Larry Murphy saw that it was a Shawanoe Indian. As if the red man meant to reveal himself beyond mistake, he took a single step forward, held his head bent for a moment in the attitude of intense attention, and then slowly looked toward every point of the compass in turn.
At one angle the full moonlight fell upon the painted face, which the youth recognized as that of the ferocious Blazing Arrow.
"I'll settle you!" whispered the youth, stealthily raising the hammer of his gun. "Ye have no business with that signal."
He tried to present his weapon without any noise, but with all his care the hammer, as it was drawn back, made two dull clicks, which sounded startlingly loud in the situation.
Knowing that the ear of the Indian had caught the noise, Larry brought his weapon to his shoulder like a flash and pointed the muzzle toward the spot, less than twenty-five feet away.
But no Blazing Arrow was there. He had disappeared like the coon at the flash of the huntsman's rifle.
Whether his acute sense of hearing had enabled him to locate the point whence came the double click, Larry did not wait to see. He had no intention that the miscreant, knife in hand, should come down on him with the resistless force of an avalanche.
Lowering his head to help conceal his movements, he drew back several paces, with a silence and stealth that the Shawanoe himself could not have surpassed. Then, crouching low on the ground, he waited, watched and listened.
His rifle was ready to be fired, and he resolved to let Blazing Arrow have the charge the instant he caught sight of him. The warrior was cunning, but he was liable to uncover himself in moving about the youth, whose precise location he could not know.
The danger of the latter was that other Shawanoes besides this one were near, and might close around him in the gloom. He was ready, and would fight any number of them if they beset him, but there could be but one result of such a desperate struggle.
Hearing and seeing nothing of his enemies, he decided to improve his situation by a further change of base. Inasmuch as the slightest slip was certain to prove fatal, the work was slow and surpassingly delicate.
The foot was lifted quickly from the ground and suspended in the air and lowered slowly, while the body leaned gently forward, waiting a long while before its weight was allowed to rest on the limb.