"I can call you."
"Well, Fanny, ef you ain't very tired, I agree to it, for I feel jest as ef I should go to sleep now."
"I am not so tired as I have been, and not so tired as you are. I will take the first watch. But do you really think the Indians will come to the island?"
"I hope not, but they might."
"How do you expect them to come?"
"I dunno; but I shouldn't wonder ef Lean Bear sent some of his redskins over arter that boy."
Fanny did not see how the savages could reach them at this distance from the main land, but she agreed with Ethan that it would be better to keep watch, and be on the safe side. Wahena's hands were tied together, and he was bound to one of the posts under the boat, in such a manner that he could lie down and sleep comfortably. Ethan stretched himself on the bed he had prepared for his companion, and was soon asleep.
Fanny seated herself under the tree at the top of the hill. It was not yet dark, and she had a full view of the water on every side. Until a later hour there was no possibility of a hostile approach by the Indians, and she gave herself up to the melancholy reflections excited by the tragic events of the day. Though a great many thoughts passed through her mind, there was only one which it is important to record here; and that was, the feeling that she was better prepared for the bitter experience upon which she had now entered than she would have been a few months before. If her friends knew that she was a changed being, the fact was still more evident to her own consciousness.
A religious faith and hope had sustained her in those terrible hours, when the shrieks of the mangled and the cries of the dying had pierced her heart, and when torture and death stared her full in the face. Ethan, in his own quaint terms, had confessed that her prayers and her unwavering trust in God had awed him and solemnized his mind, thus raising him to a level with the momentous issues he was to meet. She felt that her prayers for herself and the brave prairie boy had been answered, not only in their effect upon themselves, but more directly in the turning aside of the knife which had been pointed at their hearts. Renewedly she thanked God for his goodness; and renewedly, as she thought of the dying Jenny, she felt that to hope was to have.
Thus thinking of the past, thus hoping and praying for the future, the darkness gathered upon her, and with her mind thus illuminated by divine wisdom, the words of the Psalmist seemed to be literally verified, and even the darkness became light about her. As the shades of evening deepened over her, cutting off her view of the distant shores of the lake, she felt the necessity of a more vigilant watchfulness.