Tahmeroo tore away the dry brambles and brushwood which clothed the entrance of the defile, and made her way through a scarcely defined footpath up the hillside. Through this ravine rushed a mountain torrent, known to the Indians as the Falling Spring, which filled the whole forest with its silvery tumult.
Tahmeroo kept close to the banks of this torrent, helping herself forward by the brushwood and trailing vines that grew thickly on its margin. Nothing less surefooted than an antelope could have forced a passage through the broken rocks and steep precipices which guarded the passage of this stream up to its source in Campbell’s Ledge. A little way from the river it came, with a single leap, through a chasm in the rocks, and lost itself in a storm of white spray among the mossy boulders which choked up the ravine.
The storm had mustered again so blackly that Tahmeroo could scarcely see her course, but lost herself among the rocks and young pines below the fall. Still she climbed upward, leaping from rock to rock, till the sheer precipices that walled in the cataract on either side obstructed her passage, and she stood poised half-way up, uncertain which way to turn or how to move.
A flash of lightning revealed her position, kindled up the young trees to a lurid green; gave the slippery brown precipices to view, and shot in and out of the foaming torrent as it leaped by like flashes of fire, tearing a snowdrift into flakes again and scattering it to the wind.
The lightning revealed her peril and her path. She sprang back from the precipice, from which the next leap would have precipitated her downward with the cataract into the depths of the ravine, and tore her way into the bosom of the hills, keeping Campbell’s Ledge on the right.
A less vigorous form would have fainted beneath the toil of that mountain-pass; but the young Indian scarcely thought of fatigue; for a dull, moaning sound came up from the depths of the forest, like the hollow beat of a far-off ocean; the pent-up thunder muttered and rumbled among the black clouds, floating like funeral banners above her, every other instant pierced and torn with arrowy lightning. These signs of the storm gathering so fearfully about the mountains terrified and bewildered the Indian girl. Though a wild rover of the forest, she had been gently nurtured, and for the first time in her life was alone among the hills after nightfall.
At length she stood on a high ledge of rocks, panting and in despair; she had lost the path that led to the Indian encampment, and found herself on the sweep of a mighty precipice, far above the valley. After one wild, hopeless look upon the sky, she sunk to the ground and, burying her face in her hands, muttered, in a trembling and husky voice:
“Tahmeroo has been wicked. She has acted a lie. The Great Spirit is very angry. Why should she strive to shut out his voice? Tahmeroo can die.”
While she spoke there was a hush in the elements and the sound of many hoarse, guttural voices arose from the foot of the ledge. The terrified Indian lifted her head, and a wild, doubtful joy gleamed over her face as the lightning revealed it, with the damp, unbraided hair floating back from the pallid temples, the lips parted, and the eyes charged with terror, doubt and eager joy. She listened intently for a moment, then sunk cautiously to the ground as one who fears to break a pleasant delusion, and crept to the edge of the rock.
