“Your ears are cheats,” returned the old man, who, from the moment his own organs had been able to catch the distant sounds, stood like a statue made to represent deep attention:—“the leaps are too long for the buffaloe, and too regular for terror. Hist! now they are in a bottom where the grass is high, and the sound is deadened! Ay, there they go on the hard earth! And now they come up the swell, dead upon us; they will be here afore you can find a cover!”

“Come, Ellen,” cried the youth, seizing his companion by the hand, “let us make a trial for the encampment.”

“Too late! too late!” exclaimed the trapper, “for the creaturs are in open view; and a bloody band of accursed Siouxs they are, by their thieving look, and the random fashion in which they ride!”

“Siouxs or devils, they shall find us men!” said the bee-hunter, with a mien as fierce as if he led a party of superior strength, and of a courage equal to his own. —“You have a piece, old man, and will pull a trigger in behalf of a helpless, Christian girl!”

“Down, down into the grass—down with ye both,” whispered the trapper, intimating to them to turn aside to the tall weeds, which grew, in a denser body than common, near the place where they stood. “You’ve not the time to fly, nor the numbers to fight, foolish boy. Down into the grass, if you prize the young woman, or value the gift of life!”

His remonstrance, seconded, as it was, by a prompt and energetic action, did not fail to produce the submission to his order, which the occasion seemed, indeed, imperiously to require. The moon had fallen behind a sheet of thin, fleecy, clouds, which skirted the horizon, leaving just enough of its faint and fluctuating light, to render objects visible, dimly revealing their forms and proportions. The trapper, by exercising that species of influence, over his companions, which experience and decision usually assert, in cases of emergency, had effectually succeeded in concealing them in the grass, and by the aid of the feeble rays of the luminary, he was enabled to scan the disorderly party which was riding, like so many madmen, directly upon them.

A band of beings, who resembled demons rather than men, sporting in their nightly revels across the bleak plain, was in truth approaching, at a fearful rate, and in a direction to leave little hope that some one among them, at least, would not pass over the spot where the trapper and his companions lay. At intervals, the clattering of hoofs was borne along by the night wind, quite audibly in their front, and then, again, their progress through the fog of the autumnal grass, was swift and silent; adding to the unearthly appearance of the spectacle. The trapper, who had called in his hound, and bidden him crouch at his side, now kneeled in the cover also, and kept a keen and watchful eye on the route of the band, soothing the fears of the girl, and restraining the impatience of the youth, in the same breath.

“If there’s one, there’s thirty of the miscreants!” he said, in a sort of episode to his whispered comments. “Ay, ay; they are edging towards the river—Peace, pup—peace—no, here they come this way again—the thieves don’t seem to know their own errand! If there were just six of us, lad, what a beautiful ambushment we might make upon them, from this very spot— it won’t do, it won’t do, boy; keep yourself closer, or your head will be seen—besides, I’m not altogether strong in the opinion it would be lawful, as they have done us no harm.—There they bend again to the river— no; here they come up the swell—now is the moment to be as still, as if the breath had done its duty and departed the body.”

The old man sunk into the grass while he was speaking, as if the final separation to which he alluded, had, in his own case, actually occurred, and, at the next instant, a band of wild horsemen whirled by them, with the noiseless rapidity in which it might be imagined a troop of spectres would pass. The dark and fleeting forms were already vanished, when the trapper ventured again to raise his head to a level with the tops of the bending herbage, motioning at the same time, to his companions to maintain their positions and their silence.