The two young Englishmen crouched down and waited. By some instinct, when the old fellow had slid away like a snake in the grass, Snap held out his hand silently to Frank, who gripped it hard in silence. It was an Englishman's oath. They had silently sworn to do or die. It seemed hours before anything more happened, but at last a part seemed to detach itself from one of the pine-trees at which Frank was looking, and came gliding into the moon-lit space. It was old Wharton returning. 'They're all right,' he whispered; 'couldn't be better!' 'What, are they all asleep?' asked Snap. 'Better nor that, pard,' the old frontiersman chuckled; 'they're gambling for all they're worth; come along!' and, signing to them to follow, he glided away again from tree to tree, until at last the boys could see the red gleams of a camp-fire on the pines in front of them. Another half-dozen yards and the whole scene was presented to their eyes. In a little hollow of grass burned the camp-fire, and in its light sat half a dozen Redskins in a group, three facing the other three. They were all squatting on their hams when Snap caught sight of them, and all chanting a kind of song which sounded like a witch's incantation more than like a decent expression of merriment, such as a song should be. The fire lit up their ugly faces, painted with bars of vermilion and black; gleamed on their long, snaky tresses, and glittered in their bead-like black eyes. Much to old Wharton's delight, too, it flickered back from a pile of rifles stacked under a pine a good twenty paces from the group of gamblers. As the boys reached their point of view Buck Rabbit seemed the chief actor in the game. He had his back to them, but there was no fear of mistaking even his back, with its high, broad shoulders, heavy with knots and lumps of muscle, and that great bullet-shaped head, which seemed set right between them, with nothing but one great wrinkle of fat to show where the neck should be. His hands as they looked at him were the only moving things in the firelight, and they flitted and flashed backwards and forwards until you grew dizzy as you watched them, the old droning song rising and falling with the pace of the hands. The three men facing him had their eyes fastened on Buck Rabbit's hands all the while with an intensity which reminded the spectators of a cat watching a mouse or a snake trying to fascinate a bird. Suddenly, quick as a snake's stroke, one of the Indians opposite to Buck Rabbit shot out his arm and laid a long dark finger upon one of the chiefs hands. For a moment the song dropped. As his hand was touched Buck Rabbit stretched it out across the firelight, palm uppermost and empty! One of the three opposite to him without a word stooped down, and, taking one from a bundle of short sticks beside him, threw it across to Buck Rabbit's party, when the song again rose and the hands again dashed backwards and forwards in the firelight.