Where the French tents were spread, men were softly singing songs of their ancient land, and beyond them sentinels in neat uniforms were walking back and forth among trees that had never beheld uniforms before.
The sounds sank gradually, but Robert did not yet sleep.

He found a peculiar sort of interest in detaching these murmurs from one another, the stamp of impatient horses, the moving of arms, the last dying, notes of a song, the whisper of the creek's waters, and then, plainly separate from the others, he heard a faint, unmistakable swish, a noise that he knew, that of an arrow flying through the air.

Langlade knew it too, and sprang up with an angry cry.
"Now, has some warrior got hold of whiskey to indulge in this madness ?" he exclaimed.
The faint swish came a second time, and Robert, who had risen to his feet, saw two arrows standing upright in the earth not twenty feet away.

Langlade saw them also and swore.
"They must have come in a wide curve overhead," he said, "or they would not be standing almost straight up in the earth, and that does not seem like the madness of liquor." He looked suspiciously at the forest, in which Indian sentinels had been posted, but which, nevertheless, was so dark that a cunning form might pass there unseen.
"There is more in this than meets the eye," muttered the partisan, and drawing the arrows from the earth he examined them by the light of the fire.

Robert stood by, silent, but his eyes fell on fresh marks with a knife, near the barb on each weapon, and the great pulse in his throat leaped.