their trail. Sometimes they struggled for hours through coverts of wild
grape, thick with fruit; sometimes they walked for miles down endless
colonnades of pine trees, where the needle-strewn ground was like ice
for slipperiness, and the blue sky gleamed faintly through the far away
tree tops. The wind in the pines rose and fell in long, measured
cadences. It made the only sound there, for the birds forgot to sing and
the insect world kept silence in those vast and sombre cathedrals.

On the afternoon of the twentieth day they came to a halt upon the bank
of a small stream that fell purling over a long, smooth slide of
limestone into the river. Mountains had loomed into existence in the
last few days. In the distance they made a vast blue rampart which
seemed to prop the western skies. When the sun sank behind them it was
as though a mighty warrior had entered his fortress. Nearer at hand they
fell into lofty hills, over which the forest undulated in unbroken
green. In front the river made a sudden turn and was lost to sight,
disappearing through a frowning gateway of gray cliffs as completely as
though it had plunged into the bowels of the earth.... Landless sat down
on the bank of the stream above the fall and, chin in hand, gazed at
the mountain-piled horizon. The Indian, leaning against a great sycamore
whose branches trailed in the water, watched him attentively.

"My brother is tired," he said at last.

Landless shook his head. The Susquehannock paused, still with his eyes
upon the other's face, and then went on, "We have searched and have
found nothing. There have been five suns since the great rains blotted
out the trail. My brother has done very much. Let him say so and we will
go back to the falls of the far west and thence to the northward, to the
pleasant river, to Monakatocka's people, to the graves of his fathers.
And my brother will be welcome to the Conestogas, and he shall be made
one of them, and become a great warrior, and both he and Monakatocka
will forget the evil days when they were slaves--until they meet a
paleface from the great water. My brother has but to speak."

"If these hills in front of us," said Landless with gloomy emphasis,
"were higher than the Alps, I would climb them. If behind them there
were another range, and then another, and another, if we looked upon the
nearest wave of an ocean of mountains, I would climb them all. If they
are before us, sooner or later I shall find them