n--

"I did not come here to pass my time in foolish tears, nor you to try to
stop them. What then has brought you hither?"

"I must see the inmate of that tent."

"You know what it contains?"

"I am taught to believe I do; and I bear a letter, which I must deliver
with my own hands. If the animal prove a quadruped, Ishmael is a true
man--if a biped, fledged or unfledged, I care not, he is false, and our
compactum at an end!"

Ellen made a sign for the Doctor to remain where he was, and to be
silent. She then glided into the tent, where she continued many minutes,
that proved exceedingly weary and anxious to the expectant without, but
the instant she returned, she took him by the arm, and together they
entered beneath the folds of the mysterious cloth.

CHAPTER XII

Pray God the Duke of York excuse himself!
--King Henry VI.

The mustering of the borderers on the following morning was silent,
sullen, and gloomy. The repast of that hour was wanting in the
inharmonious accompaniment with which Esther ordinarily enlivened
their meals; for the effects of the powerful opiate the Doctor had
administered still muddled her intellects. The young men brooded over
the absence of their elder brother, and the brows of Ishmael himself
were knit, as he cast his scowling eyes from one to the other, like a
man preparing to meet and to repel an expected assault on his
authority. In the midst of this family distrust, Ellen and her midnight
confederate, the naturalist, took their usual places among the children,
without awakening suspicion or exciting comment. The only apparent
fruits of the adventure in which they had been engaged, were occasional
upliftings of the eyes, on the part of the Doctor, which were mistaken
by the observers for some of his scientific contemplations of the
heavens, but which, in reality, were no other than furtive glances at
the fluttering walls of the proscribed tent.

At length the squatter, who had waited in vain for some more decided
manifestation of the expected rising among his sons, resolved to make a
demonstration of his own intentions.

"Asa shall account to me for this undutiful conduct!" he observed. "Here
has the livelong night gone by, and he out-lying on the prairie, when
his hand and his rifle might both have been wanted in a brush with the
Siouxes, for any right he had to know the contrary."

"Spare your breath, good