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Updated: May 8, 2025
Still clasping the child to her bosom, she fell without a groan, while the Indian bounded on towards the three who yet remained alive. The Susquehannock met him. "A chief for a chief," he said with a cold smile, and the two locked together in a deadly embrace.
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.
The world of the white man was far behind them, so far that it might have been another planet for all it threatened them; the Indian villages were few and far between and inhabited by tribes whose tongue the Susquehannock did not know.
When the Ricahecrian was dead, the Susquehannock turned to find Landless one Indian dead before him, another writhing away like a wounded snake confronting across the body at his feet the graceful figure and the amber-hued, evil, smiling face of Luiz Sebastian.
"We are friends," called Landless. "This lady and I are from the Settlements. This Indian is not Algonquin, but Iroquois a Susquehannock, as you may tell by his size. You need have no fear. We are quite alone." The man slowly lowered his gun. "What, in the name of all the fiends, do you here?" he said, wiping away with the back of his hand the cold sweat that had sprung to his forehead.
At times the trail lay before them so plain that even Landless's unaccustomed eyes could read it; at times he saw nothing but untrodden ways no sign to show that man had been in that wilderness since the beginning of the world but the Susquehannock saw and went steadily onward; at times they lost it altogether, to find it hours, days afterwards.... It had led them westward, then south to the banks of the Powhatan, then westward again.
"There can be no ranger or pioneer within many leagues of us!" exclaimed Landless. "No white man hath ever come so far. It must be an Indian!" The Susquehannock shook his head. "Why should an Indian cut down a tree? We kill them and let them stand until they are bare and white like the bones of a man when the wolves have finished with him, and they fall of themselves."
Between him and the Susquehannock, standing beside him with bent body and knife drawn back against his breast, and the invaders, was a space some few feet in width, and in this space something dreadful now happened. On one side lay the body of the man with the woman crouched above it, on the other a pile of skins upon which lay the little child.
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.
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