ething like a sensation was exhibited among them, which might have
denoted that the influence of the laughing blue eyes, flaxen hair, and
glowing cheeks of Ellen, had not been lost on the dull natures of the
young men; and looks of amazement, mingled slightly with concern, passed
from one to the other as they gazed, in dull wonder, at the point of the
naked rock.

"It might well be!" added another; "she sat on a slivered stone, and
I have been thinking of telling her she was in danger for more than an
hour."

"Is that a riband of the child, dangling from the corner of the hill
below?" cried Ishmael; "ha! who is moving about the tent? have I not
told you all--"

"Ellen! 'tis Ellen!" interrupted the whole body of his sons in a breath;
and at that instant she re-appeared to put an end to their different
surmises, and to relieve more than one sluggish nature from its unwonted
excitement. As Ellen issued from beneath the folds of the tent, she
advanced with a light and fearless step to her former giddy stand, and
pointed toward the prairie, appearing to speak in an eager and rapid
voice to some invisible auditor.

"Nell is mad!" said Asa, half in contempt and yet not a little in
concern. "The girl is dreaming with her eyes open; and thinks she sees
some of them fierce creatur's, with hard names, with which the Doctor
fills her ears."

"Can it be, the child has found a scout of the Siouxes?" said Ishmael,
bending his look toward the plain; but a low, significant whisper from
Abiram drew his eyes quickly upward again, where they were turned just
in time to perceive that the cloth of the tent was agitated by a motion
very evidently different from the quivering occasioned by the wind. "Let
her, if she dare!" the squatter muttered in his teeth. "Abiram; they
know my temper too well to play the prank with me!"

"Look for yourself! if the curtain is not lifted, I can see no better
than the owl by daylight."

Ishmael struck the breach of his rifle violently on the earth, and
shouted in a voice that might easily have been heard by Ellen, had not
her attention still continued rapt on the object which so unaccountably
attracted her eyes in the distance.

"Nell!" continued the squatter, "away with you, fool! will you bring
down punishment on your own head? Why, Nell!--she has forgotten her
native speech; let us see if she can understand another language."

Ishmael threw his rifle to his shoulder, and at the next moment it was