"Pooh," said the other, with an air of contemptuous commiseration, "you are growing sentimental. This comes of listening to that confounded whimpering Telie."
"No words agin the gal!" cried Doe, sternly; "you may say what you like of me, for I'm a rascal that desarves it; but I'll stand no barking agin the gal."
"Why, she's a good girl and a pretty girl,—too good and too pretty to have so crusty a father,—and I have nothing against her, but her taking on so about the younker, and so playing the devil with the wits and good-looks of my own bargain."
"A dear bargain she is like to prove to all of us," said Doe, drowning his anger, or remorse, in another draught from the pitcher. "She has cost us eleven men already: it is well the bulk of the whelps was Wabash and Maumee dogs, or you would have seen her killed and scalped, for all of your guns and whisky,—you would, there's no two ways about it. Howsomever, four of 'em was dogs of our own, and two of them was picked off by the Jibbenainosay. I tell you what, Dick, I'm not the man to skear at a raw-head-and-bloody-bones; but I do think the coming of this here cursed Jibbenainosay among us, jist as we was nabbing the girl and sodger, was as much as to say there was no good could come of it; and so the Injuns thought too—you saw how hard it was to bring 'em up to the scratch, when they found he had been knifing a feller right among 'em! I do believe the crittur's Old Nick himself!"
"So don't I," said the other; "for it is quite unnatural to suppose the devil would ever take part against his own children."
"Perhaps," said Doe, "you don't believe in the crittur?"
"Good Jack, honest Jack," replied his companion, "I am no such ass."
"Them that don't believe in hell, will natterly go agin the devil," muttered the renegade, with strong signs of disapprobation; and then added earnestly,—"Look you, Squire, you're a man that knows more of things than me, and the likes of me. You saw that 'ere Injun, dead, in the woods under the tree, where the five scouters had left him a living man?"
"Ay," said the man of the turban; "but he had been wounded by the horseman you so madly suffered to pass the ambush at the ford, and was obliged to stop from loss of blood and faintness. What so natural as to suppose the younker fell upon him (we saw the tracks of the whole party where the body lay), and slashed him in your devil's style, to take advantage of the superstitious fear of the Indians?"
"There's nothing like being a lawyer, sartain!" grumbled Doe. "But the warrior right among us, there at the ruin?—you seed him yourself,—marked right in the thick of us! I reckon you won't say the sodger, that we had there trapped up fast in the cabin, put the cross on that Injun too?"