 longer possible.
    »I am right!« said the bee-hunter; »a panther is driving a herd before him;
or, may-be, there is a battle among the beasts.«
    »Your ears are cheats;« returned the old man, who, from the moment his own
organs had been able to catch the distant sounds, stood like a statue made to
represent deep attention - »The leaps are too long for the buffaloe, and too
regular for terror. Hist; now they are in a bottom where the grass is high, and
the sound is deadened! Ay, there they go on the hard earth! And now they come up
the swell, dead upon us; they will be here afore you can find a cover.«
    »Come, Ellen,« cried the youth seizing his companion by the hand, »let us
make a trial for the encampment.«
    »Too late! too late!« exclaimed the trapper, »for the creatur's are in open
view; and a bloody band of accursed Siouxes they are, by their thieving look and
the random fashion in which they ride!«
    »Siouxes or devils, they shall find us men!« said the bee-hunter, with a
mien as fierce as if he led a party of superior strength, and of a courage equal
to his own - »You have a piece, old man, and will pull a trigger in behalf of a
helpless, Christian girl!«
    »Down, down into the grass - down with ye both,« whispered the trapper,
intimating to them to turn aside to the tall weeds, which grew in a denser body
than common near the place where they stood. »You've not the time to fly nor the
numbers to fight, foolish boy. Down into the grass, if you prize the young woman
or value the gift of life!«
    His remonstrance, seconded as it was by a prompt and energetic action, did
not fail to produce the submission to his order, which the occasion seemed,
indeed, imperiously to require. The moon had fallen behind a sheet of thin,
fleecy clouds, which skirted the horizon, leaving just enough of its faint and
fluctuating light to render objects visible, dimly revealing their forms and
proportions. The trapper, by exercising that species of influence over his
companions, which experience and decision usually assert, in cases of emergency,
had effectually succeeded in concealing them in the grass, and, by the aid of
the feeble rays of the luminary, he was enabled to scan the disorderly
