"My sons are in the forest, seeing to their snares," replied the woman, eying the tall brave sharply, "but within are a sick woman and a small child who escaped, ten days ago, from one of Panounia's camps."
She stood aside and motioned them to enter the lodge. Ouenwa went ahead, with Black Feather close at his heels. Within, it took them several seconds to adjust their eyes to the gloom of smoke and shadow. Presently they made out a couch of fir-branches and skins beyond the fire, and on it a woman, half-reclining, with her arm about a child. Both the woman and the child were gazing at the visitors. The child began to whimper.
Black Feather uttered a low cry, and sprang over the fire. He had found his squaw and one of his lost children.
The sickness of Black Feather's wife was nothing but the result of hardship and ill-treatment. Already, under the herb-doctor's care, she was greatly improved. The meeting with her warrior went far to complete the cure of the old woman's broths and soft furs. The child was well; but the woman knew nothing of the whereabouts of their elder offspring.
Ouenwa and Black Feather did not tarry long at the lodge beside Little Thunder. With the younger of their aged hostess's sons for guide, they set out that same day to find the hidden warriors who were against the leadership of Panounia.
CHAPTER XXII. BRAVE DAYS FOR YOUNG HEARTS
Back at Fort Beatrix the time passed in weary suspense. The wounded men recovered slowly. The enemy remained inactive beyond the river and the dark forest. Only the haze of their cooking-fires, melting against the sky, told of their presence. The inaction ate into the courage of the English men and women like rust. The boat-building and the iron-working at the forge were carried on listlessly, and without the old-time spurs of song and laughter. Even William Trigget and Tom Bent displayed sombre faces to their little world.
Bernard Kingswell, however, found life eventful. He was not blind to the danger of their position, and he continued to do double duty in everything; but for all that he awoke each day with keen anticipation for whatever might befall, and, sleeping, dreamed of other things than the poised menace and the monotony. Why should he regret Bristol, or any other city of the outer world, when Beatrix Westleigh was domiciled within the rough walls of the fort on Gray Goose River? His heart would not descend to those depths of despondency in which lurk fear and hopeless anxiety. What power of man, in that wilderness, could break down his guard and harm the most wonderful being in the world? The girl's brief season of unkindness toward him was as a cloud that her later friendliness had dispersed as the sun disperses the morning fog. He had caught a glimpse of her heart in her music, in her eyes, in her voice, and on several occasions something that had set his heart thumping in the touch of her hand. At least she was neither averse nor indifferent to his society, and the glances of her magnificent eyes were open to translations that set him looking out upon life and that wilderness through a golden haze. Let a dozen black-visaged D'Antons draw their rapiers upon him—he would out-thrust, out-play, and out-stamp them all! Let a hundred fur-clad savages howl about the fort—he, Bernard Kingswell, with his lady's favour on his breast, would scatter them like straw! And all this because, for the first time in his life of twenty-one years, he was bitten with love for a woman,—and twenty-one was a fair, manly age in those days. He had won to it unknowingly, by the brave paths of adventure and the sea. So let not even the oldest of us criticize his attitude toward life. A man's emotions cannot always be herded and driven by the outward circumstances of need and danger, like a flock of sheep at the mercy of a dog and a dull countryman. That to which cautious Worldliness has given the name of madness, from the earliest times, is nothing but a spark of God's own courage and imagination in the heart of youth: the years having not yet smothered it with the ashes of cowardice and calculation.