For some time after his last visit to Tampa Bay, Cris Carrol had not been seen.
Neither the pale-faces nor the redskins had been able to discover his whereabouts.
The truth is, that the backwoodsman was glad to get away from scenes where so much violence had been done to his feelings.
As he had said, he couldn’t fight against the Indians, and he wouldn’t take up arms against the whites.
“It ain’t in human nature to shoot and stab one’s own sort, even when they’re in the wrong, unless they’d done somethin’ agin oneself; an’ that they hain’t done as regards me. I’ll be eternally dog-goned if I think the red-skins are to blame for rising agin oppression and tyranny, which is what old Rody did to them, to say nothin’ agin him now he’s dead, but to speak the truth, and that’s bad enough for him. No, they war not to blame for what they did, arter his conduct to them—the old cuss; who, bad as he war, had one redeemin’ feature in his karactur, and that war his angeliferous darter. Where kin she have gone a hidin’? Thet puzzles this chile, it do.”
Cris was unaware of Alice’s capture and imprisonment.
As suddenly as he had taken his departure from Tampa, Cris returned to the same neighbourhood. He expected the war to be transferred to a more distant point, and wished still to keep out of the way.
“It’s the durned’st fightin’ I ever heard on,” said he to himself; “first it’s here, then it’s there, and then it ain’t nowhere, till it breaks out all over again, where it was before, and they’re as far off the end as I am from Greenland. Durn it, I never knowed nothin’ like it.”
On his return to Tampa, he found the country around altogether deserted. Most of the buildings and the planter’s house had been destroyed, even his own wretched hut had been burnt to the ground.
“This is what they call the fortun’ of war, I ’spose?” he remarked, as he stood gazing at the ruins. “Wal, it war a ramshackle, crazy ole shanty anyhow, and I allers despised four walls an’ a roof at the best o’ times—still it war ‘home.’ Pshaw!” he added, after a moment’s silence, “what have I to grow molloncholly about, over sich a place as this—calling it ‘home,’ when I still have the Savannas to hunt over an’ sleep upon. If thar’s such a place as home for me that’s it, and no other.”