e the impression of the bleak and dark loneliness outside
the walls of the fort, and when the three were together, untrammeled by
the presence of others, they were free to indulge their grief and their
awful terror for husband and brother and father. They could not speak of
it, but they sat down on a buffalo rug spread before the fire, and all
three wept for the unuttered thought. The suspense, the separation of
the little party, seemed unbearable. They felt that they might better
have endured anything had they been together. Perhaps it was well for
the elder two that their attention was diverted now and again by the
effort to console Fifine in a minor distress, for with the ill-adjusted
sense of proportion peculiar to childhood she had begun to clamor loudly
too for her cat--her _mignonne_, her _douce fillette_ that she had
brought so far in her arms or on her back.

Alas, poor Fifine! to learn thus early how sharper than a serpent's
tooth it is to have a thankless child! For indeed Kitty might have
seemed to lie under the imputation of having merely "played baby" in
order to secure free transportation. At all events, she was a cat now,
the only one in the fort, and for all she knew in the settlement. The
_douce mignonne_ was in high elation, now walking the palisades, now
peeping in at a loop-hole in the upper story of one of the block-houses
where a sentinel was regularly on guard, being able to scan from the
jutting outlook not only the exterior of the fort on two sides, but a
vast extent of darkling country. In his measured tramp to and fro in the
shadowy apartment lighted only by the glimmer of the night without, he
suddenly saw a flicker at the loop-hole he was approaching, caught a
transient glimpse of a face, the gleam of a fiery eye, and he nearly
dropped his loaded firelock in amazement.

"By George!" he exclaimed, "I thought that was a blarsted cat!"

He had not seen one since he left Charlestown a year before.

He walked to the loop-hole and looked far down from the projecting wall
and along the parapet of the curtain and the scarp to the opposite
bastion with its tower-like block-house.

Nothing--all quiet as the grave or the desert. He could hear the river
sing; he could see in the light of the stars, and a mere flinder of a
moon, the clods of earth on the ground below,--naught else. For the
_douce mignonne_, with her back all handsomely humped, had suddenly
sprung aside and fled down the interior slo