During the day, therefore, he kept his retreat. Parting the bushes he watched the leaden clouds sweep across the sky, and tried to forget the fate of his friends in the twitter of the love-making orioles and the calls of the finches. And when at last the sun sunk below the ravine, and the shadows deepened, he crept, like the hunted wolf, from his covert, and reconnoitered the hollow before ascending to the wood above, when he spoke, as the reader has heard, regarding his friends.
Bob Somerville was not a novice in the ways of the wood. Under the eye of Doc Bell he had mastered the hunter and trapper’s profession, and he had faced the savage on the banks of the Miami a year prior to the opening of our story. The twain encountered the red-men with the bravery so characteristic of the spirits of the new-found West, until a whole tribe rose against them, and hunted them from the fertile lands of Ohio. Then they came to the country of the Illinois, and accidentally, one day our hero met the trader’s daughter, to whom in love he became inseparably connected.
All unarmed he stood alone in the great woods, and longed, actually sighed for the trusty rifle which no doubt rested upon some tawny shoulder, or lay broken at the foot of a tree.
“I must be about four miles from the mouth of Mink Creek,” he continued, after a pause, during which he had heard no sounds save the long howl of the wolf, a mile away. “Kate is hidden near there, and in her hour of danger I must be near. Yes, I will save her, though I be flayed alive in the performance of my duty.”
The thought of the fair girl’s situation impelled the young hunter from the spot, and a moment later he was hurrying toward the scene of the preceding chapter, and, perhaps, into the jaws of death.
Almost immediately after his escape, a thunder-storm broke over the forests, and the leaves, still saturated with water, now gave forth no sound. Bob Somerville was rejoiced at this. The prowling savage could not hear his tread, and he blessed the rain as he had never blessed it before.
After an hour’s labor he found himself upon the scene of his escape, the night previous.
He listened upon the hill a long time before he descended, and then it was with wildly-throbbing heart. He expected to find the mangled bodies or charred bones of the giant and the trader, but in this he was agreeably disappointed. He found nothing to indicate that they were dead; but he found their rifles with his own, battered out of shape against a tree.
Not a foe was in sight. The silence that brooded over him was the silence of death, and for many minutes he leaned against a tree and planned deeply for the future.
“They have not returned to Cahokia,” he muttered, referring to the avengers. “They will not leave this country without me, nor will the Bloodhound desert Kate until the gust of war has left the land. Now, where shall I go—what do? Here I am as weaponless as the blind worm. Oh—”