“Oonalooska will not sleep,” was the reply; “but to overcome the White Wolf and Alaska he must have the cunning of his white friends.”
“I cannot leave this young man until his sores are healed,” said Hewitt. “But that will not be long. Then we will baffle Jim Girty, and you, who hate him, can send him to Watchemenetoc.”
The Indian’s eyes flashed at the hermit’s last sentence, and a minute later Oonalooska was gone.
CHAPTER III.
JIM GIRTY AND HIS PRISONER.
James Girty was one of a quartette of brothers to which the notorious Simon belonged. He became the prisoner of the Indians early in Braddock’s ill-fated campaign, when he was in his fourteenth year, and was adopted by the Shawnees. Growing to manhood, he loved the life and customs of the red rovers of the trackless forests, and hated all whom they hated. His passions were as fiery as Simon’s, but for some unaccountable reasons, he has not figured as conspicuously on the page of history.
Simon Girty, notwithstanding his multitudinous crimes, possessed a few good qualities; but James possessed not one. Simon often pleaded for the life of a prisoner, James never; and his countenance was the incarnation of all that is repulsive.
At the opening of our romance he had attained his sixty-ninth year, notwithstanding which he still possessed a giant’s frame and a giant’s strength.
So well did he bear the burden of his years, that he looked beneath fifty, and scarce a gray hair was visible upon his head. His eyes still flashed the fire of manhood’s prime, from beneath long, midnight lashes, and not a crow’s foot furrowed his forehead. His face was covered by splotches of red hair, through which cutaneous eruptions, caused by his dissolute habits, were constantly making their appearance. When not influenced by wine, he was not quarrelsome; but for many years he had drawn scarce a single sober breath. He was an unerring marksman, and his influence over the Indians was unbounded.
While hunting in Virginia he encountered Eudora Morriston, whose beauty fanned the fires of his evil nature; and, as Mayne Fairfax has already related, he swooped down upon the happy home, at the head of a band of Shawnees, massacred every one of its inmates, save the beautiful girl, whom he bore to the Indian village, and placed under the guardianship of two of the most pliant of his red tools.
Bright and translucently beautiful upon the Shawnee village broke the morn that followed the transaction of the events related in the foregoing chapters.