"Now, by all that's lucky!" he cried, and would have leaped to his feet.
But at the instant the earth-edge gave way under him, and he was sent
tumbling with the small landslide of clay down upon the twain at the
fire.

It went within a trembling hair's-breadth of a tragedy. The two at the
fire sprang up as one man; and the bound that set the hunter afoot
brought his long rifle to his shoulder. But that the Indian was the
quicker, Richard's life would have paid the penalty of his slip, I
think. At the trigger-pulling instant the Catawba thrust the thick of
his hand between stone and steel, and the flint bit, harmless for
Jennifer, into the palm of the Indian.

"Wah!" he ejaculated, in his soft guttural. "No want kill Captain
Jennif', hey?"

Ephraim Yeates lowered his weapon and released the pinched hand held
fast by the gun-flint.

"Well, I'm daddled, fair and square, Cap'n Dick!" he declared. "Jest one
more shake of a dead lamb's tail, and I'd 'a' had ye on my mind, sartain
sure! I allowed ye knowed better than to come whammling down that-away
behint a man whilst he's a-cooking his ven'son."

Dick laughed and called to me to follow as I could. And his answer to
the old borderer was no answer at all.

"'Tis to be hoped you and the chief don't mean to be niddering with that
deer's meat. We were guessing but a half-hour back, Captain Ireton and