“So Hull has surrendered,” muttered Wolf-Cap through clenched lips, as he turned into the cabin again. “I know it was a cowardly affair, for Detroit was proof against ten thousand foes; but Hull was the wrong man in the right place. I know it; I told the soldiers so when I war there not long ago. These frontiers hev got to be desolated now, through the cowardice of one man,” the lone trapper continued, busying himself with preparations for a night journey. “Our block-houses are poor excuses for bulwarks; but we must get the women and children in them as quickly as possible.”
He donned his hunting accouterments and the wolf-skin cap which had given him the sobriquet that entitles our romance, and replenished the fire.
“I’ll leave you to keep house, Dick,” he said, addressing the dog. “I’ll be back about daybreak. Now old fellow do your duty, and don’t let a sneakin’ red-skin over this portal.”
He patted the dog’s shaggy back, barricaded the door, and made his exit from the cabin, by the roof.
“I’m pretty sure that Johnny missed ’em,” he said, pausing for a moment beside the cabin and communing with himself. “He came down the river, and they are too far to his left. Yes, I guess he missed ’em.”
The last word still quivered his lips when he started in a north-easterly direction, leaving the river to his left.
A well-defined trail stretched before him, and he walked rapidly through the moonlit forest, trailing his long-barreled rifle at his side.
It was a night in August, 1812, and, as not a breath of wind was stirring, the heat was oppressive. Once or twice the hunter started a deer from the weed-fringed margin of some forest stream, or frightened a coyote from his feast of freshly-slain bird.
Suddenly he paused and listened to a silver voice, soaring skyward far away.
“That’s Huldah’s voice,” he said, audibly. “No woman can sing like her in these parts. I don’t know, but some how or other I think an uncommon sight of that girl. She looks so much like Bessie did twenty years ago,” and here the rough deer-skin sleeve dashed a tear from the speaker’s eye.