It was while he was thus engaged that he accidentally discovered something for which he had been looking ever since he reached the grove, and that was a letter from Zeke. It was written on a piece of bark and fastened to a tree in plain sight, but somehow George had managed to overlook it. The letter was made up of rough characters which had been rudely traced on the bark by the point of the herdsman’s hunting-knife. The first was an Indian’s arrow—that was drawn so plainly that anybody could have told what it was—and it pointed toward something that looked like a whale with an unusually large head which was surmounted by a pair of horns. It was certainly intended to represent a fish with horns and the only one of the species in that country that George knew anything about was a catfish. The next two characters might have been taken for almost anything, except the objects that George knew they were intended to represent, namely, a couple of water-falls. The next looked like a front view of a man’s face, but one side of it was flat, while the other was round. This was meant for the moon in its first quarter. Under the moon were four short, straight lines, headed by a cross like the sign of multiplication; and these were intended to represent the days of the week, the cross standing for Sunday. Zeke, who had lived in the mountains and on the prairie all his life, did not know one letter from another, but he had left behind him a communication that George read as easily as you can read this printed page. If he had given it a free translation, it would have read something like this: “I have gone toward Catfish Falls. It is near the time of the full moon. I left camp on Thursday.” After writing this much, Zeke did just as many a school-boy does—he added a postscript, containing the only item of information that was really worth knowing. It made George open his eyes, too. It consisted of drawings of a pair of moccasins, a fire with a thick smoke arising from it, and several horses’ feet. It meant that there were Indians in the neighborhood; that they were hostile Apaches (George knew that by the shape of the moccasins), and that Zeke had seen the smoke of their fires and the tracks made by their horses.