I had so much to work out in my mind that I thought sleep would come slowly, but I remember nothing from the moment when I bolstered my head in my arms till I found the moon shining in my face.  It had been starlight when I went to sleep, I remembered, and I raised my eyelids warily.  A wild life teaches the dullest to know when he has been wakened by some one watching him.  And I knew it now.

The world was white light and thick shadow.  Wigwams, dogs, stumps, trees, sleeping Indians, I counted them in turn.  Then I saw more.  A pine tree near me had too thick a trunk.  That was what I had expected.  I let my eyes travel cautiously upward till they met the shining points of eyes watching me.

I lay and looked, and the eyes looked in return.  I did not dare glance away and the Indian would not, so we stared like basilisks.  It was not an heroic position, and having a white man’s love for open action, I had to argue with myself to keep from letting my sword whistle.  But fighting with savages is not open nor heroic.  It is tedious, oblique, often uninteresting, and frequently fatal.  I was unwilling to lose my head just then.  So I lay still.  If this were the Huron, he was probably merely reconnoitring, as I had reason to believe he had done several times before.  His game interested me, for he seemed to work unnecessarily hard for meagre returns, and Indians are seldom spendthrifts of endeavor.  I could accomplish nothing by capturing him, for I should learn nothing.  There was ostensible peace between the Huron nation and myself.  I would let him work out his plans till he did something that I could lay hold of.  Yet I would not look away.  I had grown very curious to see his face.

I do not know how it would have ended, or whether dawn would have found us still staring like barnyard cats, for chance, and a dog, suddenly settled the matter.  The dog, a forlorn, flea-driven cur, snuffed the fresh trail, followed it to the tree, and snarled out a shout of protest.  He snarled but once.  The Indian drew his knife, stooped, and I heard the sound of tearing hide and spouting blood.  It was only a dog, but I cursed myself for not having been quicker.

And so I sat up.  I was forced to shift my eyes for an instant in order to pick up my musket, which, secure in a friendly camp, I had dropped at a careless arm’s length from me on the ground.  When I looked again the Indian was gone.  I went to the tree.  The Indian had had but an instant, but he had secured himself out of reach of my eyesight; had faded into the background as a partridge screens itself behind mottled leaves.  If I followed him, a knife would be slipped out at me from behind stump or tree trunk, and the dog might not have burial alone.