Part 41 (1/2)

”Seeking you still, madam, I doubt not, though I have not seen them since the day after you were taken. They went up the Pamunkey and so missed you. Thanks to this Susquehannock, I am more fortunate.”

She lay and looked at him calmly, no surprise, but only a great peace in her face. ”The mulatto,” she said, ”I feared him more than all the rest.

When I saw him enter the hut I prayed for death. Did you kill him?”

”I trust so,” said Landless, ”but I am not certain, I was in too great haste to make sure.”

”I do not care,” she said. ”You will not let him hurt me--if he lives--nor let the Indians take me again?”

”No, madam,” Landless said.

She smiled like a child and closed her eyes. In the moonlight which blanched her streaming robe and her loosened hair that, falling to her knees, wrapped her in a mantle of spun gold, she looked a wraith, a creature woven of the mist of the stream below, a Lorelei sleeping upon her rock. Landless, still upon his knee beside her, watched her with a beating heart, while the Susquehannock, leaning upon his gun, bent his darkly impa.s.sive looks upon them both. At length the latter said, ”We must be far from here before the dogs behind us awake, and the Gold Hair cannot travel swiftly. Let us be going.”

”Madam,” said Landless.

She opened her eyes and he helped her to her feet. ”We must hasten on,”

he said gently. ”They will follow us and we must put as many leagues as possible between us before they find our trail.”

”I did not think of that!” she said, with dilating eyes. ”I thought it was all past--the terror--the horror! Let us go, let us hasten! I am quite strong; I have learned how to walk through the woods. Come!”

The Indian glided before them and led the way over the friendly rocks.

They left them and found themselves upon a carpet of pine needles, and then in a dell where the fern grew rankly and the rich black earth gave like a sponge beneath their feet. Here the Indian made Landless carry Patricia, and himself came last, walking backwards in the footprints of the other, and pausing after each step to do all that Indian cunning could suggest to cover their trail. They came to more rocky ledges and walked along them for a long distance, then found and went up a wide and shallow stream. Slowly the pale light of dawn diffused itself through the forest. In the branches overhead myriads of birds began to flutter and chirp, the squirrels commenced their ceaseless chattering, and through the white mist, at bends of the stream, they saw deer coming from the fern of the forest to drink. A great hill rose before them, bare of trees, covered only with a coa.r.s.e growth of gra.s.s and short blue thistles in which already buzzed a world of bees; they climbed it and from the summit watched a ball of fire rise into the cloudless blue. The morning wind, blowing over that illimitable forest, fanned their brows, and a tide of woodland sound and incense swept up to them from the world below. Around them were the Blue Mountains--gigantic ma.s.ses, cloudy peaks, vast ramparts rising from a sea of mist--mysterious fastnesses, scarcely believed in and never seen by the settlers of the level land--a magic country in which they placed much gold and the wandering colonists of Roanoke, the South Sea, and long-gowned Eastern peoples.

”Oh, the mountains!” said Patricia. ”The dreadful, frowning mountains!

When will we be quit of them? When will we reach the level land and the blue water?”

”Before many days, I trust,” said Landless. ”See, our faces are set to the east--towards home.”

She stood in silence for a moment, her face lifted, the color slowly coming back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes, then said suddenly:--

”Did my father send you after me?”

”No, madam.”

”Then how are you here?”

He looked at her with a smile. ”I broke gaol--and came.”

A shadow crossed her face, but it was gone in a moment. ”I am very grateful,” she said. ”You have saved me from worse than death.”

”It is I that am thankful,” he answered.

They descended the hill in silence and found the Susquehannock, who had preceded them, squatted before a fire which he had kindled upon a flat rock beside one of the innumerable streamlets that wound here and there over the land.

”The dogs yonder will need Iroquois eyes to spy out this trail,” he said with grim satisfaction, as they came up to him. ”Let my brother and the Gold Hair rest by the fire, and Monakatocka will go into the forest and get them something to eat.”

He was gone, his gigantic figure looking larger than life as he moved through the mist which still filled the hollow between the hills, and Landless and Patricia sat themselves down beside the fire. Landless piled upon it the dead wood with which the ground was strewn, and the flames leaped and crackled, sending up thin blue smoke against the hillside and reddening the bosom of the placid stream. When he had finished his task and taken his seat, there fell a silence and constraint upon the man and woman, brought through so many strange and wayward paths, through lives so widely differing, to this companions.h.i.+p in the heart of a waste and savage world. They sat opposite each other in the ruddy light of the fire, and each, looking into the dark or glowing hollows, saw there the same thing--the tobacco house and what had there pa.s.sed.