Ware was not one who would
ever be guilty of falsehood or treachery.

"Oh yes I know it," she replied, "but I wish others to know it as well."

"They will," he said, and then taking her hand in his for one brief
moment he was gone. His disappearance was so sudden and soundless that
he seemed to her to melt away from her sight like a mist before the
wind. She did not even know how he had passed through the palisade, but
he was certainly outside and away. There was something weird about it
and she felt a little fear, as if an event almost supernatural had
occurred.

The sudden departure of Henry Ware to the forest started the slanderous
tongues to wagging again, and they said it was a trap of some kind,
though no one could tell how. A sly report was started that he had
become that worst of all creatures in his time, a renegade, a white man
who allied himself with the red to make war upon his own people. It came
to the ears of Paul Cotter, and the heart of the loyal youth grew hot
within him. Paul was not fond of war and strife, but he had an abounding
courage, and he and Henry Ware had been through danger together.

"He is changed, I will admit," he said, "but if he says we are going to
be attacked, we shall be. I wish that all of us were as true as he."

He touched his gun lock in a threatening manner, and Braxton Wyatt and
the others who stood by said no more in his presence. Yet the course of
the day was against Henry's assertion. The afternoon waned, the sun, a
ball of copper, swung down into the west, long shadows fell and nothing
happened.

The people moved and talked impatiently inside their wooden walls. They
spoke of going about their regular pursuits, there was work that could
be done on the outside in the twilight, and enough time had been lost
already through a false alarm. But some of the older men, with cautious
blood, advised them to wait and their counsel was taken. Night came,
thick and black, and to the more timid full of omens and presages.

The forest sank away in the darkness, nothing was visible fifty yards
from the palisade and in the log houses few lights burned. The little
colony, but a pin point of light, was alone in the vast and circling
wilderness. One of the greatest tests of courage to which the human race
has ever been subjected was at hand. In all directions the forest curved
away, hundreds of miles. It would be a journey of days to find any other
of their own kind, they were hemme