The unusual sounds were unequivocally though still faintly audible.

The youth and his female companion had made several hurried, and vacillating conjectures concerning their nature, when a current of the night air brought the rush of trampling footsteps, too sensibly, to their ears, to render mistake any 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.