ast.
Keep it. I believe your words. And because--" there was a slight
convulsion of his features--"of the wicked ways of the wicked Earl
Loudon I have forgot to-night my words I said to-day, I say them
again--and I do not always forget!"

He turned suddenly and went down toward the river, the sad, yellow moon
sending his brown, elongated shadow with its quivering tuft of feathers
far along the stretches of white snow. Captain Stuart paused for a
moment, leaning heavily against the gate; then as he slipped within it
and into the shadow of the wall, he was full glad to hear the dancing
feet, all unconscious of the danger that had been so near, and the
childish treble scream of the unscalped children.

"A little more, and there would have been another massacre of the
innocents," he said, walking slowly across the parade; he had hardly the
strength for a speedier gait. He rescinded the order concerning the hour
at which "tattoo" and "lights out" should sound. "For," he thought,
noticing the cheerful groups in the soldiers' quarters, "I could get
them under arms much more quickly if awake than by drumming them up out
of their beds in barracks."

He carried no sign of the agitation and the significance of the
interview just past when he returned to the prismatic tinted swirl of
the dancing figures in the flaring light of the great fire, made more
brilliant by the glow of the holly boughs and the flutter of banners and
the flash of steel from the decorated walls about them. He, too, trod a
gay measure with the fair Belinda Rush, and never looked more at ease
and care-free and jovially imperious than in the character of gallant
host. Even in the gray dawn as he stood at the sally-port of the fort
and there took leave of the guests, as group by group departed, he was
as debonair and smiling throughout the handshaking as though the revels
were yet to begin.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: The Indians in North Carolina called the Christmas holidays
_Winick-kesbuse_, or "the Englishman's God's moon."]

[Footnote E: It is most true.]

[Footnote F: Is it not so?]

[Footnote G: It has been maintained that this exclamation constantly
used by the Cherokees in solemn adjuration signified "Jehovah."]

[Footnote H: Literally "the sun of the night."]

CHAPTER VI

Breakfast, the rigorous cleaning of the quarters, guard mounting, and
inspection, followed in their usual sequence, but the morning drills
were omitted to give the