All through the night the warriors ranged the forest, hunting for the trail. The moon and the stars returned, bringing with them a light that helped, and an hour or two after midnight a Shawnee found traces that led toward the prairie. He called to his comrades and they followed it to the prairie, where they lost it. The Indian warriors, looking cautiously from the brush, saw in the open the clustered black forms, looming gigantic in the moonlight, and they heard the heavings and puffings and groanings of the big bulls. Directly in front of them, across a low narrow ridge, lay the biggest bull of them all, a buffalo that stirred now and then as if he were glad to rub his body against the soil, which was rougher there than elsewhere. On the far side of the prairie, wolves yapped and barked, longing to get at the calves inside the ring of their elders. The warriors crept away and began the entire circuit of the open, looking for the lost trail. It had entered it on the western side, and it would pass out somewhere, probably on the eastern. Red Eagle, Blackstaffe and Wyatt themselves came up and directed the chase, but they were mystified when their runners, completing the entire circling movement, reported that there was no sign of the trail's reappearance. Red Eagle, after taking thought, refused to believe it. The fugitive had surpassing skill, as all of them knew, but a human being could not take a flight through the air, like an eagle or a wild duck, and leave no trail behind him. They must have overlooked the traces in the moonlight, and he sent out the warriors anew, to right and to left. Henry meanwhile slept the sleep of one who was weary and unafraid. He had not only the feeling, but the conviction, as he lay down, that he was within an inviolable ring of sentinels, and having dismissed all care and apprehension from his mind, he fell into a slumber so deep that for a long time nothing could disturb it. The yapping and barking of the wolves fell upon an unhearing ear. The puffings and groanings of the buffaloes were merely whispers to dull him into more powerful sleep. When the Indian scouts, not fifty yards away, looked at the body of the big bull that blocked the path, nothing whispered to him that danger was near. Nor was the whisper needed, as the danger passed as quickly as it had come. He awoke at the first streak of dawn, stirred a little in his blanket, but did not rise yet. He saw the buffaloes all around him and realized that his faith in them had not been misplaced. The great bull, like a black mountain, still barred the path to him.