Page:Gray Eagle (1927).pdf/149

 been won by your plan to make him emperor of all the Cherokee tribes. Corane will obey Moytoy's commands."

Sir Alexander pursed his lips and muttered in his curled and scented brown beard, yet quickly forgot his fears. Soon the sights and sounds of the springtime wilderness drove weightier matters from his mind. To his English eyes this trail through the teeming virgin forest was an avenue of innumerable wonders; and always, as he rode, he carried in his right hand the long rifle which he had procured in Charles Town and with which, thanks to Gilyan's teaching, he was already fairly proficient.

Again and again he tried his marksmanship. Now his target was a platoon of tall gray cranes, standing like soldiers on parade in a flower-sprinkled savannah beside the trail. Now he brought down, amid the plaudits of his comrades, a great wild turkey cock which Gilyan had pointed out to him as it perched in fancied security on a high limb of a giant pine. A half-dozen times he wasted powder and shot on flocks of green and yellow parrakeets which at frequent intervals flew screeching overhead; and once he rode a quarter of a mile along a sun-dappled forest vista towards a herd of twenty whitetails resting under the trees and, starting a small black wolf from its bed in a bunch of broom grass, killed