n forest, without shelter or
harbour for an ambushed foe. But at that moment Edith caught him by the
arm, and turned upon him a countenance more wan with fear than that she
had exhibited upon first hearing the cries of Stackpole. It expressed,
indeed, more than alarm,--it was the highest degree of terror, and the
feeling was so overpowering that her lips, though moving as in the act of
speech, gave forth no sound whatever. But what her lips refused to tell,
her finger, though shaking in the ague that convulsed every fibre of her
frame, pointed out; and Roland, following it with his eyes, beheld the
object that had excited so much emotion. He started himself, as his gaze
fell upon a naked Indian stretched under a tree hard by, and sheltered
from view only by a dead bough lately fallen from its trunk, yet lying so
still and motionless that he might easily have been passed by without
observation in the growing dusk and twilight of the woods, had it not
been for the instinctive terrors of the pony, which, like other horses,
and, indeed, all other domestic beasts in the settlements, often thus
pointed out to their masters the presence of an enemy.

The rifle of the soldier was in an instant cocked and at his shoulder,
while the pedler and Emperor, as it happened, were too much discomposed
at the spectacle to make any such show of battle. They gazed blankly upon
the leader, whose piece, settling down into an aim that must have been
fatal, suddenly wavered, and then, to their surprise, was withdrawn.

"The slayer has been here before us," he exclaimed,--"the man is dead and
scalped already!"

With these words he advanced to the tree, and the others following, they
beheld with horror the body of a savage, of vast and noble proportions,
lying on its face across the roots of the tree, and glued, it might
almost be said, to the earth by a mass of coagulated blood, that had
issued from the scalp and axe-cloven skull. The fragments of a rifle
shattered, as it seemed, by a violent blow against the tree under which
he Jay, were scattered at his side, with a broken powder-horn, a
splintered knife, the helve of a tomahawk, and other equipments of a
warrior, all in like manner shivered to pieces by the unknown assassin.
The warrior seemed to have perished only after a fearful struggle; the
earth was torn where he lay, and his hands, yet grasping the soil, were
dyed a double red in the blood of his antagonist, or perhaps in his own.

W