Poor, innocent girl, she knew not that as she was thanking Heaven for her rescue, the snare was still close around her; that the man whom she looked upon as a friend and deliverer was a more deadly foe than any painted warrior that roamed the forests of the Ohio valley.
No Indian is so terrible as the renegade to his country and his kin, the white-faced savage.
Once within the thicket, Benton gave vent to a grim laugh of triumph.
“The bird is in the net, and yet she imagines she is free! Oh, this will be a glorious vengeance. Once before, years ago, I made the heart of my enemy writhe with anguish, and now again I tear it. And this cunning plotter, Murdock, would use me as his tool. In yonder settlement for the moment I was in his power. Had he but spoken my name aloud, the settlers would have torn me to pieces with as little mercy as the wolves show to the wounded deer. But here, in the free woods, the tide of affairs is changed. Here I own no man as master.”
On through the forest, retracing his steps toward the cabin where Virginia had been confined, he went.
“Watega’s death I can not understand,” he said, musingly, communing with himself as he walked onward. “Can it be possible that there is a spirit-form that haunts the woods and marks the Indians for his prey? It is almost beyond belief, and yet there is no disputing the terrible evidence of his hand. Watega was a great brave; few warriors in the Shawnee tribe as good as he, and yet he falls by the hand of this Wolf Demon, apparently without even a struggle for his life, if the words of Kenton can be believed, and he always speaks the truth. Can it be that it is some borderer in disguise that is doing this terrible work? No, that is improbable. Is it then a fiend from below that walks the earth in this dreadful shape? It is beyond my comprehension. I’d like to have him within rifle range once more, though; I’d soon prove whether the Wolf Demon be a demon indeed, or a mortal in a wolf’s skin.”
Proceeding rapidly onward with his swinging stride, Benton soon reached the cabin again. Bob was, as he had left him, fast asleep in the bushes.
The events that followed the arrival of Clement Murdock—how he found the cabin deserted and his prisoner gone—we have already related.
“Well, dog-gone my cats, if ’tain’t funny,” said Bob, scratching his head in wonder.
“I can not account for it!” cried Murdock, angrily.