Hand in hand Vinnie and her father hurried on through the storm and darkness. The way was intricate and difficult to travel; but a good half-hour’s walk brought them to the edge of the clearing, and the weary girl greeted the sight of the cabin, which looked like a large square patch of blackness, through the gloom, with feelings of grateful satisfaction.
It was the work of but a few moments for Darke, while Vinnie lighted a candle, to rekindle the fire that had burned out during their absence. The girl set the light on the table, and almost exhausted with the vicissitudes of the past few hours, threw herself upon a seat. The fire was now crackling merrily on the hearth, sending showers of sparks up the wide chimney, and Darke, divesting himself of his hunting-shirt and belt, stood before its genial blaze to dry the water that adhered to his deer-skin apparel. When he took off his wide-rimmed hat and, after shaking off the rain, tossed it into a corner, Vinnie noticed for the first time that his head was bandaged about with a white cloth. The hat had concealed it before, and he had not spoken of it, or asked her any questions as they came home; his mind being filled with the mystery of the oaken chest and its horrible contents and the strange words of the giant hunter in regard to his discovery of their “secret.” He had made no reply to these words. He could make none except to regret the accident that had brought to his notice any thing that the twin avengers did not wish him to see; and thanking them again for the kindness they had extended to him, he came away.
Vinnie arose and coming over to where he was standing put her hand on his arm, saying, anxiously:
“You are hurt, papa! I knew something had happened to you, or Death would never have acted so strangely. Tell me about it, won’t you? Does it pain you much? What can I do for you?”
“Nothing, little one. It is well enough now. The pain is very slight, and it is well cared for already. I don’t think of any thing that would make it any better. But where is the dog? I don’t see him here. I know he came here after I was hurt. Did he go out with you into the forest?”
“Yes,” she replied with a smile. “Or I went with him, rather. I would not have gone if it had not been for him.”
“Tell me about it, child,” said the woodman, eagerly. Then noticing for the first time, the electric machine on the table which Vinnie had left open just as she had used it that afternoon, and the magic slippers still attached to the battery and lying on the floor near by, he went on. “Have you been taking a private shock or enjoying an electric jig all by yourself?”
“No,” she replied, coolly enough, as though it was the most trivial of incidents she was speaking of, instead of a struggle for more than life with a bloodthirsty savage. “I have not been electrizing myself; but Ku-nan-gu-no-nah called here this afternoon while you were gone and I guess I shocked him considerably. He seemed to be not a little affected by the experiments of which he was the subject. I think he entertains quite an exalted idea of my attainments as an electrician.”
“What do you mean, girl?” he asked, excitedly, placing a hand on either shoulder and looking down into her face in a curious, half-startled way. “I don’t understand you. Has that bloody-hearted devil been here to-day? Explain yourself! Tell me what you mean!”
Seating herself before the fire, while her father listened eagerly, interrupting her often with exclamations of surprise and anger, she told him the story of the afternoon’s adventures from the time of his departure from the cabin to the moment when he came to her deliverance in the forest as she recoiled in terror before the approach of that pair of lurid eyes, not omitting the mysterious disappearance of the white horse and its rider, and the limp, helpless burden that, rolled in the pall-like cloth, he carried before him across his saddle, and her subsequent unaccountable desertion by the blood-hound.