“I shall never marry, father,” he declared.
CHAPTER III
THE sun was about to climb above the rim of the world. Already the white dawn was silvering the grey mists that lay alike on plain and on river and half hid the mossy green boles of the trees that stood on the edge of the forest. From beneath it sounded the low murmur of the waters of the Auglaize, toiling sluggishly through the timbers that choked its bed and gave it its Indian name of Cowthenake, Fallen Timber river. High about it whimpered the humming rush of wild ducks. From the black wall of the forest that led northward to the Black Swamp came the waking call of birds.
Steadily the light grew. The first yellow shafts shimmered along the surface of the mist, stirring it to sudden life. Out of the draperies of fog, points seemed to rise, black against the curtain of the dawn. To them the mists clung with moist tenacious fingers, resisting for a moment the call of the sun, then shimmering away, leaving only a trace of tears to sparkle in the sunlight.
Steadily the sun mounted and steadily the mists shrank. The spectral points, first evidence that land and not water lay beneath the fog, broadened downward, here into tufts of hemlock, there into smoother, more regular shapes that spoke of human workmanship. Louder and louder grew the rippling of the river. Then, abruptly, the carpet of mist rose in the air, shredding into a thousand wisps of white; for a moment it obscured the view, then it was gone, floating away toward the great forest, as if seeking sanctuary in its chilly depths. The black river was still half-veiled, but the land lay bare, sparkling with jewelled dew-drops.
Close beside the river, on an elevation that rose, island like, above the surrounding plain, stood the Indian village, row after row of cabins, strongly built of heavy logs, roofed with poles, and chinked with moss and clay. In and out among them moved half-wolfish dogs, that had crept from their lairs to welcome the rising of the sun.
No human being was visible, but an indistinct murmur, coming from nowhere and everywhere, mingled with the rush of the river and the whisper of the wind in the green rushes and the tall grass. The huts seemed to stir visibly; first from one and then from a score, men, women, and children bobbed out, some merrily, some grumpily, to stretch themselves in the sunshine and to breathe in the soft morning air before it began to quiver in the baking heat that would surely and swiftly come. For early June was no less hot in northern Ohio in 1812, when the whole country was one vast alternation of swamp and forest, than it is a hundred years later when the land has been drained and the forest cut away.
From the door of a cabin near the centre of the town emerged a girl sixteen or seventeen years of age, who stood still in the sunbeams, eyes fixed on the trail that led away through the breaks in the forest to the south. Her features, browned as they were by the sun and concealed as they were by paint, yet plainly lacked the high cheek-bones, black eyes, and broad nostrils of the Indians. Some alien blood showed itself in the softness of her cheek, in the kindling color in her long dark hair, in the brown of her eyes. Her graceful body had the straight slenderness that in the quick-maturing Indian maids of her size and height had given place to the rounded curves of budding womanhood. Her head, alertly poised above her strong throat, showed none of the marks of ancestral toil that had already begun to bow her companions. In dress alone was she like them, though even in this the unusual richness of her doeskin garb, belted at the hips with silver, marked her as one of prominence.
For a little longer the girl watched the southward trail; then her eyes roved westward, across the rippling waters of the Auglaize, now veiled only by scattered wisps of mist, and across its border of sedgy grass, pale shimmering green in the mounting sun, and rested on a cabin that stood on the further bank, between an orchard and a small field of enormous corn. From this cabin two men were just emerging.
They were too far away indeed for the average civilized man or woman to distinguish more than that they were men and were dressed as whites. The girl, however, was possessed of sight naturally strong and had been trained all her life amid surroundings where quickness of vision might easily mean the difference between life and death. She had seen the men before and she recognized them instantly.