resent
plans, was really possessed by his conductor, and he cared not to
question how it had been arrived at; it was an augury of success, of
which he felt the full influence.

The evening of that day found him upon the banks of the Kentucky, the
wild and beautiful river from which the wilderness around derived its
name; and the next morning, crossing it on a raft of logs speedily
constructed by Nathan, he trod upon the soil of the north side, famous
even then for its beauty and for the deeds of bloodshed almost daily
enacted among its scattered settlements, and destined, unhappily, to be
rendered still more famous for a tragedy which that very day witnessed,
far off among the barren ridges of the Licking, where sixty of the
district's best and bravest sons fell the victims less of Indian subtlety
than of their own unparalleled rashness. But of that bloody field the
travellers were to hear thereafter; the vultures were winging their
flight towards the fatal scene; but they alone could snuff, in that
silent desert, the scent of the battle that vexed it.

Sleeping that night in the woods, the next day, being the fourth since
they left the Piankeshaw camp, beheld the travellers upon the banks of
the Ohio; which, seen, for the first time, in the glory of summer, its
crystal waters wheeling placidly along amid hills and forests, ever
reflected in the bright mirror below, and with the air of virgin solitude
which, through so many leagues of its course, it still presents, never
fails to fill the beholder's mind with an enchanting sense of its
loveliness.

Here a raft was again constructed; and the adventurers pushing boldly
across, were soon upon the opposite shore. This feat accomplished, Nathan
took the precaution to launch their frail float adrift in the current,
that no tell-tale memorial of a white man's visit should remain to be
read by returning warriors. The next moment, ascending the bank of the
river, he plunged with his companion into the midst of brake and forest;
neither of them then dreaming that upon the very spot where they toiled
through the tangled labyrinths, a few years should behold the magic
spectacle of a fair city, the Queen of the West, uprisen with the
suddenness, and almost the splendour, of the _Fata-Morgana_, though,
happily, doomed to no such evanescent existence. Then handling their
arms, like men who felt they were in a foe-man's country, and knew that
every further step was to be taken in pe