r nearly a mile and the dog had made his third
or fourth passage. Coming then to a bed of limestone rock which spread
wide and dry between the edge of the water and the skirts of the forest,
Grumbo sent over to his master a short, low bark, which said to the ear
addressed, as plainly as words could have said it, "The Red varmints!"
Whereat, having satisfied himself that the fording was not more than
belly-deep to a tall horse, Burl slipped off his moccasins and leggins,
and rolling up his buckskin breeches till nothing was to be seen below
his hunting-shirt but his great black legs, now in his turn waded over
to the dog's side of the river, sure that here was the place where the
Indians had quitted the water and taken again to the woods. In a trice
he had reaerranged his toilet, and now was briskly following the unerring
Grumbo on the rediscovered trail. But for more than fifty yards after
quitting the rocky margin of the stream, not a sign there could he
discern, so artfully had the cunning savages concealed or disguised
their foot-prints. Cunning as they may have thought themselves, it was
all as plain to Grumbo's far-scenting nose as it could have been to
Burl's far-sighted eye, and he a reader, had they written it in letters
on the ground, "Here we are, and here we go."

Indeed, they had not advanced more than a hundred paces farther, when
the traces of three Indians became distinctly visible in the leaves and
soft vegetable mold of the woods--as if they who had left them there had
thought that as they had thus far so completely concealed their trail
they might thenceforth proceed with less circumspection, as now quite
beyond the risk of pursuit. On closely inspecting the foot-prints, Burl
knew by certain signs--such as the unusual slenderness of one and the
mark of a patched moccasin in the other--that two of them had been left
by feet whose traces he had examined at the corn-field fence. The third
foot-print he had not seen that day, he was sure, nor its like until
that moment, never in all his border experience. It was the longest and,
excepting his own, the broadest foot-print he had ever seen, and must
have been left there by the tread of a giant. The individual, then, who
had captured his little master, and had him now in keeping, might not be
of this party; and so far as concerned the main object of this their
solitary adventure, they might, after all, be on a cold trail.
Nevertheless, they pushed on with spee