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Updated: May 19, 2025
At the sound of my foot-fall, he turned slowly around, and came forward to greet me; his face was very serious, and his manner steady and quiet. "I am glad you have come Amey!" he said, as he took my hand and held it tenderly for a moment, "I feared you would send me away again to-day although, I do not wish to intrude upon you in your grief.
At night the boat forged on through the deep solitudes of the river, hardly ever discovering a light to testify to a human presence mile after mile and league after league the vast bends were guarded by unbroken walls of forest that had never been disturbed by the voice or the foot-fall of man or felt the edge of his sacrilegious axe.
During the first part of our confinement we felt a cold chill at our hearts every time we heard a foot-fall near the cave dreading lest it should prove to be that of our executioner. But as time dragged heavily on, we ceased to feel this alarm, and began to experience such a deep, irrepressible longing for freedom, that we chafed and fretted in our confinement like tigers.
From the beer-hall near by came the sound of music; over the pavement rattled a cart drawn by two weary dogs and followed by a yet wearier peasant-woman; with a brave clink-clank of spurs and sword strode by a brave lieutenant. Above all these sounds Fräulein Vogel's quick ear caught a light foot-fall on the bare stairs without. She crossed the parlor and flung open the door. "Mees."
Every thing remained quiet; she had not heard even a foot-fall; and the solemnity of this silence, with the mysterious form she saw, subdued her spirits, so that she was moving from the casement, when, on a sudden, she observed the figure start away, and glide down the rampart, after which it was soon lost in the obscurity of night.
The Indians, with the exception of a party of scouts, had been the last to quit their rude encampment, and as they now, in their eagerness to get to the front, glided stealthily by in the deep snows on either side of the more beaten track by which the troops advanced, and so utterly without sound in their foot-fall, that they might rather have been compared to spirits of the wilds, than to human beings.
It was like the shriek of the hare when the hounds are upon it. She clasps her hands and cries out, "O my God, help me." There was no voice of any that answered; there was no sound of foot-fall on the staircase; no one entered the door; and yet that agonized cry had reached the heart it was meant for.
The body was dragged away and the blood-thirsty fiends sat waiting for the approach of another victim. Half an hour passed, and no other rap came upon the door. An hour went, and still no sound of foot-fall. All this while the savages sat mute as stones, each holding his murderous rifle in readiness for instant use. "Ugh!" grunted the chief, "no more coming. We go down and shoot em at em houses."
I could preserve thieves' honor, and yet regain some shred of that which I had forfeited as a man! So I thought as we stood face to face, our ears straining for the least movement below, our eyes locked in a common anxiety. Another muffled foot-fall felt rather than heard and we exchanged grim nods of simultaneous excitement.
But when it comes to talking one's common thoughts, those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an interminable procession of every hue and garb, there are few, indeed, that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen.
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