The night was intensely cold and still and the stars shone brightly through the bare boughs overhead.
"Are you sure you are going all right?" Nelly asked Harold. "It is so dark here that it seems impossible to know which way we are going."
"You can trust the Indians," Harold said. "Even if there was not a star to be seen they could find their way by some mysterious instinct. How you are grown, Nelly! Your voice does not seem much changed, and I am longing to see your face."
"I expect you are more changed than I am, Harold," the girl answered. "You have been going through so much since we last met, and you seem to have grown so tall and big. Your voice has changed very much, too; it is the voice of a man. How in the world did you find us here?"
Pearson had gone on ahead to speak to the Seneca, but he now joined them again.
"You mustn't talk," he said. "I hope there's no redskins within five miles of us now, but there's never any saying where they may be."
There was, Harold thought, a certain sharpness in the hunter's voice, which told of a greater anxiety than would be caused by the very slight risk of the quietly spoken words being heard by passing redskins, and he wondered what it could be.
They were now, he calculated, within a mile of the hiding place where they had left the boat, and they had every reason for believing that none of the Indians would be likely to have followed the shore so far. That they would be pursued and that, in so heavily laden a canoe, they would have great difficulty in escaping, he was well aware, but he relied on the craft of the hunters and Senecas for throwing their pursuers off the trail.
All at once the trees seemed to open in front, and in a few minutes the party reached the river. A cry of astonishment and of something akin to terror broke from Harold. As far as the eye could reach the lake was frozen. Their escape was cut off.
"That's jest what I've been expecting," Pearson said. "The ice had begun to form at the edge when we landed, and three days and nights of such frost as we've had since was enough to freeze Ontario. What on arth's to be done?"