, the friend of his childhood.

"Old Scythia!" exclaimed Corona, interrupting the narrative.

"Yes, dear; the old seeress of Raven Roost, as they used to call her. Of
course, I never, even as a boy, believed in the supernatural powers of
divination ascribed to her, but I must credit her with wonderful
intuitions. She had divined the very crisis that had come, and in that
hour of my agony and humiliation she exercised a strange power over me,"
said Rothsay; and then he took up the thread of his narrative again.

He told her that on leaving the State capital he had taken neither
railway carriage nor river steamboat, but had tramped, with old Scythia
by his side, all the way from the Cumberland Mountains to the
Southwestern frontier.

The journey had taken them all the summer, for they traveled very
slowly--sometimes walking no more than ten miles a day, sometimes
sleeping on pallets made of leaves under the trees of the forest,
sometimes reaching a pioneer's log hut, where they could get a hot
supper and a night's lodging. Sometimes stopping over Sunday in some
settlement where there was no church, and where Rule, though not an
ordained minister, would on Christian principles hold a service and
preach a sermon.

So they journeyed over the mountains, and through the valleys and
forests, until at length, in the end of October, they arrived at the
poorest, loneliest, and most forlorn of all the pioneer settlements they
had seen.

This was La Terrepeur, on the borders of the Indian Reserve. It was a
settlement of about twenty log huts, in a small valley shut in by
densely wooded hills, and watered by a narrow brook. It was too near the
country of the Comanches for safety, and too far from the nearest fort
for protection. There was neither church nor school house within a
hundred miles.

The travelers were hospitably received by the pioneers, and here, as the
autumn was far advanced, and travel difficult, they determined to halt
for the winter, at least, and in the spring to go farther south in
search of Scythia's tribe, the Nez Percees, who had been moved away from
their former hunting grounds.

They were feasted and lodged by the hutters that night. The next morning
the men turned out in a body, felled trees and cleared a spot on the
slope of a wooded hill, sawed logs and built two huts, one for Rothsay,
and one for old Scythia. They were finished before night. And then the
settlers had a house-warming, which was a