CHAPTER V
One hour after the sun had risen again, three travelers took their way onward from the house of Mr. Prevost, along a path which led to the northeast.
Two other persons watched them from the door of the house, and two negro men and a negro woman gazed after them from the corner of the building which joined on to a low fence encircling the stable and poultry yard, and running on round the well cultivated kitchen garden.
The negro woman shook her head, and looked sorrowful, and sighed, but said nothing. The two men talked freely of the imprudence of "Master" in suffering his son to go upon such an expedition.
Mr. Prevost and his daughter gazed in silence till the receding figures were hidden by the trees. Then the master of the house led Edith back, saying: "God will protect him, my child. A parent was not given to crush the energies of youth, but to direct them."
In the meanwhile, Lord H---- and his guide, Captain Brooks, according to his English name, or Woodchuck, in the Indian parlance, followed by Walter Prevost, made their way rapidly and easily through the wood. The two former were dressed in the somewhat anomalous attire which I have described in first introducing the worthy Captain to the reader; but Walter was in the ordinary costume of the people of the province of that day, except inasmuch as he had his rifle in his hand and a large leathern wallet slung over his left shoulder. Each of his companions, too, had a rifle hung across the back by a broad leathern band; and each was furnished with a hatchet at his girdle, and a long pipe, with a curiously carved stem, in his hand.
Although they were not pursuing any of the public provincial roads, and were consequently obliged to walk singly, the one following the other, yet Woodchuck, who led the way, had no difficulty in finding it, or in proceeding steadily.
We are told by an old writer of those days, who, unlike many modern writers, witnessed all he described with his own eyes, that the Indian trails, or footpaths, were innumerable over that large tract of country which the Five Nations called their "Long House," crossing and recrossing each other in every different direction, sometimes almost lost where the ground was hard and dry, sometimes indenting by the repeated pressure of many feet, the natural soil to the depth of thirty-six or forty inches.
It was along one of these that the travelers were passing, and although a stump here and there, or a young tree springing up in the midst of a trail, offered an occasional impediment, it was rarely of such a nature as to retard the travelers in their course, or materially add to their fatigue.
With the calm assurance and unhesitating rapidity of a practised woodsman, Brooks led his two companions forward without doubt as to his course. No great light had he, it is true, for though the sun was actually above the horizon, and now and then his slanting rays found their way through some more open space, and gilded the pathway, in general the thick trees and underwood formed a shade which at that early hour the light could hardly penetrate, and the sober morning was to these travelers still dressed almost in the dark hues of night.