Page:War Drums (1928).pdf/259

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at dusk, she saw Lachlan's buckskin-clad figure framed in the opening between the two rocks, the blood mounted to her face because she knew that Falcon's eyes were fixed upon her.

They had, made for Jolie a palace on their mountain top—a hut of boughs and bark built against a rock; and they had floored this palace with mosses and with hemlock branches over which were spread saddle blankets and the clean-scraped skins of deer, skins made sweet and soft by a process known to the two Muskogee braves. On either side of the hut were the rough shelters in which the others slept; and in front of these they cooked their food over a fire so made that almost no smoke rose from it. Fifty yards away was the brink of the precipice; and it was the rule of the camp that no one should show himself by daylight at the edge of the cliff.

There was another rule strictly observed—that no gun should be fired. Yet they never lacked meat. Within a day of their arrival on Sani'gilagi, the two Muskogees had made for themselves and for Lachlan and Almayne locust bows and hickory arrows that were not of the best but that served their purpose; and thanks to Aganuntsi the Conjurer, who had forbidden his tribesmen to hunt on Sani'gilagi, the mountain swarmed with game.

With their arrows and with traps of deer-sinew which Lachlan constructed, they could kill within a few hundred yards of their camp squirrels, rabbite, turkeys, ruffed grouse and an occasional deer. On