University of Virginia Library

10. CHAPTER X.

Dodge's story, which was not without its interest
to Roland, though the rapidity of their progress
through the woods, and the constant necessity
of being on the alert, kept him a somewhat
inattentive listener, was brought to an abrupt close
by the motions of Telie Doe, who, having guided
the party for several miles with great confidence,
began at last to hesitate, and betray symptoms of
doubt and embarrassment, that attracted the soldier's
attention. There seemed some cause for
hesitation: the glades, at first broad and open,
through which they had made their way, were
becoming smaller and more frequently interrupted
by copses; the wood grew denser and darker; the
surface of the ground became broken by rugged
ascents and swampy hollows, the one encumbered
by stones and mouldering trunks of trees, the
other converted by the rains into lakes and pools,
through which it was difficult to find a path;
whilst the constant turning and winding to right
and left, to avoid such obstacles, made it a still
greater task to preserve the line of direction which
Telie had intimated was the proper one to pursue.
`Was it possible,' he asked of himself, `the girl
could be at fault?' The answer to this question,
when addressed to Telie herself, confirmed his
fears. She was perplexed, she was frightened;
she had been long expecting to strike the neglected
road, with which she professed to be so well

acquainted, and, sure she was, they had ridden far
enough to find it. But the hills and swamps had
confused her; she was afraid to proceed,—she
knew not where she was.

This announcement filled the young soldier's
mind with alarm; for upon Telie's knowledge of
the woods he had placed his best reliance, conscious
that his own experience in such matters
was as little to be depended on as that of any of
his companions. Yet it was necessary he should
now assume the lead himself, and do his best to
rescue the party from its difficulties; and this,
after a little reflection, he thought he could scarce
fail in effecting. The portion of the forest through
which he was rambling was a kind of triangle,
marked by the two roads on the east, with its base
bounded by the long looked for river; and one of
these boundaries he must strike, proceed in whatsoever
direction he would. If he persevered in the
course he had followed so long, he must of necessity
find himself, sooner or later, in the path
which Telie had failed to discover, and failed, as
he supposed, in consequence of wandering away
to the west, so as to keep it constantly on the right
hand, instead of in front. To recover it, then, all
that was necessary to be done was to direct his
course to the right, and to proceed until the road
was found.

The reasoning was just, and the probability was
that a few moments would find the party on the
recovered path. But a half-hour passed by, and
the travellers, all anxious and doubting and filled
with gloom, were yet stumbling in the forest,
winding amid labyrinths of bog and brake, hill
and hollow, that every moment became wilder
and more perplexing. To add to their alarm, it
was manifest that the day was fast approaching

its close. The sun had set, or was so low in the
heavens that not a single ray could be seen trembling
on the tallest tree; and thus was lost the
only means of deciding towards what quarter of the
compass they were directing their steps. The
mosses on the trees were appealed to in vain,—as
they will be by all who expect to find them pointing,
like the mariner's needle, to the pole. They
indicate the quarter from which blow the prevailing
humid winds of any region of country; but in
the moist and dense forests of the interior, they
are often equally luxuriant on every side of the
tree. The varying shape and robustness of boughs
are thought to offer a better means of finding the
points of the compass; but none but Indians, and
hunters grown gray in the woods, can profit by
their occult lessons. The attempts of Roland to
draw instruction from them served only to complete
his confusion; and, by and by, giving over
all hope of succeeding through any exercise of
skill or prudence, he left the matter to fortune and
his good horse, riding, in the obstinacy of despair,
whithersoever the weary animal chose to bear
him, without knowing whether it might be afar
from danger, or backwards into the vicinity of the
very enemies whom he had laboured so long to
avoid.

As he advanced in this manner, he was once or
twice inclined to suspect that he was actually retracing
his steps, and approaching the path by
which he had entered the depths of the wood; and
on one occasion he was almost assured that such
was the fact by the peculiar appearance of a
brambly thicket, containing many dead trees,
which he thought he had noticed while following
in confidence after the leading of Telie Doe. A
nearer approach to the place convinced him of his

error, but awoke a new hope in his mind, by showing
him that he was drawing nigh the haunts of
men. The blazes of the axe were seen on the
trees, running away in lines, as if marked by the
hands of the surveyor; those trees that were
dead, he observed, had been destroyed by girdling;
and on the edge of the tangled brake where
they were most abundant, he noticed several
stalks of maize, the relies of some former harvest,
the copse itself having once been, as he supposed,
a corn-field.

“It is only a tomahawk-improvement,” said
Telie Doe, shaking her head, as he turned towards
her a look of joyous inquiry; and she pointed towards
what seemed to have been once a cabin of
logs of the smallest size,—too small indeed for habitation,—but
which, more than half fallen down,
was rotting away, half hidden under the weeds
and brambles that grew, and seemed to have
grown for years, within its little area; “there are
many of them in the woods, that were never
settled.”

