The young twain felt no fear, and prepared for work as calmly as though getting ready for a great festival. They resolved before entering the woods to submit to no captivity.
“Better,” said Nanette, “to fall striking dead those who spared not our own parents, than to undergo the terrible tortures inflicted by the Indians and their scarlet queen.”
“Ay, ay,” returned Kenowatha, “we will not fall into their hands alive. If they get us at all, it will be bereft of life. But they will not capture us, girl. As yet I have not struck a single blow of vengeance. I am not to die thus, no! no! It is decreed by high Heaven that my chosen mark—the red cross—shall become as terrible as your bloody crescent.”
When the twain rejoined each other in the woods—for they had separated to don their disguises—a silent pressure of hands, followed, accompanied by a look that told how inseparably their fates were linked together, by the strangest circumstances that ever existed in the untraveled forest wilds.
Their guns were concealed in the grass, and armed but with their knives, concealed but ready for use, about their persons, they stood erect, listened a moment, then marched boldly forward. The most careful observer would have proclaimed the couple what they seemed to be—what they counterfeited—an Indian boy and girl—for though they kept together they roamed about the village with a nonchalance that would deceive the most suspicious. Still, as a precautionary measure, they kept in the shadows as much as possible, yet did not shrink from walking into the glare of the ground fires whenever necessary. No suspicion seemed to attach itself to the young would-be-rescuers, and the lazy savages little dreamed that their deadliest foes were in their very midst.
By-and-by in their seemingly aimless saunterings they approached the prison cabin wherein a noble man waited for them—waited behind strong logs and a guard of stalwart braves, whose eyes noted every thing that came near in the fitful starlight.
The avengers were prepared to find the prison strongly guarded, and knew that to rescue the young spy they must have recourse to a strategy seldom if ever used in red villages. The strategy, as perilous and startling in its character as it was unique, found birth in the Girl Avenger’s brain, and Kenowatha joined in the scheme. Crouching in the gloomy shadow of a lodge, the twain remained silent until the opaque clouds that crept over the western horizon had completely clothed the sky in blackness, and vailed the shining faces of the stars.
The prison-hut was built of strong beech logs, dove-tailed, after the usual mode of constructing cabins in the West, and the roof was composed of three layers of bark, each two inches thick, and secured by strong wooden pins. The hut had been built for the express purpose of securing prisoners, under the eye of the Girty brothers, and other renegades, and many a noble red and white captive had marched, in the noon of life, from its gloomy recesses to the fatal stake, beneath a pellucid sky. The inmates of the prison-hut were secured to a stake in the center of the structure, thus preventing them from self-escape.
Kenowatha and the Girl Avenger crept to the rear of the hut without attracting the attention of the guards who stood at the door, and with the noiseless and ghostly movements of the lizard, as it ascends the slimy wall, Nanette began to ascend the cabin to its roof. Breathless, and with drawn knife Kenowatha waited below, ready to give the signal of danger or drive the keen blade into the heart of the first red-man who approached.
The rough exterior of the logs aided the young She-wolf in her perilous undertaking, and presently she found herself grasping the bark coverings of the hut.