When she awoke, it was broad daylight, and all was quiet within, while without the birds were chanting their morning melodies. At first she could scarcely believe that the scene she had passed through was not the distempered imaginings of some frightful dream. But there, on the blood-stained floor beneath her, lay the carcass of a dead wolf, and the scattered bones of the slain Indians, to attest the dreadful reality. Hastening down from the loft into the room, and averting her eyes from the revolting spectacle, she hurried forward with a shudder to the door, effected an opening sufficient for her egress, and rushed out into the open air, of which she now drew a long, grateful inhalation, more expressive than words of the deep sense of inward pleasure she experienced in being freed from this den of horrors.
Believing that, by the advantages daylight would now afford her, she might be able to retrace her way to the road, she immediately sought out and entered the old path by which she had approached the cabin; and this serving to indicate the general course she must pursue to accomplish her purpose, she followed it back to the end, and then passed on through the forest in the same direction. She had proceeded but a short distance, however, before she was startled by the unexpected appearance of a man advancing through the thick intervening undergrowth directly towards her. As she was about to strike out obliquely into the forest to avoid him, her steps were arrested by his voice calling out to her.
“Don't be alarmed at a friend, young lady,” he said, in a plausible manner, as he came forward and stopped at a respectful distance—“don't be alarmed at my appearance at all; for you are the one, I take it, that we are searching for. It is Miss Haviland, is it not?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the latter, looking doubtfully at the man whom she thought she had somewhere before seen—“yes, that is my name; but as there may be both friends and foes out in search of me, you will excuse me for saying that I do not know to which of these you belong.”
“True, true,” said the other, in a wheedling tone—“true; I don't blame you for being a little cautious. So I must tell you that, living in these parts, and being acquainted with Captain Woodburn, I volunteered, when I heard you were lost last night, to go with the rest in search of you. And being now so lucky as to find you, I will conduct you out to Coffin's—four or five miles from this, I suppose—where your friends are anxiously waiting to see or get word of you.”
Although our heroine was not exactly pleased with the manner and countenance of the man, yet the charm of the name of Woodburn, to whom he had so artfully referred, restored her confidence, and she at once and thankfully accepted of his proffered guidance, little suspecting that she had yielded herself to the most subtle of her foes—the deceitful and treacherous David Redding!
CHAPTER VIII.
“Then marched the brave from rocky steep,
From mountain river, swift and cold.
The borders of the stormy deep,
The vales where gathered waters sleep,
Bent up the strong and bold.”—Bryant