“How I would like to creep up on them, and pick out a nice young bull to drop,” said Roger. Then he shook his head and heaved a sigh, for there came before his mental vision the happy home so far away, over which such a dark shadow rested, and which could only be dissipated through the efforts of himself and his cousin.
“One thing we ought to remember with thankfulness,” remarked Dick, “and that is that so far we have seen not a single sign of Indians. The Mandans do not come this way very often, you know, and the Sioux are even more timid about venturing into the region of the Bad Lands; but there are other tribes who are not so fearful.”
“You mean the Blackfeet and the Crows,” Roger added; “both of them fierce fighters, and hating the whites like poison. I’m afraid we will see more or less of them before we get back to camp.”
“We have always been able to take care of ourselves in the past, remember, Roger, and can again. Here are three of us, well armed and determined. If the Indians try to do us injury they will find two can play at that game. Our fathers had to fight just the same kind of enemies away back there on the Ohio, and if we’re ‘chips of the old block,’ as they tell us, why shouldn’t we do as well? There, Benjamin has discovered something, and wants to show us.”
Mayhew showed the boys where Jasper and his two companions had dropped down behind some bushes, and crawled along for quite a distance.
“Here is where they stopped to raise their heads,” explained the guide. “I think they must have discovered some enemies over in that direction, for they always kept peering out that way. See, here is where they even plucked some of the dead leaves from this bush to glue their eyes to the opening. It is an old hunter’s trick for a moving branch might betray the one in hiding.”
A short time afterwards Mayhew seemed pleased, for he announced another radical change in the trail he was following so carefully.
“The danger was passed successfully, you can see,” he told the boys, “for here they arose to their feet again, and hurried on, perhaps bending low, because they were careful to keep behind these rocks. After this we may not find it so easy to follow the trail, for they have scented danger.”
It turned out just as he said, and from that time on it required the exercise of considerable woodcraft on the part of the frontiersman to enable him to detect the tracks of the three whom they were pursuing.
Now Jasper and his two friends had followed an outcropping stone ledge as far as they could, and swung across a patch of soft ground by means of a dangling wild grave-vine. Another time they had stepped upon an overturned tree, proceeded some distance along the trunk, and then made a great leap for some spot where soft-soled moccasins would leave but scant evidence of their passing.