Part 8 (1/2)

Lennox, Willet and Tayoga fell asleep, one by one, and the Onondaga was the last to close his eyes. Then the three, wrapped in their blankets, lay in complete darkness on the stone shelf, with the canoe beside them.

They were no more than the point of a pin in the vast wilderness that stretched unknown thousands of miles from the Hudson to the Pacific, apparently as lost to the world as the sleepers in a cave ages earlier, when the whole earth was dark with forest and desert.

Although the storm could not reach them it beat heavily for long hours while they slept. The sweep of the rain maintained a continuous driving sound. Boughs cracked and broke beneath it. The waters of the river, swollen by the floods of tributary creeks and brooks, rose fast, bearing upon their angry surface the wreckage of trees, but they did not reach the stone shelf upon which the travelers lay.

Tayoga awoke before the morning, while it was yet so dark that his trained eyes could see but dimly the figures of his comrades. He sat up and listened, knowing that he must depend for warning upon his hearing, which had been trained to extreme acuteness by the needs of forest life. All three of them were great wilderness trailers and scouts, but Tayoga was the first of the three. Back of him lay untold generations that had been compelled to depend upon the physical senses and the intuition that comes from their uttermost development and co-ordination.

Now, Tayoga, the product of all those who had gone before, was also their finest flower.

He had listened at first, resting on his elbow, but after a minute or two he sat up. He heard the rus.h.i.+ng of the rain, the crack of splintering boughs, the flowing of the rising river, and the gurgling of its waters as they lapped against the stone shelf. They would not enter it he knew, as he had observed that the highest marks of the floods lay below them.

The sounds made by the rain and the river were steady and unchanged. But the intuition that came from the harmonious working of senses, developed to a marvelous degree, sounded a warning note. A danger threatened. He did not know what the danger was nor whence it would come, but the soul of the Onondaga was alive and every nerve and muscle in his body was attuned for any task that might lie before him. He looked at his sleeping comrades. They did not stir, and their long, regular breathing told him that no sinister threat was coming to them.

But Tayoga never doubted. The silent and invisible warning, like a modern wireless current, reached him again. Now, he knelt at the very edge of the shelf, and drew his long hunting knife. He tried to pierce the darkness with his eyes, and always he looked up the stream in the direction in which they had come. He strained his ears too to the utmost, concentrating the full powers of his hearing upon the river, but the only sounds that reached him were the flowing of the current, the bubbling of the water at the edges, and its lapping against a tree or bush torn up by the storm and floating on the surface of the stream.

The Onondaga stepped from the shelf, finding a place for his feet in crevices below, the water rising almost to his knees, and leaned farther forward to listen. One hand held firmly to a projection of stone above and the other clasped the knife.

Tayoga maintained the intense concentration of his faculties, as if he had drawn them together in an actual physical way, until they bore upon one point, and he poured so much strength and vitality into them that he made the darkness thin away before his eyes and he heard noises of the water that had not come to him before.

A broken bough, a bush and a sapling washed past. Then came a tree, and deflecting somewhat from the current it floated toward the shelf.

Leaning far over and extending the hand that held the knife, Tayoga struck. When the blade came back it was red and the young Onondaga uttered a tremendous war whoop that rang and echoed in the confines of the stony hollow.

Lennox and Willet sprang to their feet, all sleep driven away at once, and instinctively grasped their rifles.

”What is it, Tayoga?” exclaimed the startled Willet.

”The attack of the savage warriors,” replied the Onondaga. ”One came floating on a tree. He thought to slay us as we slept and take away our scalps, but the river that brought him living has borne him away dead.”

”And so they know we're here,” said the hunter, ”and your watchfulness has saved us. Well, Tayoga, it's one more deed for which we have to thank you, but I think you'd better get back on the shelf. They can fire from the other side, farther up, and although it would be at random, a bullet or two might strike here.”

The Onondaga swung himself back and all three flattened themselves against the rock. After Tayoga's triumphant shout there was no sound save those of the river and the rain. But Robert expected it. He knew the horde would be quiet for a while, hoping for a surprise the second time after the first one had failed.

”It was bold,” he said, ”for a single warrior to come floating down the stream in search of us.”

”But it would have succeeded if Tayoga hadn't been awake,” said the hunter. ”One warrior could have knifed us all at his leisure.”

”Where do you think they are now?”

”They must be crouched in the shelter of rocks. If they had nothing over them the storm would take the fighting spirit for the time out of savages, even wild for scalps. I'm mighty glad we have the canoe. It holds the food we need for a siege, and if the chance for escape comes it will bear us away. I think, Tayoga, I can see a figure stirring among the boulders on the other side farther up.”

”I see two,” said the Onondaga, ”and doubtless there are others whom we cannot see. Keep close, my friends, I think they are going to fire.”

A dozen rifles were discharged from a point about a hundred yards away, the exploding powder making red dots in the darkness, the bullets rattling on the stone cliff or sending up little spurts of water from the river. The volley was followed by a shrill, fierce war whoop, and then nothing was heard but the flowing of the river and the rus.h.i.+ng of the rain.

”You are not touched?” said Tayoga, and Robert and Willet quickly answered in the negative.

”They don't know just which way to aim their guns,” said Willet, ”and so long as we keep quiet now they won't learn. That shout of yours, Tayoga, was not enough to tell them.”

”But they must remember about where the hollow is, although they can't pull trigger directly upon it, owing to the darkness and storm,” said Robert.

”That about sums it up, my boy,” said the hunter. ”If they do a lot of random firing the chances are about a hundred to one they won't hit us, and the Indians don't have enough ammunition to waste that way.”