y her hope
glowed into triumph! She had a fantastic conviction that the child was
bound fast. The signs intimated that the great mystic Red Spider,
_Kananiski gigage_, had woven his unseen web about the boy, and he
could not escape from those constraining meshes. As to the men--she
concluded that they were blown away somewhere. The wind had attended to
that little matter. "_Agaluga Hegwa! Atigale yata tsutu negliga_," she
exclaimed in grateful rapture. ("Oh, great Whirlwind! By you they must
have been scattered.")

Happiness had long held aloof. She was of the poorest of the tribe;
childless, for many years; a widow; she suffered much from rheumatism;
she was slowly going blind; she was deemed unlucky and avoided. For more
than once of late years she had in important crises predicted disaster,
and this prophecy, by fortuitous circumstances, had been fulfilled; thus
those to whom a deceitful hope is preferable to a warning of trouble
sought by fleeing the oracle to elude the misfortune. Being esteemed a
witch, and associated with dark dealings and prone to catastrophe, she
lived in peculiar solitude, and the two spent the long months of the
winter within the cabin together, while the mountain snows lay heavy on
the eaves and the mountain winds beat and gibed at the door. Great
icicles hung from the dark fissures of the crags; frosty scintillations
tipped the fibres of the pines; wolves were a-prowl--sometimes their
blood-curdling howls from afar penetrated to the hut where the
ill-assorted companions sat together in the red glow of the fire, and
roasted their sweet potatoes and apples on the hearth, and cracked nuts
to pound into the rich paste affected by the Cherokees, and drank the
bland "hominy-water," and gazed happily into each other's eyes, despite
their distance apart at the two termini of life, the beginning and the
end.

As she could speak no English, yet they must needs find a medium of
exchange for their valuable views, she tried to teach him to speak
Cherokee. He was a bird, her little bird, she told him by signs, and his
name was _Tsiskwa_. This she repeated again and again in the velvet-soft
fluting of her voice. But no! he revolted. His name was Archie Royston,
he declaimed proudly. He soon became the monarch of this poor hearth, and
he deported himself in royal fashion.

"Oo tan't talk," he said patronizingly to her one day, after listening in
futile seriousness to her unintelligible jargon. Forthwith