uts
faster than could I. For this was my own country, and I trusted it. The
distance was five good miles to the now-abandoned settlement of
Broadalbin, or Fonda's Bush, which some still call it, and my road lay
south, straight as the bee flies, after I had once crossed the trail of
the Oswaya raiders.

I crossed it where I expected to, in a soft and marshy glade,
unblackened by the frost, where blue flowers tufted the swale, and a
clear spring soaked the moss and trickled into a little stream which, I
remembered, was ever swarming with tiny troutlings. Here I found the
print of Cayuga and Mohawk moccasins and white man's boots a-plenty;
and, for one fierce instant, burned to pick up the raw trail, hanging
on their rear to drive one righteous bullet into them when chance gave
me an opportunity. But the impulse fled as it came. Sick at heart I
pressed forward once more, going at a steady wolf-trot; and so
silently, so noiselessly, that twice I routed deer from their hemlock
beds, and once came plump on a tree-cat that puffed up into fury and
backed off spitting and growling, eyes like green flames, and every
hair on end.

Tree after tree I passed, familiar to me in happier years--here an oak
from which, a hundred yards due west, one might find sulphur
water--there a pine, marking a clean mile from the Kennyetto at its
nearest curve, yonder a birch-bordered gulley, haunted of partridge and
woodcock--all these I noted, scarcely seeing them at all, and plodded
on and on until, far away through the trees, I heard the Kennyetto
roaring in its gorge, like the wind at Adriutha.

A stump-field, sadly overgrown with choke-cherry, sumach, and
rabbit-brier, warned me that I was within rifle-hail of the Rangers'
post at Broadalbin. I swung to the west, then south, then west again,
passing the ruins of the little settlement--a charred beam here, an
empty cellar there, yonder a broken well-sweep, until I came to the
ridge above the swamp, where I must turn east and ford the stream,
under the rifles of the post.

There stood the chimney of what had once been my father's house--the
new one, "burned by mistake," ere it had been completed.

I gave it one sullen glance; looked around me, saw but heaps of brick,
mortar, and ashes, where barns, smoke-houses, granaries, and stables
had stood. The cellar of my old home was almost choked with weeds;
slender young saplings had already sprouted among the foundation-stones.

Passing the orc