Roland did not require to be informed that a
`tomahawk-improvement,' as it was often called
in those days, meant nothing more than the box
of logs in form of a cabin, which the hunter or
land-speculator could build with his hatchet in a
few hours, a few girdled trees, a dozen or more
grains of corn from his pouch thrust into the soil,
with perhaps a few poles laid along the earth to
indicate an enclosed field; and that such improvements,
as they gave pre-emption rights to the
maker, were often established by adventurers, to
secure a claim, in the event of their not lighting
on lands more to their liking. Years had evidently
passed by since the maker of this neglected
improvement had visited his territory, and Roland

no longer hoped to discover such signs about it as
might enable him to recover his lost way. His
spirits sunk as rapidly as they had risen, and he
was preparing to make one more effort to escape
from the forest, while the day-light yet lasted, or
to find some stronghold in which to pass the
night; when his attention was drawn to Telie
Doe, who had ridden a little in advance, eagerly
scanning the trees and soil around, in the hope
that some ancient mark or footstep might point
out a mode of escape. As she thus looked about
her, moving slowly in advance, her pony on a
sudden began to snort and prance, and betray
other indications of terror, and Telie herself was
seen to become agitated and alarmed, retreating
back upon the party, but keeping her eyes wildly
rolling from bush to bush, as if in instant expectation
of seeing an enemy.

“What is the matter?” cried Roland, riding
to her assistance. “Are we in enchanted land, that
our horses must be frightened, as well as ourselves?”

“He smells the war-paint,” said Telie, with a
trembling voice;—“there are Indians near us!”

“Nonsense!” said Roland, looking around, and
seeing, with the exception of the copse just passed,
nothing but an open forest, without shelter or harbour
for an ambushed foe.—But at that moment
Edith caught him by the arm, and turned upon
him a countenance more wan with fear than that
she had exhibited upon first hearing the cries of
Stackpole. It expressed, indeed, more than alarm,
—it was the highest degree of terror, and the
feeling was so overpowering, that her lips, though
moving as in the act of speech, gave forth no
sound whatever. But what her lips refused to
tell, her finger, though shaking in the ague that

convulsed every fibre of her frame, pointed out;
and Roland, following it with his eyes, beheld the
object that had excited so much emotion. He
started himself, as his gaze fell upon a naked Indian
stretched under a tree hard by, and sheltered
from view only by a dead bough lately fallen from
its trunk, yet lying so still and motionless, that he
might easily have been passed by without observation
in the growing dusk and twilight of the
woods, had it not been for the instinctive terrors
of the pony, which, like other horses, and, indeed,
all other domestic beasts in the settlements, often
thus pointed out to their masters the presence of
an enemy.

The rifle of the soldier was in an instant cocked
and at his shoulder, while the pedler and Emperor,
as it happened, were too much discomposed
at the spectacle to make any such show of battle.
They gazed blankly upon the leader, whose piece,
settling down into an aim that must have been
fatal, suddenly wavered, and then, to their surprise,
was withdrawn.

“The slayer has been here before us,” he
exclaimed,—“the man is dead and scalped already!”

With these words, he advanced to the tree, and
the others following, they beheld with horror, the
body of a savage of vast and noble proportions,
lying on its face across the roots of the tree, and
glued, it might almost be said, to the earth by a
mass of coagulated blood, that had issued from
the scalped and axe-cloven skull. The fragments
of a rifle, shattered, as it seemed, by a violent blow
against the tree under which he lay, were scattered
at his side, with a broken powder-horn, a splintered
knife, the helve of a tomahawk, and other
equipments of a warrior, all in like manner shivered

to pieces by the unknown assassin. The
warrior seemed to have perished only after a fearful
struggle; the earth was torn where he lay,
and his hands, yet grasping the soil, were dyed
a double red in the blood of his antagonist, or
perhaps in his own.

While Roland gazed upon the spectacle, amazed,
and wondering in what manner the wretched
being had met his death, which must have happened
very recently, and whilst his party was
within the sound of a rifle-shot, he observed a
shudder to creep over the apparently lifeless
frame; the fingers relaxed their grasp of the
earth, and then clutched it again with violence; a
broken, strangling rattle came from the throat;
and a spasm of convulsion seizing upon every
limb, it was suddenly raised a little upon one arm,
so as to display the countenance, covered with
blood, the eyes retroverted into their orbits, and
glaring with the sightless whites. It was a horrible
spectacle,—the last convulsion of many that
had shaken the wretched and insensible, yet still
suffering clay, since it had received its deathstroke.
The spasm was the last, and but momentary;
yet it sufficed to raise the body of the
mangled barbarian so far that, when the pang that
excited it suddenly ceased, and, with it, the life of
the sufferer, the body rolled over on the back, and
thus lay, exposing to the eyes of the lookers-on
two gashes wide and gory on the breast, traced
by a sharp knife and a powerful hand, and, as it
seemed, in the mere wantonness of a malice and
lust of blood which even death could not satisfy.
The sight of these gashes answered the question
Roland had asked of his own imagination; they
were in the form of a cross; and as the legend, so
long derided, of the forest-fiend recurred to his

memory, he responded, almost with a feeling of
superstitious awe, to the trembling cry of Telie
Doe:—

“It is the Jibbenainosay!” she exclaimed, staring
upon the corse with mingled horror and wonder;—“Nick
of the Woods is up again in the
forest!”