“Which entails a search through the forest.  That’s just what I wanted, but I didn’t know how you felt about it with your lame shoulder.”

“Tomorrow or next day I shall be able to use the shoulder if we have to fight, but we may not meet any of the French or their allied warriors.  I have no wish at all to turn back.”

“Then forward it is, Tayoga, and I propose that we go toward the spot where we left them in conflict.  Such eyes as yours may yet find there signs that you can read.  Then we’ll know how to proceed.”

“Well spoken, Dagaeoga.  Come, we’ll go through the forest as fast as we may.”

The cave had been a most welcome place.  It had served in turn as a home, a hospital and a fort, and, in every capacity, it had served well, but both Robert and Tayoga were intensely glad to be out again in the open world, where the winds were blowing, where vast masses of green rested and pleased the eye, and where the rustling of leaves and the singing of birds soothed the ear.

“It’s a wonderful, a noble wilderness!” said Robert.  “I’m glad I’m here, even if there are Frenchmen and Indians in it, seeking our lives.  Why, Tayoga, I can feel myself growing in such an atmosphere!  Tell me, am I not an inch taller than I was when I left that hollow in the rocks?”

“You do look taller,” said the Onondaga, “but maybe it’s because you stand erect now.  Dagaeoga, since the wolves have been defeated, has become proud and haughty again.”

“At any rate, your wonderful cure is still going on at wonderful speed.  You use your left arm pretty freely and you seem to have back nearly all your old strength.”

“Yes, Tododaho still watches over me.  He is far better to me than I deserve.”

They pushed on at good speed, returning on the path they had taken, when Tayoga received his wound, and though they slept one night on the way, to give Tayoga’s wound a further chance, they came in time to the place where the rangers and the Mohawks had met St. Luc’s force in combat.  The heavy rains long since had wiped out all traces of footsteps there, but Robert hoped that the keen eyes of the Onondaga would find other signs to indicate which way the battle had gone.  Tayoga looked a long time before he said anything.

“The battle was very fierce,” he said at last.  “Our main force lay along here among these bushes.”

“How do you know, Tayoga?” asked Robert.

“It is very simple.  For a long distance the bushes are shattered and broken.  It was rifle balls and musket balls that did it.  Indians are not usually good marksmen, and they shot high, cutting off twigs above the heads of the Mohawks and rangers.”

“Suppose we look at the opposing ridge and line of bushes where St. Luc’s warriors must have stationed themselves.”

They crossed the intervening space of sixty or seventy yards and found that the bushes there had not been cut up so much.