The cabin was empty! The girl was gone!
With blank faces the three looked at each other.
The girl had been spirited out of their hands by some means, but how, they could not tell. There was no possible solution to this mystery. No way by which the girl could escape, and yet she was gone. Vanished without a trace of the manner of her escape. Murdock was beaten, but how or by whom he could not even guess.
CHAPTER XV.
THE RENEGADE’S DAUGHTER.
By the northern bank of the Kanawha, some five miles from the settlement of Point Pleasant, stood a lonely cabin. A little clearing surrounded it.
The cabin was situated about half a mile from the broad trail leading from Point Pleasant to the Virginia settlements.
A narrow foot-path led from the broad trail to the lonely cabin, but so little was it used and so dense had grown the weeds and rank grass of the forest about it, that it would almost have required the practiced eye of the savage, or his rival in woodcraft, the white borderer, to have discovered the existence of the path.
The cabin itself, though situated far from the line of civilization, showed evident signs of human occupation.
The wild vines of the forest, transplanted from their native fastness, twined and bloomed about the rough logs that formed the walls of the cabin. And with the wild children of the wood grew red and white roses, the floral gems that art had plucked from nature.