Then with a feeble cry she started up and gazed wildly around her. The phantom forms were now more substantial—the voices sounded more clearly upon her ear, and she knew that the visionary dream had been a reality.
Then she uttered a feeble cry and sunk back, with a convulsive shudder. Before her she beheld a hideous face, dusky, it seemed, with nodding plumes surmounting it, that she knew could only belong to an Indian!
She felt that she was lost—that her pursuers had overtaken her, and that now she was helpless in the power of the merciless fiends!
CHAPTER IV.
THE FORLORN HOPE.
“Do you think that Dusky Dick is with them, Maxwell?”
“I would sw’ar it, boss, ef that wasn’t ag’in my natur’,” promptly replied the old borderer, as he seated himself beside his loop-hole, and coolly began cutting a plug of tobacco into bits, to fill the pipe that he held in his mouth, as he spoke. “But I tell you he’s thar. I didn’t see him when those galoots was a’ter old Ebenezer, but they was in a crowd, an’ I didn’t hev time to look good. But I kin smell him, now.”
“Smell him!” echoed Calhoun, somewhat astonished at the positive tone of the old guide.
“Yas, sir,” quoth Tom, cramming the tobacco into the pipe-bowl. “You know thar is sech a thing as smell, don’t ye? Wal, then, one thing smells like somethin’ else, an’ then ag’in another don’t. See?” selecting a match from a small pocket-safe.
“You won’t risk a light here, now, Tom?”
“No danger, boss, fer as you’ll see, when I make a light, thar hain’t a smich o’ light to be see’d; that is, onless you look whar it is, an’ then you won’t see it, nuther,” laying his old slouched hat upon the ground, over the handle of his knife.