e God who is above the stillness of these hills, you still
believe me criminal in aught else, you wrong me much, you wrong
yourself!"

He ceased abruptly, and rising, began to heap more wood upon the fire.
The figure of the Indian, with something dark upon its shoulder, emerged
from the spectral forest, and came towards them through the mist.

"Monakatocka has found our breakfast," said Landless, forcing himself to
speak with indifference, and without looking at his companion. "I am
glad of it, for you must be faint from hunger."

"I am very thirsty," she said in a low voice.

"If you will come to the water's edge, that at least can be quickly
remedied."

She rose from the rock upon which she had been seated and followed him
down to the brink of the little stream. "I would I had a cup of gold,"
he said, "and here is not even a great leaf. Will you drink from my
hands, madam?"

"Yes," she said; then deliberately, after a pause, "for I well believe
them to be clean hands."

Her own hand touched his as she spoke, and he put it to his lips in
silence. Kneeling upon the turf by the stream, he raised the water in
his hands and she stooped and drank from them, and then they went back
to the fire and sat beside it without speaking until the arrival of
Monakatocka, laden with a wild turkey. An hour later the Susquehannock
carefully extinguished the fire, raked all the embers and ashes into the
stream, hid beneath great rocks the debris of their morning meal,
obliterated all moccasin prints, and having made the little hollow
between the hills to all appearance precisely as it was a few hours
before, when the foot of man had probably never entered it, stepped into
the stream and announced that they were ready to pursue their journey.
Before midday, the stream winding to the south, they left it, and
plunging into the dark heart of the forest pushed rapidly on with their
faces to the east.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE HUT IN THE CLEARING

Five days later saw the wayfarers some thirty leagues to the eastward of
the hollow in the hills. They had traveled swiftly, sleeping but a few
hours of each night and in the daytime pausing for rest only when
Landless, quietly watchful, saw the weariness growing in the eyes of the
woman beside him, or noted her lagging footsteps. They had left the
higher mountains behind them, but still moved through what seemed an
uninhabited territory. No Indian village crowned the hills above the
st