not
break,--it seemed as if it might never dawn again; only a pallid
visibility came gradually upon clouds that had enshrouded all the world.
The earth and the sky were alike indistinguishable; the mountains were
as valleys, the valleys as plains. One might scarcely make shift to see
a hand before the face. Through this white pall, this cloud of nullity,
came ever the dolorous chant, "_Yo-he-ta-wah! Yo-he-ta-weh!
Yo-he-ta-hah! Yo-he-ta-heh!_" as in their grief and poignant bereavement
the ignorant and barbarous Indians called upon the God who made them,
and He who made them savages doubtless heard them.

Creeping out into the invisibility of the clouded day, Abram Varney had
not great fear of detection. The mists that shielded him from view
furthered still his flight, for his footsteps were hardly to be
distinguished amidst the continual dripping of the moisture from the
leaves of the dank autumnal woods. At night he knew the savages would be
most on the alert. They would scarcely suspect his flight in the broad
day. Moreover, their suspicions of his presence here were lulled;
craftily enough he followed after the horsemen who fancied they were
pursuing him--they would scarcely look for their quarry hard on their
own heels. He experienced no sentiment but one of intense satisfaction
when, as invisible as a spirit, he passed his own trading-house, and
divined from the sounds within that the Indians were busy in sacking it,
albeit a greater financial loss than seems probable at the present day;
for the Indian trade was a very considerable commerce, as the accounts
of those times will show. The English and French governments did not
disdain to compete for its monopoly with various nations of Indians, for
the sake of gaining control of the savages thereby, in view of supplies
furnished by the white traders vending these commodities and resident in
the tribes.

Recollections of the items and values of his invoices, afflicting to
Varney's commercial spirit, threaded his consciousness only when again
safe in Charlestown. He reached that haven at last by the exercise of
great good judgment. He realized that another party would presently be
sent out when no news of capture came from the earlier pursuers; he
divined that the second expedition would take the Chickasaw path, for
being friendly to the British, that tribe would naturally be thought of
as a refuge to an Englishman in trouble with the Cherokees; therefore
Varney, les