e in the wanderers, although I cannot say it
was a cheerful scene. I never realized until Mrs. MacLeod reached the
gate here the meaning of the phrase 'dissolved in tears.'"

Alexander looked anxiously at his wife--had she found the journey, then,
so vexatious?

"I was tired and dusty," she said demurely, as if in explanation. "My
shoes--one of them was in tatters; and, Sandy, I was _so_ ashamed."

Captain Stuart stared at her for a moment and broke into a laugh.
"That's putting the shoe on the other foot, at all events," he said.

He and Captain Demere, accompanied by the newcomer, turned into the
block-house, in order to question Sandy as to any information he might
have been able to acquire concerning French emissaries, the disposition
of the Cherokees, the devastation of the Virginia settlements, and any
further news of General Forbes and the fall of Fort Duquesne now called
Fort Pitt. However, Sandy had naught to report, save the angry threat
with the tomahawk which gave way upon the assurance that the party was
French. In the solitary journey with those who had resigned their boat
to Willinawaugh, he had experienced no worse treatment than the
destruction of his pocket compass. With this at first they had been
highly delighted, but some ten miles from the fort they had been joined
by an Indian who declared he had seen such things in Carolina, doubtless
among land-surveyors, and who stigmatized it as a "land-stealer,"
forthwith crushing it with his tomahawk. MacLeod had expected this
revelation to bring about ill-feeling, but the party shortly met the
hunters of the post, who had insisted on conducting him to the fort on
suspicion of being a Frenchman.

These pioneers never forgot that day, a rich, languid day of the
lingering St. Martin's summer-tide. What though in the early morn the
frost had lain in rime as white as snow on the bare branches of the
great trees where now the yellow sunshine dripped in liquid light! A
tender haze like that of spring suffused the depths of the forest, the
gleaming, glancing reaches of the river, the level summit-lines of the
great massive purple mountains of the west, and half concealed, and
shifting half revealed, always elusively, the fine azure snow-capped
domes against the pearl-tinted eastern sky. What though the flowers were
dead, the leaves had fled, the woods were bare and rifled,--when the
necromancy of the powers of the air filled all the winter day with
sweet, subt