THE BACKWARD TRACK
Landless turned to the pathway by which they had come, but the Indian
shook his head, and pointing to the stream which, making a sudden turn,
brawled along at their very feet, stepped noiselessly down into the
water, first, however, possessing himself of Luiz Sebastian's gun, which
lay upon the ground beside the hut. Landless, following him in silence,
would have turned his face towards the river, but again the
Susquehannock shook his head and began to make his way slowly and warily
up stream.
The other knew how to obey. Holding with one arm the unconscious form of
the woman he had come so many leagues to seek, and with the other
steadying himself by boulder and projecting cliff, he followed his
companion past the sleeping Ricahecrians, out of the shadow of the great
arch, into the splendor of the moonlight beyond. It was not until they
had gone a long distance, past vast, scarred cliffs, through close,
dark, scented tunnels formed by the overarching boughs of great
arbor-vitaes, up smooth slides where the water came down upon them in
long, unbroken, glassy green slopes, that Landless said, in a low voice:
"Why do we go up this stream instead of back to the river? It is their
road we are traveling."
The faint, reluctant smile of the Indian crossed the Susquehannock's
face. "The white man is very wise except when he is in the woods. Then
he is as if every brook ran fire-water and he had drunk of them all. A
pappoose could trick him. When these Algonquin dogs wake and find the
fawn fled and the yellow slave killed, they will cast about for our
trail, and they will find that we came up from the river. Then, when
they find no backward track, but only that we entered the water there,
before the maiden's hut, they will think that we have gone down the
stream, back to the river. They will go down to the river themselves,
but when they have reached it they will not know what to do. They will
think, 'They who come after the Ricahecrians into the Blue Mountains
must be many, with great hearts and with guns.' They will think, 'They
came in boats, and one of their braves and one Iroquois, stealing up
this stream, came upon the Ricahecrians when Kiwassa had closed their
eyes and their ears, and stole away the fawn that the Ricahecrians had
taken, and killed the man who fled with them from the palefaces.' And it
will take a long time for them to find that there were no boats and that
but two men have followed them into the Blue Mountains, for I covered
our trail where this stream runs into the river very carefully. After a
while they will find it, and after another while they will find that the
chief of the Conestogas and his white brother and the maiden have gone
up the stream, and they will come after us. But that will not be until
after the full sun power, and by then we must be far from here."
"It is good," said Landless briefly. "Monakatocka has the wisdom of the
woods."
"Monakatocka is a great chief," was the sententious reply.
"Do you think they will follow us when they find how greatly we have the
start of them?"
"They will be upon our track, sun after sun, keen-eyed as the hawk,
tireless as the wild horses, hungry as the wolf, until we reach the
tribes that are friendly to the palefaces. And that will be many suns
from now. I told my brother that we followed Death into the Blue
Mountains. Now Death is upon our trail."
They came to a rivulet that emptied itself into the larger stream, and
the Susquehannock led the way up its bed. Presently they reached a
gently sloping mass of bare stone, a low hill running some distance back
from the margin of the stream.
"Good," grunted the Susquehannock. "The moccasin will make no mark here
that the sun will not wipe out."
They clambered out upon the rock and stood looking down the ravine
through which they had come. "My brother is tired," said the Indian.
"Monakatocka will carry the maiden."
"I am not tired," Landless answered.
The Indian looked at the face, thrown back upon the other's shoulder.
"She is fair, and whiter than the flowers the maidens pluck from the
bosom of the pleasant river."
"She is coming to herself," said Landless, and laid her gently down upon
the rock.
Presently she opened her eyes quietly upon him as he knelt beside her.
"You came," she said dreamily. "I dreamt that you would. Where are my
father and my cousin?"
"Seeking you still, madam, I doubt not, though I have not seen them
since the day after you were taken. They went up the Pamunkey and so
missed you. Thanks to this Susquehannock, I am more fortunate."
She lay and looked at him calmly, no surprise, but only a great peace in
her face. "The mulatto," she said, "I feared him more than all the rest.
When I saw him enter the hut I prayed for death. Did you kill him?"
"I trust so," said Landless, "but I am not certain, I was in too great
haste to make sure."
"I do not care," she said. "You will not let him hurt me--if he
lives--nor let the Indians take me again?"
"No, madam," Landless said.
She smiled like a child and closed her eyes. In the moonlight which
blanched her streaming robe and her loosened hair that, falling to her
knees, wrapped her in a mantle of spun gold, she looked a wraith, a
creature woven of the mist of the stream below, a Loerelei sleeping upon
her rock. Landless, still upon his knee beside her, watched her with a
beating heart, while the Susquehannock, leaning upon his gun, bent his
darkly impassive looks upon them both. At length the latter said, "We
must be far from here before the dogs behind us awake, and the Gold Hair
cannot travel swiftly. Let us be going."
"Madam," said Landless.
She opened her eyes and he helped her to her feet. "We must hasten on,"
he said gently. "They will follow us and we must put as many leagues as
possible between us before they find our trail."
