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"To sift a score of murderers out of a murderous nation will be like searching the ocean for a wave." Then Shalah spoke. "The trail is ten suns old, but I can follow it. The men were of the Meebaw tribe by this token." And he held up a goshawk's feather. "The bird that dropped that lives beyond the peaks of Shubash. The Meebaw are quick hunters and gross eaters, and travel slow.
I might dream of horrors in the low coast forests among their swampy creeks, but in that clear high world of the hills I believed lay safety. I could have gazed at them for hours, but Shalah would permit of no delay. He hurried us across the open meadows, and would not relax his pace till we were on a low wooded ridge with the young waters of the Rapidan running in a shallow vale beneath.
We will find them by the Tewawha." "All in good time," I said. "Retribution must wait till we have finished our task. Can you find the Meebaw men again?" "Yea," said Shalah, "though they took wings and flew over the seas I should find them." Then we hastened away from that glade, none speaking to the other.
But in that moment of bodily weakness and mental confusion I was shaken with a longing to follow them, to find what lay beyond the farthest cloud-topped mountain, to cross the wide rivers, and haply to come to the infinite and mystic Ocean of the West. "Would to God I were with them!" I sighed. "Will you come, brother?" Shalah whispered, a strange light in his eyes.
I sent out Bertrand and Donaldson to trap in the woods; Ringan, with Grey and Shalah, stayed at home to strengthen still further the stockade and protect Elspeth; while I took my musket and some pack-thongs and went up the hill-side to look for game. We were trysted to be back an hour before sundown, and if some one of us did not find food we should go supperless.
With her Grey was the courtly cavalier, ready with a neat phrase and a line from the poets. Donaldson and Shalah were unmoved; no woman could make any difference to their wilderness silence. The Frenchman Bertrand grew almost gay. She spoke to him in his own tongue, and he told her all about the little family he had left and his days in far-away France. But in Ringan was the oddest change.
"What is it?" I asked unthinkingly. "The Shenandoah," Shalah said, and I never stopped to ask how he knew the name. He was gazing at the sight with hungry eyes, he whose gaze was, for usual, so passionless. That prospect gave me a happy feeling of comfort; why, I cannot tell, except that the place looked so bright and habitable.
We had boucanned a quantity of deer's flesh two days before, and this, with the fruit of yesterday's trapping, made a fair stock in our larder. Then I announced my plan. "I am going to try to reach Lawrence," I said. No one spoke. Shalah lifted his head, and looked at me gravely. "Does any man object?" I asked sharply, for my temper was all of an edge.
Indeed, they were as fair as many an Englishman, and their slim, golden-brown bodies were not painted in the maniac fashion of the Cherokees. They stood stock still, watching us with a dreadful impassivity which was more frightening to me than violence. Then I, too, was overtaken by the grey screen. "Will they follow?" I asked Shalah. "I do not think so.
"With good fortune, we shall soon see the rest pass, and then have a clear road for the hills." "I saw no fresh scalps," I said, "so they seem to have missed our man on the horse." I was proud of my simple logic. All that Shalah replied was, "The rider was a woman. "How, in Heaven's name, can you tell?" I asked. He held out a long hair. "I found it among the vines at the level of a rider's head."
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