rickle of a branch that hardly wet the mint, so shyly hidden
amongst its rocks, was a fissure. Odalie had often noted it; dark it
was, for the shadows fell on it, and it might be deep; limited--it would
but hold her piggin, should she thrust it there, or admit a man's head,
yet not his shoulders--and this was what it had done yesterday, for
protruding thence Fifine maintained she had seen Willinawaugh's face
with "him top-feathers, him head, an' him ugly mouf!"

Odalie laid her ear to the ground to listen; smooth, quiet, full, she
heard the flow of water, doubtless the branch from the little spring
always brimming, yet seeming to send so tiny a rill over the slopes of
the mint. There was evidently a cave beneath, and they had never dreamed
of it! She began to search about for fissures, finding here and there in
the deep herbage and the cleft rocks one that might admit the passage of
a man's body. She remembered the first sudden strange appearance of the
Cherokee women at her fireside, and afterward, and that Sandy and Hamish
and Dill often declared that watch the gate as they might they never saw
the squaws enter the stockade nor issue therefrom. Doubtless they had
come through the cave, that had a hidden exit.

Her heart throbbed, her eyes filled; "I ought to be so thankful to
discover it in time--to think how safe we felt here when the gates were
locked! But, oh, my home! my sweet, sweet home!"

The way the men's faces fell when they were summoned, and stood and
looked at the slope, might make one pity them. It represented the hard
labor of nearly two years--and it was all to begin anew.

When Sandy, with the vigorous Scotch thrift, began to show how easily
the stockade might be moved to exclude the spring, Gilfillan shook his
head warningly. A station should never be without water. Sooner or later
its days were numbered. As to the stockade, it was futile. Twenty--nay,
fifty men might be surprised and massacred here. For the ordinary
purposes of life the place was useless.

Hamish, after the first sharp pang, was resolved into curiosity; he must
needs slip through the fissure and into the cave below. When Odalie
ceased her tears to remonstrate, he declared that he could get out of
any cave that Willinawaugh or Choo-qualee-qualoo could, and then
demanded to be tied to her apron-string to be drawn up again in case he
should prove unable to take care of himself. He went down with a whoop,
somewhat like Willinawaugh's