He took me by the arm and led me cautiously a few rods to the left, then crouched down and parted the bushes with his hand. We were kneeling on the very edge of a precipice which I never should have seen, and over which I certainly should have walked had I been here alone. Deep down below us the Ohio flowed, a dark, slow stream, with jutting rocks on the eastern bank and a long flat sand-spit on the west.
At the point of this spit a man was standing, leaning on a rifle. It was not Butler.
"There's another fellow on that rock," whispered Mount, pointing. "Butler will be watching the slope below our camp."
"Let him watch it," observed the Weasel; "we'll be with Cresap by moon-rise!"
"You can take a safe shot from here," smiled Mount, looking around at me; "but it's too far to go for the scalp."
I shook my head, shuddering, and we resumed our march, filing away into the west in perfect silence until the sun stood in mid-heaven and the heated air under the great pines drove us to the nearest water, which I had been sniffing for some time past.
Resting there to drink, I looked curiously at my three companions. Such a company I had never beheld. There was the notorious Mount, a giant in stringy buckskins, with a paw like a bear and a smooth, boyish face cut by the single, heavy crease of a scar below the right eye. With his regular features and indolent movements, he appeared to me like some overgrown village oaf, too stupid to work, too lazy to try.
Beside him squatted the little Jew, toes turned in, dirty thumbs joined pensively, musing in his red beard. His boots had left the foreign mark which I had seen the day before in the trail; the Weasel's moccasins were those of Albany make.
I examined the Weasel. Such a shrunken, serene, placid little creature, all hunting-shirt and cap, with two finely chiselled flat ears, which perhaps gave him that alert allure, as though eternally listening to some sound behind his back.
But the mouths of these three men were curiously well made, bespeaking a certain honesty which I began to believe they perhaps possessed after all. Even Shemuel's mouth, under his thin, red beard, was not the mouth of treachery, though the lips were shrewd enough, God wot!