ble location, and he promised to contrive to slip
them past Fort Loudon without the commandant's knowledge.

They restrained all expression of objection or discomfort and bore their
growing distresses with a fortitude that might rival the stoicism of a
savage. Only when an aside was possible, MacLeod besought his wife to
loose the burden of one of the packhorses and mount the animal herself.
She shook her head resolutely. She had already suffered grief enough for
the household stores she had left behind. To these precious remaining
possessions she clung desperately. "When I can no longer walk," she
said, with a flash in her eye which admonished him to desist.

They offered no comment on their route, although it seemed that they
had climbed the mountain two days ago for the express purpose of
descending it again, but on the eastern side. MacLeod, however, at
length realized that the Indian was following some faint trace, well
distinguishable to his skilled eye, and the difficulties of the steep
descent were rendered more tolerable by his faith in the competence of
his guide. The packhorses found it hard work filing down the sharp
declivities and sustaining the equilibrium of their burden. The chief,
with his lordly impatience and superiority to domestic concerns,
evidently fumed because of the delay they occasioned, and had he not
supposed that the contents of the bales of goods were merchandise and
trinkets to be bartered with the Indians for peltry, instead of Odalie's
slim resources of housekeeping wares,--sheets, and table-linen and
garments, and frugal supplies of flax and seeds,--he would not have
suffered the slow progress.

Through the new country below, that they had watched from the heights,
they went now, the mountains standing sentinel all around the
horizon--east and west, and north and south, sometimes nearer, sometimes
more distant; always mountains in sight, like some everlastingly
uplifting thought, luring a life to a higher plane of being. Now and
again the way wended along the bank of a river, with the steeps showing
in the waters below as well as against the sky above, and one day when
they had but recently broken their camp on its shores there shot out
from beneath an overhanging boscage of papaw trees a swift, arrowy thing
akin to a fish, akin to a bird--an Indian canoe, in which were three
braves.

The poor pioneers were exhausted with their long and swift journey;
their hearts, which had been