“Agreed, agreed!” cried the men; “come on.”

Dick, too, seemed to agree to this proposal, and hastily ordered Crusoe to run on ahead with the savage; an order which the dog obeyed so vigorously that, before the men had done laughing at him, he was a couple of hundred yards ahead of them.

“Take care that he don’t get off!” cried Dick, springing on Charlie and stretching out at a gallop.

In a moment he was beside the Indian.  Scraping together the little of the Indian language he knew, he stooped down, and, cutting the thongs that bound him, said,—­

“Go! white men love the Indians.”

The man cast on his deliverer one glance of surprise, and the next moment bounded aside into the bushes and was gone.

A loud shout from the party behind showed that this act had been observed; and Crusoe stood with the end of the line in his mouth, and an expression on his face that said, “You’re absolutely incomprehensible, Dick!  It’s all right, I know, but to my feeble capacity it seems wrong.”

“Fat for you do dat?” shouted Pierre in a rage, as he came up with a menacing look.

Dick confronted him.  “The prisoner was mine.  I had a right to do with him as it liked me.”

“True, true,” cried several of the men who had begun to repent of their resolution, and were glad the savage was off.  “The lad’s right.  Get along, Pierre.”

“You had no right, you vas wrong.  Oui, et I have goot vill to give you one knock on de nose.”

Dick looked Pierre in the face, as he said this, in a manner that cowed him.

“It is time,” he said quietly, pointing to the sun, “to go on.  Your bourgeois expects that time won’t be wasted.”

Pierre muttered something in an angry tone, and wheeling round his horse, dashed forward at full gallop, followed by the rest of the men.

The trappers encamped that night on the edge of a wide grassy plain, which offered such tempting food for the horses that Pierre resolved to forego his usual cautious plan of picketing them close to the camp, and set them loose on the plain, merely hobbling them to prevent their straying far.

Dick remonstrated, but in vain.  An insolent answer was all he got for his pains.  He determined, however, to keep Charlie close beside him all night, and also made up his mind to keep a sharp look-out on the other horses.

At supper he again remonstrated.

“No ’fraid,” said Pierre, whose pipe was beginning to improve his temper.  “The red reptiles no dare to come in open plain when de moon so clear.”

“Dun know that,” said a taciturn trapper, who seldom ventured a remark of any kind; “them varmints ‘ud steal the two eyes out o’ you’ head when they set their hearts on’t.”

“Dat ar’ umposs’ble, for dey have no hearts,” said a half-breed; “dey have von hole vere de heart vas be.”

This was received with a shout of laughter, in the midst of which an appalling yell was heard, and, as if by magic, four Indians were seen on the backs of four of the best horses, yelling like fiends, and driving all the other horses furiously before them over the plain!