ene in the midst of the dense darkness of the
stormy night was before his eyes. Again and again he plunged into the
woods seeking to follow the well-known trail of the trading-path to the
camp and rejoin his companions, but invariably he would emerge from the
wilderness after a toilsome tramp, entering the old "waste town" at a
different angle.

He perceived at length that he could not keep the direction, that he was
wandering in a circle after the manner of those lost in forests. His
clothing, freezing upon his body, was calculated for warmer weather; the
buckskin shirt and leggings, the garb of the frontiersmen, copied from
the attire of the Indians, were of a thin and pliable texture, owing to
the peculiar skill of the savages in dressing peltry. An early historian
describes such costume in a curiously sophisticated phrase as the
"summer visiting dress of the Indians." The southern tribes were
intensely averse to cold, for in winter they wore furs and garments made
of buffalo hides, the shaggy side inward; this raiment was sewed with
the sinews of deer and a kind of wild hemp for thread, and with needles
dexterously fashioned of fishbone.

Barnett had now no thought of the ghosts of the old "waste town." His
first care was to save his life this cruel night; without fire, without
food, without shelter, it might be that he had indeed come to the end.
He was induced by this reflection to climb the mound to the old
council-house. For here the walls, plastered both within and without
with the strong adhesive red clay of the region, admitted no wind, while
in the cabins which had been dwellings the drifts lay deep beneath the
rifts in the dilapidated roofs and the crevices in the wall, and the
flying flakes sifted in as the keen gusts surged through. He had had the
forethought to gather as he went bits of wood, now a loose clapboard or
piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten
puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of
the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the
hearth in the centre of the floor.

When he was once more warm and free of the fear of death, other fears
took hold upon him. In the first glimmers of the fire he could see
through the tall narrow doorless portal only the dark night outside and
a flickering glimpse against its blackness of the quivering crystals of
the snow,--these but vaguely, for the blue smoke eddying through the
gr