CHAPTER XIX.
How if he will not stand?
-- Shakspeare.
The several movements, related in the close of the preceding chapter, had passed in so short a space of time, that the old man, while he neglected not to note the smallest incident, had no opportunity of expressing his opinion concerning the stranger's motives.

After the Pawnee had disappeared, however, he shook his head and muttered, while he walked slowly to the angle of the thicket that the Indian had just quitted-- "There are both scents and sounds in the air, though my miserable senses are not good enough to hear the one, or to catch the taint of the other." "There is nothing to be seen," cried Middleton, who kept close at his side.

"My eyes and my ears are good, and yet I can assure you that I neither hear nor see any thing." "Your eyes are good! and you are not deaf!" returned the other with a slight air of contempt; "no, lad, no; they may be good to see across a church, or to hear a town-bell, but afore you had passed a year in these prairies you would find yourself taking a turkey for a buffaloe, or conceiting, fifty times, that the roar of a buffaloe bull was the thunder of the Lord! There is a deception of natur' in these naked plains, in which the air throws up the images like water, and then it is hard to tell the prairies from a sea.

But yonder is a sign that a hunter never fails to know!" The trapper pointed to a flight of vultures, that were sailing over the plain at no great distance, and apparently in the direction in which the Pawnee had riveted his eye.

At first Middleton could not distinguish the small dark objects, that were dotting the dusky clouds, but as they came swiftly onward, first their forms, and then their heavy waving wings, became distinctly visible.
"Listen," said the trapper, when he had succeeded in making Middleton see the moving column of birds.