position of Ella was such, that,
by slightly turning her head, she could command a view of the features
of the renegade; whose strange workings, as before noted, served to fix
her attention and divide her thoughts between him, as the cause of her
present unhappiness, and that unhappiness itself--and she gazed on his
loathsome, contorted countenance, with much the same feeling as one
might be supposed to gaze upon a serpent coiling itself around the
body, whose deadly fangs, either sooner or later, would assuredly give
the fatal stroke of death. She noted the sudden start of Girty, and the
wildness with which he peered around him, with feelings of hope and
fear--hope, that rescue might be at hand--fear, lest something more
dreadful was about to happen. At length Girty started again, and turned
his head toward Ella so suddenly, that she had not time to withdraw her
eyes ere his were fixed searchingly upon them.

"And are you too awake?" he said, with something resembling a sigh.
"I thought the innocent could ever sleep!"

"Not when the guilty are abroad, with deeds of death, and friends
exposed," returned Ella, bitterly.

"Ah! true--true!" rejoined Girty, again looking toward the fire, in a
musing mood.

"Well may you muse and writhe under the tortures of your guilty acts,"
continued Ella, in the same bitter tone; "for you have much to answer
for, Simon Girty."

"And who told you the past tortured me?" cried Girty, quickly, turning
on her a fierce expression.

"Your changing features and guilty starts," answered Ella.

"Ha! then you have been a spy upon me, have you?" said Girty, pressing
the words slowly through his clenched teeth, knitting his shaggy brows,
and fixing his eye with intensity upon hers, until she quailed and
trembled beneath its seeming fiery glance; which the light, whereby it
was seen, rendered more demon-like than usual; while it made shadow
chase shadow, like waves of the sea, across his face: "You have been
a spy upon my actions, eh? Beware! Ella Barnwell--beware! Do not
put your head in the lion's mouth too often, or he may think the bait
troublesome; and by ----! had other than you told me what I just now
heard, he or she had not lived to repeat it."

"Far better an early death and innocence, than a long life of guilt and
misery," returned Ella, at once regaining her boldness of speech; "Far
better the fate you speak of, than mine."

"And would you prefer being wedded to death, rather t