and eagerly.

Kenneth silently recognized the small creature who had moved him to a
trivial charity which had resulted in so strangely disproportionate a
disaster. Doubtless, however, the squaws would never have been able to
return to their accustomed place but for the food which he had given
them, sustaining them on the journey home.

It would imply some mission of importance surely, he thought, to induce
the woman to expose the child to a tempest like this; and indeed the
pappoose, buffeted by the wind, the rain full in his face, lifted up his
voice again in a protest so loud and vehement that his mother was
enabled to see the great white owl, whose business it is to remove
troublesome little Cherokees from the sphere of worry of their elders,
already winging his way hither. One might wonder if the Oo-koo-ne-kah
would do worse for him than his maternal guardian, but pelted by the
pitiless rain he promptly sank his bleatings to a mere babble of a
whimper. Thereby Kenneth was better enabled to hear what the woman was
saying to the sentinel.

An important mission indeed, as MacVintie presently gathered, for she
must needs lift her voice stridently to be heard above the din of the
elements. Some powder, only a little it was true, had been sent by the
French to the town, and a share had been left at the house of the
sentinel that night in the general distribution. But there was no one at
home. All his family were across the mountains, whither, according to
the custom of the Cherokees, they had gone to find and bring back the
body of his brother, who had been killed in the fight at Etchoee. And
the leak in the roof! She, his nearest neighbor, had just bethought
herself of the leak in the roof! Would not the powder, the precious
powder, be ruined? Had he not best go to see at once about it?

He hesitated, letting the butt of his gun sink to the ground. She seized
the weapon promptly. She would stand guard here till he returned, she
promised. The prisoners were bound. They could not move. It would
require but an instant's absence,--and the powder was so scarce, so
precious!

The next moment the sentinel was gone! The darkness descended, doubly
intense, after a succession of electric flashes; the rain fell with
renewed force. MacVintie suddenly heard the babbling whimper quite close
beside him, somewhat subdued by a fierce maternal admonition to listen
to the terrible voice of the Oo-koo-ne-kah, coming to catch a Cherokee