"Not so. Look here, and you will see the print of her moccasin. I know it well, because it is so much smaller than the others," remarked Bob, halting a minute to point to the ground at a certain open spot.
"Yes," cried Sandy, eagerly, "and surely I ought to know it, too, since I helped Kate make those same moccasins. She is alive and well up to now. But, after all, Kate is a girl, and she will not be able to travel long in this fashion."
"Then they will either have to stop and make camp, or else pick her up and carry her," Bob declared, positively.
"But which do you think it will be?" asked his brother.
"They fear the anger of the whites so much," Bob continued, once more moving on, "that they are anxious to get as far away as they can from the settlement. Perhaps they know Colonel Boone to be our friend, and his name is feared in every Indian wigwam from Fort Pitt to the Mississippi, and from the Great Lakes down to the southern border of the Dark and Bloody Ground known as Kentucky. They will go on, and carry Kate."
After that for a long time the brothers did not exchange words, save when something came up to excite their curiosity or their fears that they were about to lose the trail.
"I can see signs to tell me they have begun to stop now and then to hide their tracks. Only for the help given by O'Mara I would perhaps have to stop until we had daylight to show us the trail," Bob had declared, much to the distress of his companion; for Sandy was easily influenced to extremes by either good or bad fortune.
"We must go on just as far as we dare to-night," he said, stubbornly. "Every furlong gained will count in the end. As for being tired, I forget all that when I see mother's dear face as she kissed us good-bye, and begged us not to give up until we believed every hope gone."
So, for another half hour, they managed to move along. Three torches had been consumed thus far, and Sandy held only one more. It would probably be sufficient, for human nature has its limit, and the boys could hardly expect to keep up this killing pace all through the long hours of that dreadful night.
Now and then Bob would stop for a brief time to straighten up, and rest his cramped back. At such times it was only natural for him to stare ahead into the black depths of the woods that confronted them, stretching away hundreds of miles to the mysterious north, until finally they ended on the shore of that inland fresh water sea now known as Lake Erie, but at that time going with the others under the general name of the Great Lakes, though some called it after the tribe living on its shore.