ucted them to the plain.

CHAPTER 19

"Salar.--Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take
his flesh; what's that good for?
Shy.--To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it
will feed my revenge."
--Merchant of Venice

The shades of evening had come to increase the dreariness of the place,
when the party entered the ruins of William Henry. The scout and his
companions immediately made their preparations to pass the night there;
but with an earnestness and sobriety of demeanor that betrayed how
much the unusual horrors they had just witnessed worked on even their
practised feelings. A few fragments of rafters were reared against a
blackened wall; and when Uncas had covered them slightly with brush,
the temporary accommodations were deemed sufficient. The young Indian
pointed toward his rude hut when his labor was ended; and Heyward, who
understood the meaning of the silent gestures, gently urged Munro to
enter. Leaving the bereaved old man alone with his sorrows, Duncan
immediately returned into the open air, too much excited himself to seek
the repose he had recommended to his veteran friend.

While Hawkeye and the Indians lighted their fire and took their
evening's repast, a frugal meal of dried bear's meat, the young man paid
a visit to that curtain of the dilapidated fort which looked out on the
sheet of the Horican. The wind had fallen, and the waves were already
rolling on the sandy beach beneath him, in a more regular and tempered
succession. The clouds, as if tired of their furious chase, were
breaking asunder; the heavier volumes, gathering in black masses about
the horizon, while the lighter scud still hurried above the water, or
eddied among the tops of the mountains, like broken flights of birds,
hovering around their roosts. Here and there, a red and fiery star
struggled through the drifting vapor, furnishing a lurid gleam of
brightness to the dull aspect of the heavens. Within the bosom of the
encircling hills, an impenetrable darkness had already settled; and
the plain lay like a vast and deserted charnel-house, without omen or
whisper to disturb the slumbers of its numerous and hapless tenants.

Of this scene, so chillingly in accordance with the past, Duncan stood
for many minutes a rapt observer. His eyes wandered from the bosom of
the mound, where the foresters were seated around their glimmering fire,
to the fainter light which still lingered in the