"I am not afraid of them," announced little Christopher. "Not more than I am afraid of Liesel."
Once more Conrad leafed his little book. It was no wonder that it scarcely held together.
"They are not bad people. They fish and hunt and plant crops. They go farther and farther back into the woods as the white people come. I am no more afraid of them than I am of Christopher."
"But how are we to get there, brother?" asked Magdalena, who spoke least among a family who spoke little.
Conrad shut his book and tied it in its place under his coat.
"That I do not know," said he impatiently. "But we will all see yet the river and the great sea and the deep forests and the red people."
"Old Redebach says—" No sooner had John Frederick began to speak than his lips were covered by the hand of his brother.
"Old Redebach cannot tell the truth. It is not in him. And he is afraid of everything. Ten times he has told me that Liesel would be carried off, that he has had a dream and has seen men watching her. Forty times he has told me that Liesel would die of the cattle plague. There stands Liesel fat and hearty. It is the schoolmaster who is to be believed in this matter. He would start to-morrow if he could. I tell you"—Conrad pointed toward the declining sun—"we are going, we are going, we are going."
Now, on the twenty-third of June, as Conrad, alone, guided the obstinate way of Liesel through the dusk, the words of old Redebach came back to him. Liesel had all the trying defects of a spoiled and important character; believing herself to be the Queen of Gross Anspach, she expected her subjects to follow where she led. She proceeded deliberately into all sorts of black and shadowy places from which Conrad did not dare to chase her roughly for fear of affecting the precious store of milk, upon which John Frederick and other Gross Anspach babies depended.