een no other white man in the
party.

"I saw no other," he replied: "but there was a tall man in a blanket,
wearing a red turban, who looked at me from a distance; and I thought he
was a half-breed, like Doe,--for so, at first, I supposed the latter to
be."

"Well, friend! And he seemed to command the party, did he not?" demanded
Nathan, with interest.

"The leader," replied Roland, "was a vile, grim old rascal, that they
called Kenauga, or Kenauga, or--"

"Wenonga!" cried Nathan, with extraordinary vivacity, his whole
countenance, in fact, lighting up with the animation of intense
interest,--"an old man tall and raw-boned, a scar on his nose and
cheek, a halt in his gait, his left middle-finger short of a joint,
and a buzzard's beak and talons tied to his hair?--It is Wenonga, the
Black-Vulture. Truly, little Peter! thee is but a dolt and a dog, that
thee told me nothing about it!"

The soldier remarked, with some surprise, the change of Nathan's visage,
and with still more, his angry reproaches of the trusty animal, the first
he had heard him utter.

"And who then is the old Black-Vulture," he asked, "that he should drive
from your mind even the thought of my poor wretched Edith?"

"Thee is but a boy in the woods, if thee never heard of Wenonga, the
Shawnee," replied Nathan hastily,--"a man that has left the mark of his
axe on many a ruined cabin along the frontier, from the Bloody Run of
Bedford to the Kenhawa and the Holston. He is the chief that boasts he
has no heart: and, truly, he has none, being a man that has drunk the
blood of women and children--Friend! thee kinswoman's scalp is already
hanging at his girdle!"

This horrible announcement, uttered with a fierce earnestness that proved
the sincerity of the speaker, froze Roland's blood in his veins, and he
stood speechless and gasping; until Nathan, noting his agitation, and
recovering in part from his own ferment of spirits, exclaimed, even more
hastily than before--"Truly, I have told thee what is false--thee
kinswoman is safe,--a prisoner, but alive and safe."

"You have told me she is dead--murdered by the foul assassins," said
Roland; "and if it be so, it avails not to deny it. If it be so, Nathan,"
he continued, with a look of desperation, "I call Heaven and earth to
witness, that I will pursue the race of the slayers with thrice the fury
of their own malice,--never to pause, never to rest, never to be
satisfied with vengeance, while an India