reparing
to stay there? How could her mother endure the cold of the mountain
all night?

Then she began to consider how she might protect her mother after the
sun had gone from the cold that would envelop them. Reasoning that as
long as the Indians stayed in the cabin they could not be seen by
them, she looked about for some projecting ledge under which they
might creep for the night. Gently she lifted her mother's head and
placed it on her own folded shawl, and, with an eye ever on the cabin
below, she crept further up the side of the mountain until she found a
place where a huge rock, warmed by the sun, projected far out, and
left a hollow beneath, into which they might creep. Frantically she
tore off twigs of the scrubby pines around them, and made a fragrant
bed of pine needles and moss on which to rest. Then she woke her
mother.

Sane and practical on all subjects but the one, Madam Manovska roused
herself to meet this new difficulty with the old courage, and climbed
with Amalia's help to their wild resting place without a word of
complaint. There she sat looking out over the magnificent scene
before her with her great brooding eyes, and ate the coarse corn cake
Amalia put in her hands.

She talked, always in Polish or in French, of the men "rouge," and
said she did not wonder they came to so good a place to rest, and that
she would give thanks to the great God that she and her daughter were
on the mountain when they arrived. She reminded Amalia that if she had
consented to return when her daughter wished, they would now have been
in the cabin with those terrible men, and said that she had been
inspired of God to stay long on the mountain. Contentedly, then, she
munched her cake, and remarked that water would give comfort in the
eating of it, but she smiled and made the best of the dry food. Then
she prayed that her husband might be detained until the men were
gone.

Amalia gave her mother the water that was left in the bottle she had
brought with her, and lamented that she had saved so little for her.
"It was so bad, not to save more for my mamma," she cried, giving the
bottle with its lowered contents into her mother's hand. "I go to
watch, mamma mine. Soon will I return."

Amalia went back to her point of vantage, where she could see all
about the cabin and shed. Still the smoke poured from the chimney, and
there was no sign of red men without. It was a mountain sheep they had
carried, slung between them