s of the tyranny he practiced, thus remote from civilization,
that however jocose he might be not a trace of responsive merriment must
decorate the faces of the men. They were all now, as was meet, grave and
wooden. At the orders in his clear, ringing voice--"Let fall!" and the
oars struck the water with emphasis, "Give way!"--Odalie's tears must
needs flow anew. She gazed at the dozen fresh, florid young faces, as
the boat swung round and they came once more near the canoe, as if they
were a vision of saints vouchsafed to some poor groping, distraught
spirit,--when they were far indeed from being saints, though good enough
in their way, too! They all looked with unconscious sympathy at her as
she sat and wept and looked at them, and Corporal O'Flynn, moved by the
tears, exclaimed below his breath, "But, be jabbers, afther all, what's
the good of 'em now--better have been cryin' yesterday, or mebbe the day
before. Back oars! Now--now! Give way!"

He was the last in the little fleet, and Hamish paddled briskly now to
keep ahead, as he was evidently expected to do, for Corporal O'Flynn
intended that his own boat should bring up the rear. As they fared thus
along, Odalie noted the inflowing of that tributary, the Tellico
River--how solitary, how remote, how possible its loneliness had
rendered the scheme of Willinawaugh. Some distance beyond appeared a
settler's cabin in an oasis of cultivated land in the midst of the dense
cane-brake; then others, now dull and dusky in the blue twilight, with
the afterglow of the sunset redly aflare above in the amber sky and
below in the gray and glimmering water; now with a lucent yellow flicker
from the wide-open door gemming the night with the scintillations of the
hearthstone, set like a jewel in the center of the wilderness; now
sending forth a babbling of childish voices where the roof-tree had been
planted close by the river-side and the passing of the boats had drawn
all the household to the brink. How many they seemed--these cabins of
the adventurous pioneers! How many happy homes--alas, that there should
ever be cause to cry it were better for them had they never been!

Odalie began to realize that she owed her liberty and perhaps her life
to the first of these settlers who had espied the craft upon the river;
as she marked the many windings and tortuous curves of the stream she
understood that he must have galloped along some straight, direct route
to the fort to acquaint the