All his old life, the dear familiar ties surged up, and were hot upon
his brain. His place was there! with them! not here! He had yielded too
easily to the spell of the woods and the call of the old primeval
nature. He might have escaped long ago, there had been many
opportunities, but he could not see them. His blindness had been
willful, the child of his own desires. He knew it too well now. He saw
himself guilty and guilty he was.
But in that moment of agony and fear for his own he was paying the price
of his guilt. The sense of helplessness was crushing. In two hours the
war party would start and it would flit southward like the wind, as
silent but far more deadly. No, nothing could save the innocent people
at Wareville; they were as surely doomed as if their destruction had
already taken place.
But not one of these emotions, so tense and so deep, was written on the
face of him whom even the Shawnees did not know to be white. Not a
feature changed, the Indian stoicism and calm, the product alike of his
nature and cultivation, clung to him. His eyes were veiled and his
movements had their habitual gravity and dignity.
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