essened and deformed their company.

By this they had become light-headed, they had quite missed their path
in the Wilderness, their stores were already running low. With the
further horrors it is superfluous that I should swell this narrative,
already too prolonged. Suffice it to say that when at length a night
passed by innocuous, and they might breathe again in the hope that the
murderer had at last desisted from pursuit, Mountain and Secundra were
alone. The trader is firmly persuaded their unseen enemy was some
warrior of his own acquaintance, and that he himself was spared by
favour. The mercy extended to Secundra he explains on the ground that
the East Indian was thought to be insane; partly from the fact that,
through all the horrors of the flight, and while others were casting
away their very food and weapons, Secundra continued to stagger forward
with a mattock on his shoulder, and partly because, in the last days,
and with a great degree of heat and fluency, he perpetually spoke with
himself in his own language. But he was sane enough when it came to
English.

"You think he will be gone quite away?" he asked, upon their blest
awakening in safety.

"I pray God so, I believe so, I dare to believe so," Mountain had
replied almost with incoherence, as he described the scene to me.

And indeed he was so much distempered that until he met us, the next
morning, he could scarce be certain whether he had dreamed, or whether
it was a fact, that Secundra had thereupon turned directly about and
returned without a word upon their footprints, setting his face for
these wintry and hungry solitudes along a path whose every stage was
mile-stoned with a mutilated corpse.

FOOTNOTE:

[10] Tear-marked.

CHAPTER XII

THE JOURNEY IN THE WILDERNESS (_continued_)

Mountain's story, as it was laid before Sir William Johnson and my lord,
was shorn, of course, of all the earlier particulars, and the expedition
described to have proceeded uneventfully, until the Master sickened. But
the latter part was very forcibly related, the speaker visibly thrilling
to his recollections; and our then situation, on the fringe of the same
desert, and the private interests of each, gave him an audience prepared
to share in his emotions. For Mountain's intelligence not only changed
the world for my Lord Durrisdeer, but materially affected the designs of
Sir William Johnson.

These I find I must lay more at length before the rea