"I—I wish I were home in my own bed," Dolly protested, with a stifled sob.
Miles hushed her, in some alarm lest the savages might not approve of people who cried; but his Indian bedfellows never heeded Dolly's tears, for they were lulling themselves to sleep by singing in a high, monotonous strain that drowned every other noise. After the little girl was quieted, they still droned on, and, when they were at last silent, there sounded the notes of swarms of mosquitoes that tortured Miles, for all he was so tired, into semi-wakefulness.
A snatch of feverish slumber once and again, and then, of a sudden, he was aware of the round moon peering in at him through the smoke-hole. That same light would now be whitening the quiet fields of Plymouth, and slipping through the little windows across the clean floor of Master Hopkins's living room; Miles remembered just how the patch of light rested on the wall of his own chamber.
He sat up on his comfortless bed and hid his face against his knee. "I wish I hadn't run away; I wish I were home—were home," he groaned aloud. But, save for the heavy snoring of the Chief of Manomet and his warriors, he got no answer.
CHAPTER XVII
HOW THEY KEPT THE SABBATH
A LITTLE daylight works a mighty change in the look of things. When in the morning Miles rose at length from the stupor of sleep into which he had fallen, the sky was clouded filmily to westward, but in the east, above the pines, hung a yellow sun. The river that curved through the meadow was half bright with the stroke of the sun, and, where the trees of the opposite bank grew low, half a lucid green; the strip of sandy beach shone white, and the coarse herbage of the level space all was gleaming.
Miles looked forth from the doorway of Chief Canacum's wigwam, and, sniffing the breeze with the tang of brine in it, decided that, after all, Manomet might prove a pleasant place in which to spend a day. He said as much to Dolly, but she held her poppet closer and shook her head. "There were fleas in that bed," she answered sorrowfully. "Let's go home now, Miles."
An easy thing to say, but to do it would have puzzled an older head than Miles's, for not only did leagues of forest stretch between him and the English settlement, but, even had he known the direct road to Plymouth, there was no chance to follow it, since, wherever he turned, the watchful eyes of the savages were upon him.