"Him wasn't all in," she explained. "Him top-feathers—him head—an' him ugly mouf!" She looked expectantly and half doubtfully at her mother, remembering her seeming anger.
"Oh, how droll! One might perish with laughter!" screamed Odalie, with a piercing affectation of merriment, and once more Fifine banged her heels hilariously against the door-step, as she sat on the threshold, and cried in derision, "Fonny! Fonny!"
"Where, Fifine? At the stockade? Some hole?"
Fifine became angry at this suggestion, for had not "Dill" built the stockade, and would he build a stockade so Indians might get through and cut off her curls—she bounced them about her head—that Dill said were "'andsomer than any queen's."
But Odalie knew she had seen "Fonny" at the stockade, and Fifine contradicted, and after a spirited passage of "Did!" "Didn't!" "Did!" "Didn't!" Fifine arose to go and prove her proposition.
There at the little spring, so sylvan sweet, so full, yet with the merest trickle of a branch that hardly wet the mint, so shyly hidden amongst its rocks, was a fissure. Odalie had often noted it; dark it was, for the shadows fell on it, and it might be deep; limited—it would but hold her piggin, should she thrust it there, or admit a man's head, yet not his shoulders—and this was what it had done yesterday, for protruding thence Fifine maintained she had seen Willinawaugh's face with "him top-feathers, him head, an' him ugly mouf!"
Odalie laid her ear to the ground to listen; smooth, quiet, full, she heard the flow of water, doubtless the branch from the little spring always brimming, yet seeming to send so tiny a rill over the slopes of the mint. There was evidently a cave beneath, and they had never dreamed of it! She began to search about for fissures, finding here and there in the deep herbage and the cleft rocks one that might admit the passage of a man's body. She remembered the first sudden strange appearance of the Cherokee women at her fireside, and afterward, and that Sandy and Hamish and Dill often declared that watch the gate as they might they never saw the squaws enter the stockade nor issue therefrom. Doubtless they had come through the cave, that had a hidden exit.
Her heart throbbed, her eyes filled; "I ought to be so thankful to discover it in time—to think how safe we felt here when the gates were locked! But, oh, my home! my sweet, sweet home!"
The way the men's faces fell when they were summoned, and stood and looked at the slope, might make one pity them. It represented the hard labor of nearly two years—and it was all to begin anew.
When Sandy, with the vigorous Scotch thrift, began to show how easily the stockade might be moved to exclude the spring, Gilfillan shook his head warningly. A station should never be without water. Sooner or later its days were numbered. As to the stockade, it was futile. Twenty—nay, fifty men might be surprised and massacred here. For the ordinary purposes of life the place was useless.