High above him shafts of sunlight were interwoven with the foliage of the trees that overhung the crest of the chasm, forming a radiant ceiling, when Morton awoke. The weirdly romantic gulf in which he lay, coupled with the strange scenes of the night, caused him to think the past was a dream, but going over the several details the sense of reality was restored, and there, a few feet from him, was stretched the sinewy form of the Indian. “Who could fancy that a being so stolid, heavy, and matter-of-fact,” asked Morton of himself, “should show such keenness of feeling and so active an imagination? And, yet, how little we know of what sleeps in the bosoms of our fellows. Mark that sullen pool above the cataract! How dead and commonplace its water appears. It is swept over the brink and, breaking into a hundred new forms, instantly reveals there dwelt dormant beneath its placid surface a life and a beauty undreamt of. We are not all as we seem, and so with this much-tried son of the forest.”
He rose to bathe his stiffened limbs in the river and the motion caused Hemlock to spring to his feet. He glanced at the sky, and remarked that he had slept too long. While Morton bathed, Hemlock busied himself in contriving a scoop of withes and birch bark, with which, standing beneath the fall, he quickly tossed out a number of trout. A flint supplied fire and on the embers the fish as caught were laid to roast, and whether it was so, or was due to his keen appetite, Morton thought they tasted sweeter than when cleaned. With the biscuit in their pouches, though wet, they made a fair breakfast. As they finished, a faint echo of drums and fifes was wafted to them. “We will stay a little while,” said Hemlock, “to let the scouts go back to camp, for they would search the woods again this morning.”
“And what then?” asked Morton.
“We will go back to Perrigo, who is near-by.”
“Would they not fly to Canada after what they did?”
“Indians are like the snake. When it is hunted, it does not fly; it hides. They are waiting for us.”
“Where were you taught to speak English so well, Hemlock?”
“I did not need to be taught; I learnt it with the Iroquois. I was born near an English settlement and my choice companion was an English girl, we played together, and were taught together by the missionary; long after, she became my wife.”
“But you are not a Christian?”
“No; when I saw the white man’s ways I wanted not his religion.”