Soon the sun appeared through an opening in the leaden gray clouds that had drifted lazily through the sky until they were gathered together in a dark, lowering mass overhead, and its bright rays trembled for a moment upon the surface of the water.
“See!” continued the Indian, pointing to the falls just visible through the trees. “See the waters smile! They laugh because the red men will give them a pale-face victim! Let the white man hear them sing! ‘Ha! ha!’ they say, ‘the pale-face must die!’ It is his death chant! The great Manitou is speaking through the laughing waters. He is happy with his red children when a pale-face dies. The white hunter is brave. He is not afraid to fight. But his heart will grow small within his bosom when he must go down into the black waters—the river of death! Will he be brave when he meets the unknown dangers of the dark valley? He will find it hard to die now. He is young and the world looks bright to his eyes. Perhaps a white woman will weep when he is dead. The Indian women have mourned for their husbands and brothers when they have gone out to fight the Long-knives and never returned. The laughing waters are crying aloud for their victim. The white man must die!”
“We all must die,” said Vere, calmly, not caring to show the concern he really felt. “Men have died before, why should I fear death?”
An expression of surprise flitted over the Indian’s painted face.
Few men could meet death so calmly.
The young hunter had resolved not to die without a desperate struggle; but he preferred that his captors should think him resigned to his fate—the horrible fate which seemed inevitable.
A few rods above the falls a tree grew far out over the water, rushing madly to the cataract below.
The bank at this point was rough and jagged, its steep and rocky sides jutting out full twenty feet above the black, roaring mass underneath.
The party halted here.
“The pale-face hunter’s feet must be tied,” said the Indian who had spoken before. “He must not fight with the laughing waters.”