"Yes, yes," said Mary, thoughtfully, to the soldiers in their own language; "the land is beautiful; but it is not home. Then what is it to us?"
"Yet," said Ewen, "here is a badge for your bonnet, MacGillivray, and, though of American growth, you cannot despise it."
"Thanks, Ewen," said the officer, with a kindling eye, as he placed the gift in his bonnet.
It was a sprig of the red whortleberry, the badge of those of his name in Scotland, where they are styled the Clann Gillibhreac, "or the Sons of the Freckled Man."
The elm, the ash, the cypress, the chesnut, the pine, and the beech, all mingled their varied foliage above the narrow track or Indian trail the soldiers were pursuing, while a thousand flowers and shrubs, to them unknown, flourished in all the rich luxuriance of this new world into which they were penetrating, and the musk-rat, the racoon, and the fox scampered before them from tree to tree as they proceeded.
"Hark!" exclaimed Alaster MacGregor, a wary old forester, "something on two feet stirs in the bush!"
"Dioul! and see, Alaster, the objects are close enough," added the officer.
At a part of the wood where it became more open by the trees having been cut away, and where the ground shelved abruptly down to the depth of eighty or a hundred feet, they suddenly came in view of two Indians gliding stealthily from stem to stem, as if seeking to elude observation. Their wild and horrid aspect caused the timid wife of MacGillivray to utter a faint cry of terror, while the whole detachment halted simultaneously to observe them, and began instinctively to handle their muskets.
"They are Iroquois," whispered MacGillivray to his sergeant; "I was told that Montcalm had filled all the woods around Lake George with the cursed tribes of that race."
"One of them is carrying something," replied the sergeant, as he shred away by his Lochaber axe a magnificent azalea, the flowers and foliage of which obscured his view.