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If so, were the men still in the area? Were they hiding until they felt it was safe to come out of cover?
If those men were nearby, they could have a gun aimed at him this very moment.
He stiffened as he gathered the cards together in one pile, then stuffed them inside the travel bag that hung at the side of his horse.
Before mounting his steed, he again looked cautiously in all directions, but he saw nothing. Nor did he hear anyone or anything except the soft breeze that whispered through the trees all around him.
He swung himself into his saddle, grabbed the reins, then rode onward, but this time not with the same easiness he had felt before he found the cards.
He could be the hunted one now.
He rode stiffly, his eyes ever watching around him for any sudden movement. And then he spotted something lying on the ground, and a flash of something red caught in an elm tree’s bark. Again, he drew his steed to a halt.
“A shoe,” he mumbled to himself as he gazed intently at the lone shoe that lay on the ground a few feet from his horse.
He then focused on what was stuck to the bark of the tree. His eyebrows lifted when he realized it was strands of hair that made a brilliant red streak against the grayish brown color of the trunk of the old elm tree.
He gazed at the shoe again, and then at the hair. He recalled the man named Tiny having that color hair, and the shoe was not of a large size.
Ho, yes, it did seem to all fit together. Had Tiny come to a bad end?
But how would he have died?
Was it an animal, perhaps a large bear, that had killed the tiny man? Or was it perhaps those two trappers who had murdered him?
If he were dead, where was his body?
No matter how it had happened, or where the body might be, if what he was thinking were true, Wolf Hawk knew that he, himself, could also be in danger.
He hurriedly dismounted, whisked the shoe up from the ground, adding it to the travel bag with the cards, then carefully plucked the hair from the tree and put it with Tiny’s other belongings. Then he mounted and rode quickly through the forest until he finally reached the fort.
Feeling vulnerable, he didn’t go on inside the walls of the fort until he’d studied the footprints going in and out of it.
He saw only one set of fresh prints. They went into the fort, and then the same prints came out again.
He dismounted, took the shoe that he had found from the travel
bag, and set it directly onto the footprint; the shoe belonged to whoever had made those footprints.
“Tiny,” he said, his jaw tight.
Ho, by the smallness of the print and the shoe, he judged that Tiny had returned to the fort after Wolf Hawk had taken Mia from it. Then he had left again.
Sighing, feeling safe enough now to enter the fort and get the bird’s cage, Wolf Hawk placed the shoe back inside his travel bag and walked his horse through the wide gate to the cabin where Mia had stayed with her father and Tiny.
Securing his horse’s reins, he stepped gingerly inside the cabin, finding it as deserted as he’d thought it would be.
He smiled when he saw the cage right where Mia had said it would be. Not wanting to take any more time than he needed to, he looked around and found what he thought was the seed that the bird ate.
He placed it inside the cage, then grabbed the cage and took it outside to his horse.
After tying it to the side of the saddle, he mounted and rode directly back to his village without stopping.
When he stepped inside his tepee, holding the cage before him, Mia looked quickly up.
Georgina was trustingly asleep on her lap. Smiling at Wolf Hawk, Mia reached a hand out for the cage as she whispered, “Thank you” to him.
Wolf Hawk returned the smile, then set the cage close beside her.
