from their logs.  Lizards blinked at him.  Moccasin snakes darted wicked forked tongues at him and then glided out of reach of his tomahawk.  The frogs had stopped their deep bass notes.  A swamp-blackbird rose in fright from her nest in the saw-grass, and twittering plaintively fluttered round and round over the pond.  The flight of the bird worried Wetzel.  Such little things as these might attract the attention of some Indian scout.  But he hoped that in the excitement of the war preparations these unusual disturbances would escape notice.  At last he gained the other side of the swamp.  At the end of the cornfield before him was the clump of laurel which he had marked from the cliff as his objective point.  The Indian corn was now about five feet high.  Wetzel passed through this field unseen.  He reached the laurel bushes, where he dropped to the ground and lay quiet a few minutes.  In the dash which he would soon make to the forest he needed all his breath and all his fleetness.  He looked to the right to see how far the woods was from where he lay.  Not more than one hundred feet.  He was safe.  Once in the dark shade of those trees, and with his foes behind him, he could defy the whole race of Delawares.  He looked to his rifle, freshened the powder in the pan, carefully adjusted the flint, and then rose quietly to his feet.

Wetzel’s keen gaze, as he swept it from left to right, took in every detail of the camp.  He was almost in the village.  A tepee stood not twenty feet from his hiding-place.  He could have tossed a stone in the midst of squaws, and braves, and chiefs.  The main body of Indians was in the center of the camp.  The British were lined up further on.  Both Indians and soldiers were resting on their arms and waiting.  Suddenly Wetzel started and his heart leaped.  Under a maple tree not one hundred and fifty yards distant stood four men in earnest consultation.  One was an Indian.  Wetzel recognized the fierce, stern face, the haughty, erect figure.  He knew that long, trailing war-bonnet.  It could have adorned the head of but one chief—­Wingenund, the sachem of the Delawares.  A British officer, girdled and epauletted, stood next to Wingenund.  Simon Girty, the renegade, and Miller, the traitor, completed the group.

Wetzel sank to his knees.  The perspiration poured from his face.  The mighty hunter trembled, but it was from eagerness.  Was not Girty, the white savage, the bane of the poor settlers, within range of a weapon that never failed?  Was not the murderous chieftain, who had once whipped and tortured him, who had burned Crawford alive, there in plain sight?  Wetzel revelled a moment in fiendish glee.  He passed his hands tenderly over the long barrel of his rifle.  In that moment as never before he gloried in his power—­a power which enabled him to put a bullet in the eye of a squirrel at the distance these men were from him.  But only for an instant did the hunter yield to this feeling.  He knew too well the value of time and opportunity.