CHAPTER XXI. THE SEEKING OF THE TRIBESMEN
Ouenwa and Black Feather turned their faces from the little fort and the hostile camp beyond the white river, and set bravely forward into the darkness. Black Feather led the way, avoiding hummocks, bending and twisting through the coverts, crossing the open glades like a shadow—and all without any noise except the scarcely audible padding of his stringed shoes. Ouenwa trod close after. They had not gone far before the snow began to fall and puff around them in blinding clouds. The trees bent tensely under the lash of the wind. More than one frost-embrittled spire came crashing down. Still the warrior and the lad held on their journey, for they were both fresh and strong, and eager to widen the spaces of wilderness between themselves and the camp of Panounia.
Shortly before dawn they dug a trench in the snow on the leeward side of a thicket of low spruces, broke fir-branches for a bed, built a fire between the walls of white, and cooked and ate a frugal repast, and then rolled themselves in their rugs of skin and fell asleep. They had no fear that any of Panounia's people would disturb their slumbers. They lay as motionless and unknowing as logs for several hours. Then Ouenwa turned over and yawned, and Black Feather sat up, wide-awake in an instant. The morning was bright and unclouded. The white sun was half-way up the blue shell of the eastern sky. All around the new snow lay in feathery depths. On the dark firs and spruces it clung in even masses, which showed that the wind had died down long before the flakes had ceased to fall. Ouenwa and his comrade ate frugally of cold meat and bread, swallowed some brandy and water, and resumed their journey.
Not until the afternoon of the third day following their departure from Fort Beatrix did the travellers sight the smoke of a fire. It was Black Feather, attaining the summit of a ridge a few paces ahead of Ouenwa, who caught the first sight of the thin, melting signal of human life. It wavered up from a wood in a valley a few hundred of yards in front. On their right hand lay the ice-edged gray waters of an arm of the sea. On their left stretched dark forest and empty barren to a mountainous horizon. In front lay hope, and behind the spur of menace.
"Is there a village yonder?" asked Ouenwa.
Black Feather replied negatively.
"The stream is Little Thunder," he said, in his own language, "and there was no lodge there when last I saw it. We will approach under the shelter of those spruces in the hollow. It makes the journey a few paces longer, and perhaps the arrival twenty times safer."
Ouenwa nodded his sympathy with the caution expressed by his friend.
"But let us hurry," he said. "Remember that around the stockade the black captain is ever stirring the courage of the night-howlers."