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"Musha! but that is a quare sound," whispered Flinders to Westly. "Hush!" returned Westly. At a signal from their chief the whole band of Indians sank, as it seemed, into the ground, melted off the face of the earth, and only the white men and the chief remained. "I must go forward alone," whispered Unaco, turning to Paul. "White man knows not how to go on his belly like the serpent."
Paul Bevan and his friends occupied a fire by themselves, the only native who stood beside them being Unaco. It is probable that the savage chief constituted himself their guard in order to make quite sure of them, for the escape of Stalker weighed heavily on his mind.
Without deigning to listen to a reply, Unaco turned and gave orders to his men, who at once brought up the horse and pony, set Betty and Tolly thereon, lifted Tom Brixton on their shoulders as before, and resumed their march deeper into the fastnesses of the Sawback Hills.
The manner in which Unaco was received by the people of his tribe, young and old, showed clearly that he was well beloved by them; and the hospitality with which the visitors were welcomed was intensified when it was made known that Paul Bevan was the man who had shown kindness to their chief's son Oswego in his last hours.
He led the gold-diggers to the robbers' retreat, and there, learning from a brother savage that the robber-chief and his men had gone off to hunt up Paul Bevan in the region that belonged to Unaco, he led his party by a short cut over the mountains, and chanced to come on the scene of action at the critical moment, when Unaco and his party were about to attack the robbers.
"But the country has been kept for a long time in constant alarm and turmoil by these men," said Fred Westly, "and, although I like fighting as little as any man, I cannot help thinking that we owe it as a duty to society to capture as many of them as we can, especially now that we seem to have caught them in a sort of trap." "What says Mahoghany Drake on the subject!" asked Unaco.
He quietly took up a piece of firewood and began, as it were, to amuse himself therewith. "You has many faces, many colours," continued Unaco, "and too many eyes." At the last word he plucked the blue glasses off the botanist's nose and flung them into the fire. "My enemy!" gasped Paul Bevan, turning first very pale and then very red, as he glared like a chained tiger at his foe.
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