Eagerly Oonalooska promised to grant Girty’s request, and the plans for the escape were quickly formed.
While the plot was discussed by the warrior and the renegade, dark clouds were creeping from the west, and soon the whole sky was overcast—which harbingered a storm. Through a rift in the opaque masses, the dying rays of the sun fell upon the Shawnee village, and when night prevailed Girty threw a cordon of braves around Eudora’s lodge. Alaska witnessed the precautionary movement, but instead of encircling the cordon with her braves, she moved nearer the aperture of the wigwam, which she made discernible by torches, thrust into the yielding earth.
Girty thought it best to keep Eudora ignorant of the destination he intended for her; but told Oonalooska to say that he would conduct her to a place of safety, beyond the reach of all her enemies.
The night was the incarnation of gloom, and every waning moment brought Tecumseh and his braves nearer the village. The chief had promised to return upon that particular night, and he had never broken his word. In the rear of the wigwam Girty had placed several braves upon whom he could rely, and, as the first peal of thunder reverberated through the forest, and far down the Scioto, Oonalooska’s keen knife gashed the thin bark in the rear of Eudora’s couch.
A peal of thunder in autumn always startled the Shawnees, and, believing it the harbinger of Tecumseh’s approach, the most timid glided over to the Wolf-Queen.
Girty did not murmur at their late disaffection, for he knew that Alaska would not move till the arrival of the giant chief.
“Oonalooska is ready,” whispered the brave, turning from the perforated bark to the maiden, whose eyes had witnessed the operation.
“Then let us hasten,” she said in tremulous accents, “lest Tecumseh’s arrival doom me to the teeth of the mad-woman’s wolves.”
Tenderly, noiselessly, Oonalooska lifted Eudora in his arms, and glided through the slit, and past the posted guards in the rear of the wigwam. Once beyond the confines of the village, he walked rapidly, experiencing no difficulty in picking his way rightly in the cimmerian gloom.
Presently he entered the forest, and when he had placed a hill between himself and the village, he paused, and drew a torch from beneath his wolf-skin robe.