“And you persuaded the Committee to keep him? Oh, Marion, I know you did. It is just like you,” said Milly.
The captain laughed. “Where do you think we would find another Oxford graduate to teach in this wilderness? Would you like to know the quaint way in which he vindicated himself? He quoted from Sophocles: ‘He who surpasses his fellow citizens in wisdom is no longer a member of the city. Its laws are not for him, since he is a law unto himself.’”
Milly laughed. “And, meanwhile, the mystery of who set the fire remains a mystery?”
“It remains a mystery,—look yonder, Milly!” he exclaimed. “If that isn’t Uncle Amasa! and he’s alone!”
They ran back to the scene of the merrymaking. The dancers had stopped, and were clustering three deep around the old pioneer. As Milly and Marion joined the crowd the fiddles were silenced by a lifted hand.
“Jimmy’s gone!” whispered the listeners, looking at one another with awed faces. “Gone—no one knows where. Uncle Amasa’s spent all this time searching among the settlements. He found where Jimmy had passed through on horseback, with another man, but he never caught up with them, and he’s given up hope. Jimmy left a word on the wall of the cabin saying that he’d gone to find his father!”
As this message passed among the settlers, their faces grew sober in the firelight. There was not a soul among them but believed that Jimmy’s father had been killed by the Indians, and the message sounded like an ill omen. Gravely, almost solemnly, the party broke up.
“Don’t worry, Uncle Amasa,” said Marion, moving away with the old man. “Jimmy can take care of himself. He’s made for the wilderness. He’ll come back, or we may pick him up in some town along the way. He is in no danger that you haven’t been in and come out of—remember that.”
“I know,” said Uncle Amasa. “I know; but I’d ruther he had taken his chances along with ye, and seen some of the doin’s down to New Orleans. It would have been a sight safer. There’s been treachery in this, Marion; there’s been treachery, or the boy wouldn’t have written that message. It’s uncanny. The lad is being led to his death.”
“No such thing,” said Marion, stoutly. But his heart misgave him, and he determined to watch closely, as he went down the river, for the runaway.