The man cast on his deliverer one glance of surprise, and the next moment bounded aside into the bushes and was gone.
A loud shout from the party behind showed that this act had been observed, and Crusoe stood with the end of the line in his mouth, and an expression on his face that said, “You’re absolutely incomprehensible, Dick! It’s all right, I know; but to my feeble capacity it seems wrong.”
“Fat for, you do dat?” shouted Pièrre in a rage, as he came up with a menacing look.
Dick confronted him. “The prisoner was mine. I had a right to do with him as it liked me.”
“True, true,” cried several of the men who had begun to repent of their resolution, and were glad the savage was off. “The lad’s right. Get along, Pièrre.”
“You had no right, you vas wrong. Oui, et I have goot vill to give you one knock on de nose.”
Dick looked Pièrre in the face, as he said this, in a manner that cowed him.
“It is time,” he said quietly, pointing to the sun, “to go on. Your bourgeois expects that time won’t be wasted.”
Pièrre muttered something in an angry tone, and, wheeling round his horse, dashed forward at full gallop followed by the rest of the men.
The trappers encamped that night on the edge of a wide grassy plain, which offered such tempting food for the horses that Pièrre resolved to forego his usual cautious plan of picketting them close to the camp, and set them loose on the plain, merely hobbling them to prevent their straying far.