Their faces
expressed nothing, whatever they may have felt. Henry repeated the
farewell, hesitated no longer and plunged into the forest. But he
stopped when he was thirty or forty yards away and looked back. The
chief and the warriors stood side by side as he had left them,
motionless and gazing after him. It was night now and to eyes less keen
than Henry's their forms would have melted into the dusk, but he saw
every outline distinctly, the lean brown features and the black shining
eyes. He waved his hands to them--a white man's action--and resumed his
flight, not looking back again.
It was a dark night and the forest stretched on, black and endless, the
trunks of the trees standing in rows like phantoms of the dusk. Henry
looked up at the moon and the few stars, and reckoned his course.
Wareville lay many hundred miles away, chiefly to the south, and he had
a general idea of the direction, but the war party would know exactly,
and its advantage there would perhaps be compensation for the superior
speed of one man. But Henry, for the present, would not think of such a
disaster as failure; on the contrary he reckoned with nothing but
success, and he felt a marvelous elation.
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