CHAPTER VIII.
THE BLOODHOUND’S HOWL.
“I wonder where Blount and Doc are. But, why do I wonder? I left them ready for that torture, the bare thought of which causes my flesh to creep, and no doubt I am the only one left. The only one? No, there’s Kate, and my life-duty is now to find her—to track the Bloodhound to his kennel, and snatch her from the fate he has in store for her—a fate worse than death.”
The speaker, as the reader has already surmised, was the young scout—Robert Somerville—nicknamed Bob, by his giant tutor and companion, now, as he thought, dead.
The youth ran several miles before he paused, almost ready to sink to the earth with utter exhaustion, and when he found that the red-skins had given over the pursuit, he crept under the projecting banks of a ravine, and fell into a sound slumber. When he awoke to the dangerous realities that surrounded him, the sun was peering down upon him, and the birds were singing among the bushes that hid his retreat. But, he did not stir; he did not seek the food his stomach craved, for well he knew what number of red marauders swarmed through the forests, and he believed that, as soon as practicable, Segowatha’s avengers would throw themselves upon his trail, determined to hunt him to the doors of doom.
During the day, therefore, he kept his retreat. Parting the bushes he watched the leaden clouds sweep across the sky, and tried to forget the fate of his friends in the twitter of the love-making orioles and the calls of the finches. And when at last the sun sunk below the ravine, and the shadows deepened, he crept, like the hunted wolf, from his covert, and reconnoitered the hollow before ascending to the wood above, when he spoke, as the reader has heard, regarding his friends.
Bob Somerville was not a novice in the ways of the wood. Under the eye of Doc Bell he had mastered the hunter and trapper’s profession, and he had faced the savage on the banks of the Miami a year prior to the opening of our story. The twain encountered the red-men with the bravery so characteristic of the spirits of the new-found West, until a whole tribe rose against them, and hunted them from the fertile lands of Ohio. Then they came to the country of the Illinois, and accidentally, one day our hero met the trader’s daughter, to whom in love he became inseparably connected.
All unarmed he stood alone in the great woods, and longed, actually sighed for the trusty rifle which no doubt rested upon some tawny shoulder, or lay broken at the foot of a tree.
“I must be about four miles from the mouth of Mink Creek,” he continued, after a pause, during which he had heard no sounds save the long howl of the wolf, a mile away. “Kate is hidden near there, and in her hour of danger I must be near. Yes, I will save her, though I be flayed alive in the performance of my duty.”
The thought of the fair girl’s situation impelled the young hunter from the spot, and a moment later he was hurrying toward the scene of the preceding chapter, and, perhaps, into the jaws of death.
Almost immediately after his escape, a thunder-storm broke over the forests, and the leaves, still saturated with water, now gave forth no sound. Bob Somerville was rejoiced at this. The prowling savage could not hear his tread, and he blessed the rain as he had never blessed it before.
After an hour’s labor he found himself upon the scene of his escape, the night previous.
He listened upon the hill a long time before he descended, and then it was with wildly-throbbing heart. He expected to find the mangled bodies or charred bones of the giant and the trader, but in this he was agreeably disappointed. He found nothing to indicate that they were dead; but he found their rifles with his own, battered out of shape against a tree.
Not a foe was in sight. The silence that brooded over him was the silence of death, and for many minutes he leaned against a tree and planned deeply for the future.
“They have not returned to Cahokia,” he muttered, referring to the avengers. “They will not leave this country without me, nor will the Bloodhound desert Kate until the gust of war has left the land. Now, where shall I go—what do? Here I am as weaponless as the blind worm. Oh—”
A plash in the water scarcely twenty feet from him broke the chain of his murmurings, and he crouched at the foot of the tree like the panther ready for a spring. His forest experience told him that the noise had been caused by a human foot, and presently his keen eye detected a statue-like object on the bank of the Cahokia.
