The wilderness spectacle had a remarkable fascination for Henry, who understood it so well, and, knowing that there was little danger from men who were spending their time in what to them was a festival, he crept closer, but was still well hidden in the dense thicket. Then his pulses gave a great leap, as four figures which had been on the other side of the fire came distinctly into his view. They were Red Eagle, head chief of the Shawnees; Yellow Panther, head chief of the Miamis; and the renegades, Braxton Wyatt and Moses Blackstaffe, who had pursued him so long and with such tenacity. They were talking earnestly, and he crept to the very edge of the thicket, where scarcely three feet divided him from the open. He knew that only a chance would bring the four near enough for him to understand their words, but after a half hour's waiting the chance came. Blackstaffe, who took precedence over Wyatt because of his superior years and experience, was doing most of the talking, and the subject, chance or coincidence bringing it about, was Henry himself. "The warriors discovered a white trail, the trail of one," said the renegade, "but we don't know it was Ware's. He may have perished in the great freeze, and if so we are well rid of a dangerous foe, an eye that has always watched over our movements, and a bold spirit that always takes the alarm to the settlements below. I give him full credit for all his skill and courage, but I'd rather his bones were lying in the forest, picked clean by the wolves." Henry felt a little thrill of satisfaction. "Picked clean by the wolves?" Why, the wolves themselves had saved him once! "I don't think he's dead," said Braxton Wyatt. "I don't know why, but I believe I understand him better than any of you do. I tell you he's even stronger and more resourceful than you suppose! Look how often he has escaped us, when we were sure we held him fast! He'd find a way to live in the big freeze, or anywhere. I've an idea that he's back up there by the lake somewhere, and that the trail the warriors found was that of another of the five, perhaps the traces of the fellow Shif'less Sol." Henry's pulse leaped again, now with joy. The shiftless one had not been taken nor slain, and doubtless none of the others either, or they would have referred to it. But he waited to hear more, and not a dead leaf nor a twig stirred in the thicket, he was so still. "It seems strange," said Blackstaffe, thoughtfully, "that we have not been able to take him, when more than a thousand warriors were in the hunt, carried on without stopping, except during the big snow and the big freeze. And the warriors are the best in the west, men who can come pretty near seeing a trail through the air, men without fear. It almost seems to me that there's been something miraculous about it." Then one of the chiefs spoke for the first time, and it was Yellow Panther, the Miami.