.
“Hist,” interrupted Collins, placing one hand upon the speaker's shoulder, and with the other directing his attention to what, now seen by the whole of the party, was ill calculated to re-assure them.