"If my brother will not go with me, I will go with my brother," said the Conestoga.
CHAPTER XXIX
THE BRIDGE OF ROCK
For twenty days they had followed the Ricahecrians. At times the trail lay before them so plain that even Landless's unaccustomed eyes could read it; at times he saw nothing but untrodden ways—no sign to show that man had been in that wilderness since the beginning of the world—but the Susquehannock saw and went steadily onward; at times they lost it altogether, to find it hours, days afterwards.... It had led them westward, then south to the banks of the Powhatan, then westward again. At first they had to avoid an occasional clearing with the cabin of a pioneer rising from it, or some frontier post, or the village of one of the Powhatan tribes, but that time had long past. The world of the white man was far behind them, so far that it might have been another planet for all it threatened them; the Indian villages were few and far between and inhabited by tribes whose tongue the Susquehannock did not know. For the most part they gave these villages a wide berth, but sometimes in the quiet of the evening they entered one, and were met by the eldest man and conducted to the stranger's lodging where slim brown maidens came to them with platters of maize cakes and nuts and broiled fish, and the warriors and old men gathered around, marveling at the color of the one and conversing with the other in stately gesture. Sometimes, crouched in a tangle of vines or behind the giant bole of some fallen tree they watched a war party file past, noiseless, like shadows, disappearing in the blue haze that filled the distant aisles of the forest. Once a band of five attacked them, coming upon them in their sleep. Three they killed and the others fled. They dipped into the next stream that crossed their path and swam up it a long distance, then emerged and went their way, tolerably confident that they had covered their trail. Sometimes they struggled for hours through coverts of wild grape, thick with fruit: sometimes they walked for miles down endless colonnades of pine trees, where the needle-strewn ground was like ice for slipperiness, and the blue sky gleamed faintly through the far away tree tops. The wind in the pines rose and fell in long, measured cadences. It made the only sound there, for the birds forgot to sing and the insect world kept silence in those vast and sombre cathedrals.
On the afternoon of the twentieth day they came to a halt upon the bank of a small stream that fell purling over a long, smooth slide of limestone into the river. Mountains had loomed into existence in the last few days. In the distance they made a vast blue rampart which seemed to prop the western skies. When the sun sank behind them it was as though a mighty warrior had entered his fortress. Nearer at hand they fell into lofty hills, over which the forest undulated in unbroken green. In front the river made a sudden turn and was lost to sight, disappearing through a frowning gateway of gray cliffs as completely as though it had plunged into the bowels of the earth.... Landless sat down on the bank of the stream above the fall and, chin in hand, gazed at the mountain-piled horizon. The Indian, leaning against a great sycamore whose branches trailed in the water, watched him attentively.
"My brother is tired," he said at last.
Landless shook his head. The Susquehannock paused, still with his eyes upon the other's face, and then went on, "We have searched and have found nothing. There have been five suns since the great rains blotted out the trail. My brother has done very much. Let him say so and we will go back to the falls of the far west and thence to the northward, to the pleasant river, to Monakatocka's people, to the graves of his fathers. And my brother will be welcome to the Conestogas, and he shall be made one of them, and become a great warrior, and both he and Monakatocka will forget the evil days when they were slaves—until they meet a paleface from the great water. My brother has but to speak."
"If these hills in front of us," said Landless with gloomy emphasis, "were higher than the Alps, I would climb them. If behind them there were another range, and then another, and another, if we looked upon the nearest wave of an ocean of mountains, I would climb them all. If they are before us, sooner or later I shall find them. But not to know that they are before us! To know that they may be to the north of us, may be to the south of us! that we may even have passed them! it is maddening!"
"We have not passed them," said his companion slowly, "for—" he stopped abruptly, broke off a bough from a sumach bush beside him, and falling on his knees, leaned far out over the stream. There were many tiny cascades in the brook with little eddies below them where sticks and leaves circled gaily around before they were drawn on to the next miniature fall, and into one of these eddies the Indian plunged the bough. The next moment he drew it carefully towards him, something white clinging to one of its twigs. It proved to be a fragment of lace—not more than an inch or two—and it might have been torn from a woman's kerchief. Landless's hand closed over it convulsively.
"It came down the stream!" he cried.