Why he had remained when the red pack started, I could not understand, and with that confused thought in mind I rose, ran down to the water's edge, the Wyandotte following without a word.
A few yards below the ford a giant walnut tree had fallen, spanning the stream to a gravel-spit; I crossed like a squirrel on this, the burly Wyandotte padding over at my heels, sprang to the bottom sand, and ran up the willow-gully.
They were already dragging out what they had killed; and I came up to them and looked down on the slain man who had so rashly brought destruction upon his own head.
He wore no paint; he was not a warrior but a hunter.

"St.Regis," said the Mohican briefly.
"The poor fool," I said sadly.
The young Oneida in yellow clapped the scalp against a tree-trunk carelessly, as though we could not easily see by his blazing eyes and quivering nostrils that this was his first scalp taken in war.

Then he washed the blade of his knife in the river, wiped it dry and sheathed it, and squatted down to braid the dead hair into the hunters-lock.
We found his still smouldering fire and some split fish baking in green leaves; nets, hooks, spears, and a bark shoulder-basket.

And he had been a King's savage truly enough, foraging, no doubt, for Brant or Butler, who had great difficulty in maintaining themselves in a territory which they had so utterly laid waste--for we found in his tobacco pouch a few shillings and pennies, and some pewter buttons stamped, "Butler's Rangers." Also I discovered a line of writing signed by old John Butler himself, recommending the St.Regis to one Captain Service, an uncle of Sir John Johnson, and a great villain who recently had been shot dead by David Elerson, one of my own riflemen, while attempting to brain Tim Murphy with an axe.
"The poor fool," I repeated, turning away, "Had he not meddled with war when his business lay only in hunting, he had gone free or, if we had caught him, only as a prisoner to headquarters." Mayaro shrugged his contempt of the St.Regis hunter; the Oneida youth sat industriously braiding his first trophy; the others had rekindled the embers of the dead man's fire and were now parching his raw corn and dividing the baked river-trout into six portions.
Mayaro and I ate apart, seated together upon a knoll whence we could look down upon the river and upon the fire, which I now ordered to be covered.
From where I sat I could see the burly Wyandotte, squatting with the others at his feed, and from time to time my glance returned to him.
Somehow, though I knew not why, there was about this Indian an indefinable something not entirely reassuring to me; yet, just what it might be I was not able to say.
Truly enough he had a most villainous countenance, what with his native swarthiness and his broken and dented nose, so horridly embellished with a gash of red paint.

He was broad and squat and fearfully powerful, being but a bulk of gristly muscle; and when he leaped a gully or a brook, he seemed to strike the earth like a ball of rubber and slightly rebound an the light impact.