That it was the figure of a white man, our hero well knew, for the head between him and the stars that peeped through a rift in the foliage was crowned with a fur cap, and not by the plumes or scalp-lock of the Indian. The young scout held his breath while he regarded the man, trying in vain to fix his identity, and when, all at once, he heard the mysterious one communing with himself, he bent forward with an eagerness which almost proved his doom.
For his foot, which he moved to secure an easier position, snapped a tiny twig and caused the stranger with hastily-drawn knife to step directly toward him.
But still ten feet distant he paused, and after listening a moment, sent the hoot of the little horned-owl from his throat.
Bob Somerville almost started forward at this signal, for he had often heard it from the lips of Doc Bell, and now he believed that the Hercules before him was his old and tried friend. But, notwithstanding this belief, he resolved to be cautious, and answered the signal with the notes of the nightingale.
At this the giant stepped forward, paused within gun’s-length of the scout, and whispered:
“Nogawa!”
A strange thrill darted to young Somerville’s heart.
The voice had betrayed the speaker—had declared him the Yellow Bloodhound!
For a moment the young scout did not move; but he was concentrating his strength for a spring.
He answered the creole’s whisper with an Ojibwa “here,” and, as the villain moved forward, he shot upward and struck him with all the strength he could summon.
So sudden and unexpected was the assault, that the knife dropped from Jules Bardue’s hand, and when he struck the earth he found the scout upon his breast, and saw his own glittering blade in dangerous proximity to his craven heart.
“I’ve got the upper hand now, Jules Bardue!” hissed Somerville, glaring upon his enemy with the ferocity of the tiger; “and no doubt there’ll be a dead Frenchman hereabouts when I stand erect again. Now, sir devil, answer what questions I choose to put.”
The creole did not reply; but smiled sardonically in his foeman’s eyes.
“In the first place, where is the girl—Kate Blount?”
No answer.
The question was repeated, and the knife flew aloft—drawn upward by deadly intent.
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the Yellow Bloodhound, with forced gayety. “How sweet it is to die revenged! The girl is hidden forever from your eyes—she never meets her father again. She refused to become Madame Bardue once, and old Blount slashed my back till it bled like a deer’s throat. Now I’m almost even with him; but I’d like to get the old hound into my clutches again.”
“He is out of them now?”
“Yes, curse him!”
“Thank God!” ejaculated Somerville. “But I will not talk with you. You’d talk here till morning. Where is the girl?”
The creole laughed devilishly with his steel-gray eyes, and the scout gritted his teeth with rage and disappointment.
“Then here ends your accursed villainies!” he cried. “If Kate is dead, I’ll avenge her; if living I’ll find her without you to baffle me.”
The lips closed with determined emphasis over the last word, and a second later the shining steel descended.
It entered the broad breast of the Yellow Bloodhound, and with a shriek, scarce half-human, he sprung upward, hurling our hero from him as if he were a child. Upon his feet, the fiend reeled a moment as though he would fall, and then, seemingly having gained control of himself, he wheeled and darted toward the creek from which he had lately emerged.
It was the pain shot throughout his body by the penetrating steel that drove him to his feet, and soon, no doubt, he would fall, like the death-wounded stag, when the gush of strength had spent its force.
The scout noted the effect of his blow with a cry of horror, and darted after the wounded creole, determined to put an end to the life he had but partially stricken.
The Yellow Bloodhound gained the deep creek a yard or two in advance of his pursuer, and plunged in. He sunk immediately, for his strength seemed to have deserted him; but a minute later he rose to the surface of the blood-tinged water, a short distance below the spot where Bob Somerville stood.
“Ha! there he is!” cried the young man, and he darted down-stream, with his eyes fastened upon his foe.
A minute later the avenging knife might have found the heart it had missed a moment before, had not a dark object sprung from the rushes, almost beneath the scout’s very feet, and a red hand griped his arm.
Young Somerville turned upon the intruder with a low cry, and threw the gory blade aloft to descend upon a search for another heart, when a strange laugh greeted his ears, and he heard his forest appellation—Young Hunter—spoken in a tone which he had heard before.
Instantly the knife dropped to his side, and he found himself face to face with Nehonesto!