"So, ho! Buck! quiet, my boy!" said Dred. "Show us the way in!"
The dog, as if understanding the words, immediately turned into the thicket, and Dred and his companion followed him, on their hands and knees. The path wound up and down the brushwood, through many sharp turnings, till at last it ceased altogether, at the roots of a tree; and, while the dog disappeared among the brushwood, Dred climbed the tree, and directed his companion to follow him, and, proceeding out on to one of the longest limbs, he sprang nimbly on to the ground in the cleared space which we have before described.
His wife was standing waiting for him, and threw herself upon him with a cry of joy.
"Oh, you've come back! I thought, sure enough, dey'd got you dis time!"
"Not yet! I must continue till the opening of the seals—till the vision cometh! Have ye buried him?"
"No; there's a grave dug down yonder, and he's been carried there."
"Come, then!" said Dred.
At a distant part of the clearing was a blasted cedar-tree, all whose natural foliage had perished. But it was veiled from head to foot in long wreaths of the tillandsia, the parasitic moss of these regions, and, in the dim light of the approaching dawn, might have formed no unapt resemblance to a gigantic spectre dressed in mourning weeds.
Beneath this tree Dred had interred, from time to time, the bodies of fugitives which he had found dead in the swamps, attaching to this disposition of them some peculiar superstitious idea.
The widow of the dead, the wife of Dred, and the new-comer, were now gathered around the shallow grave; for the soil was such as scarcely gave room to make a place deep enough for a grave without its becoming filled with water.