“I can not fail,” said Murdock, decidedly. “You will need food for the girl. Here in the hollow of this tree,” and Murdock led the way to a small white oak, some dozen paces from where they stood, “is some dried deer-meat. I think I shall rescue the girl to-morrow,” and Murdock laughed slightly, at the idea, as he spoke. “There is a small hole under the logs in the back of the cabin, by which I can creep inside and appear to the girl in my new character of a saving angel, periling all to rescue her from the hands of the red-skins.”
“Yes, but may she not discover this hole and escape through it?” asked Benton.
“No, a heavy log on the outside, that can not be stirred from the inside of the cabin, prevents that.”
“To-morrow, then, you’ll return?”
“Yes, to-morrow.”
Then Murdock left the twain to watch the cabin and the prisoner, and plunging into the forest took his way back to Point Pleasant. And in his heart, as he walked along, he gloated over the success of the plan that had struck a hated rival from his path and given entirely into his power the girl whose fortune he craved.
We will now return to the little ravine wherein, stark and ghastly, lay the form of the young stranger, Harvey Winthrop; the man who had left home and friends to carve out a future by the banks of the Ohio, and who had fallen by the ball of the assassin, without even a chance to struggle for his life.
The little ravine looked bright and beautiful; the rays of the fast-dying sun glinted down, gayly, through the tree-tops, and played in beams of lambent light upon the pale face, whose open eyes glared, as if in mockery, on all around.
The rocky glade was as fair to look upon with the dreadful evidence of man’s crime lying in its center, as when, but a short hour before, its leafy branches had formed a living frame to a picture of true love.
A huge black crow flying high and lazily in the air caught sight of the white face that so steadily stared with its stony and fixed eyes at the sky.