The Sagamore touched my arm as though with awe and pity, and I lifted my head.
"Is this true, brother?" he asked gently.
"I do not know if it is," I said, dazed.
"Then—it is the truth."
"Why do you say that, Mayaro?"
"I know it, now. I suspected it when your eyes first fell on the Ghost-bear rearing on my breast. I thought I knew you, there at Major Lockwood's house in Poundridge. It was your name, Loskiel, and your knowledge of your red brothers, that stirred my suspicions. And when I learned that Guy Johnson had sheltered you, then I was surer still."
"Who, then, am I?" I asked, bewildered.
The three Indians were staring at me as though that murderer aloft on his eyrie did not exist. I, too, had forgotten him for the moment; and it was only the loud explosion of his smooth-bore that shocked us to the instant necessity of the situation.
The bullet screamed through the leaves above us; we clapped our rifles to our cheeks, striving to glimpse him. Nothing moved on the rocky shelf.
"He fired to signal his friends," whispered the Mohican. "He must believe them to be within hearing distance."