yet, and we can't
afford to relax our efforts a particle. What is it, Tayoga?"

The Onondaga, rising from the fallen tree, had gone about twenty yards
into the forest, where he was examining the ground, obviously with
great concentration of both eye and mind. He waited at least a minute
before replying. Then he said:

"Our friend, the lone ranger, Black Rifle, has passed here."

"How can you know that?" asked Grosvenor in surprise.

"Come and look at his traces," said Tayoga. "See where he has written
his name in the earth; that is, he has left what you would call in
Europe his visiting card."

Grosvenor looked attentively at the ground, but he saw only a very
faint impression, and he never would have noticed that had not the
Onondaga pointed it out to him.

"It might have been left by a deer," he objected.

"Impossible," said Tayoga. "The entire imprint is not made, but there
is enough to indicate very clearly that a human foot and nothing
else pressed there. Here is another trace, although lighter, and here
another and another. The trail leads southward."

"But granting it to be that of a man," Grosvenor again objected, "it
might be that of any one of the thousands who roam the wilderness."

The great red trailer who had inherited the forest lore of countless
generations smiled.

"It is not any one of the thousands and it could not be," he said. "It
is easy to tell that. The footsteps are those of a white man, because
they turn out, and not in, as do ours of the red race. That is very
easy; even Dagaeoga here, the great talker, knows it. The footsteps
are far apart, so we are sure that they are those of a tall man; the
imprints are deep, proving them to have been made by a heavy man, and
at the outer edge of the heel the impression is deeper than on the
inner edge. I noticed, when we last saw Black Rifle, which was not
long ago, that he wore moccasins of moose hide, that he had turned
them outward a little, through wear, and that a small strip of the
hardest moose hide had been sewed on the right edge of each heel in
order to keep them level. Those strips have made their marks here."

"Somebody else might have put strips of hide on his moccasin heels!"

"It is so, but Black Rifle is tall and large and heavy, and we know
that the man who made this trail is tall, large and heavy. The chances
are a hundred to one against the fact that any other man tall, large
and heavy with moose hide strips to even the w