was most alluring. He longed for
freedom and his "Whoraminta."

A visitor came on the second morning. The lodge door was opened and a
thick figure filled it a moment as a man entered. Henry was sitting on a
mat at the farthest part of the lodge, and he could see the man very
clearly. The stranger was young, twenty-seven or twenty-eight perhaps,
thick set and powerful, tanned to the brownness of an Indian by sun,
wind and rain, but the features obviously were those of the white race.
It was an evil face, but a strong one. Henry felt a shiver of repulsion.
He felt that something demoniac had entered the lodge, because he knew
that this was Simon Girty, the terrible renegade, now fully launched
upon the career that made his name infamous throughout the Ohio Valley
to this day.

But after the little shiver, Henry was without motion of expression.
Show apprehension in the presence of such a man! He would rather die.
Girty laughed and sat down on the mat on the other side of the lodge.
But it was a small lodge, and their faces were not more than four feet
apart. Henry read in the eyes of Girty a satisfaction that he did not
seek to conceal.

"It isn't so pleasant to be trussed up in that fashion, is it?" he
asked.

Henry refused to answer.

Girty laughed again.

"You needn't speak unless you feel like it," he said. "I can do the
talking for both of us. You're tied up, it's true, but you're treated
better than most prisoners. I've been hearing a good deal about you. A
particular friend of yours, one Braxton Wyatt, a most promising lad, has
told me a lot of stories in which you have a part."

"I know Braxton Wyatt very well," said Henry, "and I'm glad to say that
I've helped to defeat some of his designs. He has a great ambition."

"What is that?" asked Girty.

"To become as bad a man as you are."

But Girty was not taken aback at all. His lips twisted into a peculiar
grin of cruel satisfaction.

"They do fear me," he said, "and they'll fear me more before long. I've
joined the Indians, I like them and their ways, and I'm going to make
myself a great man among them."

"At the expense of your own kind?"

"Of course. What is that to me. I'm going to get all the tribes
together, and sweep the whites out of the Ohio Valley forever."

"I've heard that these same Indians with whom you're so thick burned
your step-father at the stake?" said Henry.

"That's true," replied the renegade without the slightest feeling.