The second day we had no beaten trail to aid us, and a cold rain pelted from the east. The country was seamed with shallow ravines and gulleys, and at intervals we came to dense belts of undergrowth, spurred with thorns and bound together by vines and creepers. Sometimes we circled these patches. Sometimes we hacked a path with our war-hatchets. We were exhausted when night fell, and welcomed the shelter offered us by a party of wandering Mohicans; but in the morning we took up the trail, despite the recurring rain. Slippery rocks and ankle-deep mud delayed us. The coarse grass of the occasional swales was treacherous underfoot. But we kept on. And I was amazed to discover that the weather had no effect upon my spirits. I enjoyed the independence of it, the sopping foliage, the persistent drip-drip of the rain, the fatigue that strained every muscle. More than all I enjoyed our third camp beneath a bark lean-to hastily contrived. The roof leaked; our fire lasted barely long enough to cook the wild turkey our Mohican hosts had given us; and I was soaked to the skin. Yet I slept through the night to awaken alert and refreshed in the bright dawning of a new day.
In the forenoon Tawannears made his landfall on a tiny creek that fed the headwaters of the Alleghany. We reached the main stream in mid-afternoon, and with one curt glance around, he walked straight to a grass-covered indentation in the bank.
"Here is the canoe, brothers," he said casually.
"Nein," Corlaer, without moving from where he stood, his little eyes fixed on the hiding-place.
Tawannears drew back from the edge of the inlet, a startled look on his usually blank face.
"Here I left it, well-concealed," he insisted.
"Smoke, down-rifer," remarked the Dutchman.
Tawannears and I shifted our gaze. The Seneca's eyes reflected a momentary expression of chagrin that he should not have been the first to mark this sign.
"We will go to it," he announced briefly. "This land is tributary to the Long House. We shall see who is bold enough to take the canoe of a chief of the Long House from the threshold of the Western Door."
Of course, he was speaking figuratively, for we were a long three days' tramping from Deonundagaa; but it was a striking manifestation of the proud arrogance of the Iroquois that Tawannears, an Indian to his backbone, insisted upon walking directly into that encampment, without going to the preliminaries of scouting the strange community.