"No," replied Canondah, in a decided tone. "Look at his hands, they are small and delicate as those of a girl, though the seawater has stained them brown."
"He may be a messenger," suggested Rosa doubtfully.
The Indian maiden again shook her head. "See," said she, "he comes from the great salt lake which drinks the waters of our river, and yet he knows not how to bring his boat through the thick grass. He took the water-snake for a rotten tree, and stepped upon it, and it buried its teeth in his flesh. Thy white brother has fled from the chief of the Salt Lake."
She spoke these words with as much confidence and decision as if she had herself accompanied the stranger on his adventurous voyage.
"And will Canondah," said Rosa, "leave her brother to perish of fever in the cold night air—he who never harmed her or hers?"
"My sister speaks with the tongue of a white, but Canondah is the daughter of the great Miko," replied the Indian girl, with some severity of manner. The next moment her countenance again brightened, and she took Rosa's hand.
"Canondah will listen to the words of her sister," said she, "and will befriend her white brother. She will take him to the hollow tree."
The two maidens now raised the young man, and each taking one of his arms, assisted him through the thick growth of reeds. It was a long and wearisome task, for loss of blood, and previous privations, had rendered the stranger nearly helpless, and they were hardly able, by the utmost exertion of their strength, to keep him on his feet and convey him along. At one moment, when half-way through the palmettos, he seemed about to breathe his last; his strength left him, and it was only by the most laborious and painful efforts that the young girls got him over the rest of the field. Panting and trembling, they at last reached its extremity, and Rosa sank upon the ground, incapable of further exertion. By a last effort Canondah drew her burthen out of the palmettos, and then threw herself down by the side of her friend.
The last rays of the sun still played upon the summits of the loftier trees, of which the lower branches were dimly seen in the rapidly thickening twilight, when Rosa approached the Indian maiden, and with the words, "The sun is low," roused her from her state of exhaustion and semi-unconsciousness. Canondah sprang to her feet, and the two girls tripped side by side into the wood, until they at last paused before an enormous cotton-tree. Several gigantic vines, in whose powerful and enervating embrace the mighty trunk had perished, still clasped the magnificent colossus with their shining red tendrils, whilst the interior of the tree, hollowed by the tooth of time, was of a fantastical configuration, not unlike a Gothic chapel, and sufficiently spacious to contain twenty men. The care with which the hollow had been swept out, and the neighbourhood of a salt spring, showed that it was used by the Indian hunters as a resting-place and ambush. Canondah cautiously approached the tree and returned to Rosa with the intelligence that it was unoccupied. From the branches of a neighbouring cypress, the two girls now stripped quantities of Spanish moss, wherewith they speedily composed a soft and luxurious bed in the interior of the cotton-tree. This done, they rolled blocks of wood and fragments of trees to the entrance, apparently to form a rampart against the nocturnal intrusion of bear or panther. These preparations completed, they returned to the wounded man. Canondah passed her left arm under his legs, and signed to Rosa to grasp her hand, whilst their arms should serve as a support to his back. Rosa blushed and hesitated.
"Does the white Rose," said Canondah, "fear to touch her brother, for whose life she was lately so anxious?"