"I did not think of that!" she said, with dilating eyes. "I thought it
was all past--the terror--the horror! Let us go, let us hasten! I am
quite strong; I have learned how to walk through the woods. Come!"
The Indian glided before them and led the way over the friendly rocks.
They left them and found themselves upon a carpet of pine needles, and
then in a dell where the fern grew rankly and the rich black earth gave
like a sponge beneath their feet. Here the Indian made Landless carry
Patricia, and himself came last, walking backwards in the footprints of
the other, and pausing after each step to do all that Indian cunning
could suggest to cover their trail. They came to more rocky ledges and
walked along them for a long distance, then found and went up a wide and
shallow stream. Slowly the pale light of dawn diffused itself through
the forest. In the branches overhead myriads of birds began to flutter
and chirp, the squirrels commenced their ceaseless chattering, and
through the white mist, at bends of the stream, they saw deer coming
from the fern of the forest to drink. A great hill rose before them,
bare of trees, covered only with a coarse growth of grass and short blue
thistles in which already buzzed a world of bees; they climbed it and
from the summit watched a ball of fire rise into the cloudless blue. The
morning wind, blowing over that illimitable forest, fanned their brows,
and a tide of woodland sound and incense swept up to them from the world
below. Around them were the Blue Mountains--gigantic masses, cloudy
peaks, vast ramparts rising from a sea of mist--mysterious fastnesses,
scarcely believed in and never seen by the settlers of the level land--a
magic country in which they placed much gold and the wandering colonists
of Roanoke, the South Sea, and long-gowned Eastern peoples.
"Oh, the mountains!" said Patricia. "The dreadful, frowning mountains!
When will we be quit of them? When will we reach the level land and the
blue water?"
"Before many days, I trust," said Landless. "See, our faces are set to
the east--towards home."
She stood in silence for a moment, her face lifted, the color slowly
coming back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes, then said
suddenly:--
"Did my father send you after me?"
"No, madam."
"Then how are you here?"
He looked at her with a smile. "I broke gaol--and came."
A shadow crossed her face, but it was gone in a moment. "I am very
grateful," she said. "You have saved me from worse than death."
"It is I that am thankful," he answered.
They descended the hill in silence and found the Susquehannock, who had
preceded them, squatted before a fire which he had kindled upon a flat
rock beside one of the innumerable streamlets that wound here and there
over the land.
"The dogs yonder will need Iroquois eyes to spy out this trail," he said
with grim satisfaction, as they came up to him. "Let my brother and the
Gold Hair rest by the fire, and Monakatocka will go into the forest and
get them something to eat."
He was gone, his gigantic figure looking larger than life as he moved
through the mist which still filled the hollow between the hills, and
Landless and Patricia sat themselves down beside the fire. Landless
piled upon it the dead wood with which the ground was strewn, and the
flames leaped and crackled, sending up thin blue smoke against the
hillside and reddening the bosom of the placid stream. When he had
finished his task and taken his seat, there fell a silence and
constraint upon the man and woman, brought through so many strange and
wayward paths, through lives so widely differing, to this companionship
in the heart of a waste and savage world. They sat opposite each other
in the ruddy light of the fire, and each, looking into the dark or
glowing hollows, saw there the same thing--the tobacco house and what
had there passed.
"I wish to believe in you," said Patricia at last, lifting appealing
eyes to the opposite face. "But how can I? You lied to me!"
Landless raised his head proudly. "Madam, will you listen to me--to my
defense if you will? You are a Royalist: I am a Commonwealth man. Can
you not see, that as ten years ago, in the estimation of you and yours,
it was all that was just and heroic for a Cavalier to plot the downfall
of the Government which then was, both here and at home, so they of the
Commonwealth saw no disgrace in laboring for their cause, a cause as
real and as high and as holy to them, madam, as was that of the Stuart
and the Church to the Cavalier.... And will not the slave fight for his
liberty? Is it of choice, do you think, that men lie rotting in prison,
in the noisome holds of ships, are bought and sold like oxen, are
chained to the oar, to the tobacco field, are herded with the refuse of
the earth, are obedient to the finger, to the whip? We--they who are
known as Oliverians, and they who are felons, and I who am, if you
choose, of both parties, were haled here with ropes. What allegiance did
we owe to them who had cast us out, or to them who bought us as they buy
dumb beasts? As God lives, none! We were no longer regarded as men, we
were chattels, animals, slaves, caged, and chained. And as the caged
beast will break his bars if he can, so we strove to break ours. You
have been a captive, madam. Is not freedom sweet to you? We also longed
for it. We staked our lives upon the throw--and lost. That dream is
over,--let it go!... There is honor among rebels, madam, as among
thieves. That morning after the storm, I had the choice of lying to you
or of becoming a traitor indeed.... But as to what I had before asked
you to believe, that was the truth, is the truth. I know that in your
eyes I am still the rebel to the King, well deserving the doom which
awaits me, but if, after what I say to you, by the faith of a gentleman,
before the 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.