“Maybe I am seeing things!” he thought. “Anyway, I’ll find out.”
Scrambling up the slope, Dan boldly entered the fringe of woods.
Distinctly, he heard a faint rustling sound, and the crackle of a stick. Someone had been watching him! That person now was moving rapidly away.
Dan moved faster. Now deep among the trees, he could see no one. It was as if he were chasing a will-o’-the-wisp!
Finally giving up, the boy returned to the slope directly above the site he had selected for the sand painting.
A gap in the tree branches, he noted, permitted a perfect view not only of the camp but also of the picture he had started.
“Someone was watching me, all right,” he thought. “Wonder if it was Ross?”
Carefully, Dan inspected the soft, moist earth. At first he could find no footprints or other sign of the watcher. But after he had pulled away a pile of damp leaves from the trail, he discovered a print which appeared to have been made by a moccasin.
“It wasn’t Ross,” he decided. “One of those Indians is watching our camp. I don’t like it.”
Decidedly troubled, the boy returned to the sand painting. But he could not keep his mind on it. What use, he thought, to go to so much work again, with the ever present hazard that over-night the picture might be ruined by a hostile stranger?