"Pray cover yourself," said Dorothy, encouragingly, and Mount did so, dumb as a Matanzas oyster and crimson as a boiled sea-crab. Then, doubtless, deeming that gentility required some polite observation, he spoke in a high-pitched voice of the balmy weather and the sweet profusion of birds and flowers, when there was more like to be a "sweet profusion" of Indians; and I nigh stifled with laughter to see this lumbering, free-voiced forest-runner transformed to a mincing, anxious, backwoods macaroni at the smile of a pretty woman.
"Do you bring no other news save of the birds and blossoms?" asked Dorothy, mischievously. "Tell us what we all are fearful of. Have the Senecas and Cayugas risen to join the British?"
Mount stole a glance at me.
"I wish I knew," he muttered.
"We will know soon, now," I said, soberly.
"Sooner, perhaps, than you expect, sir," he said. "I am summoned to the manor to confer with General Schuyler on this very matter of the Iroquois."
"Is it true that the Mohawks are in their war-paint?" asked Dorothy, maliciously.
"Stoner and Timothy Murphy say so," replied Mount. "Sir John and the Butlers are busy with the Onondagas and Oneidas; Dominic Kirkland is doing his best to keep them peaceable; and our General played his last cards at their national council. We can only wait and see, Mistress Varick."
He hesitated, glancing at me askance.
"The fact is," he said, "I've been sniffing at moccasin tracks for the last hour, up hill, down dale, over the ford, where I lost them, then circled and picked them up again on the moss a mile below the bridge. If I read them right, they were Mohawk tracks and made within the hour, and how that skulking brute got away from me I cannot think."