, he used to argue. He could tell all he knew, and
more besides, in the somewhat limited English vocabulary at his command.
"Parlez vous? Parlez, fou!" he was wont to exclaim, feeling very clever.
How should he have dreamed that Odalie's little _Vocabulaire Francais_
would be more efficacious to save his life than his rifle and his deadly
aim?

[Illustration: "The canoe rocked in the swirls."]

He looked toward her once more in his despair. The boats were now among
a series of obstructions formed by floating debris of a recent
storm,--many branches of trees, here and there a bole itself, uprooted
and flung into the river by the violence of the tempest,--which
necessitated careful steering and paddling and watching the current to
take them through safely. It threw the two boats apart for a space,
prolonging Hamish's suspense, yet serving as a reprieve to the ordeal of
his examination as to his proficiency in the French language by the
erudite Cherokee. The canoe rocked in the swirls, and although
Willinawaugh sat still in stately impassiveness, Odalie and Fifine clung
to the gunwale. Hamish's eyes met Odalie's, which were clear, liquidly
bright, as if fired with some delightful anticipation, and yet weary and
feverishly eager. Oh, this was delirium! She did not realize her
surroundings; her intelligence was gone! His poor young heart swelled
nearly to bursting as he turned back with aching arms and dazzled eyes
and throbbing, feverish pulses to the careful balancing of the paddle,
for Willinawaugh was an exacting coxswain. Hamish could not know what
vision had been vouchsafed to Odalie in the midst of the gloomy woods
while the other Indians and Willinawaugh had wrangled and he had hung
absorbed upon their words as on the decrees of fate. Even she at first
had deemed it but hallucination, the figment of some fever of the
brain--this had been a day of dreams! Yet there it had stood on the
river bank with the primeval woods around it, with the red sunset
amongst the clouds above it, with the sunset below it, reflected in the
current of the river, full of sheen and full of shadow,--a figure, a
hunter, looking out at the boats; a white man,--a man she had never
before seen.

How he stared! She dared make no signal of distress. She only turned
her head that she might look back covertly with a face full of meaning.
The next moment she saw him mount his horse in the buffalo path in the
cane-brake and gallop off at a breaknec