nd chirp, the squirrels commenced their ceaseless chattering, and
through the white mist, at bends of the stream, they saw deer coming
from the fern of the forest to drink. A great hill rose before them,
bare of trees, covered only with a coarse growth of grass and short blue
thistles in which already buzzed a world of bees; they climbed it and
from the summit watched a ball of fire rise into the cloudless blue. The
morning wind, blowing over that illimitable forest, fanned their brows,
and a tide of woodland sound and incense swept up to them from the world
below. Around them were the Blue Mountains--gigantic masses, cloudy
peaks, vast ramparts rising from a sea of mist--mysterious fastnesses,
scarcely believed in and never seen by the settlers of the level land--a
magic country in which they placed much gold and the wandering colonists
of Roanoke, the South Sea, and long-gowned Eastern peoples.

"Oh, the mountains!" said Patricia. "The dreadful, frowning mountains!
When will we be quit of them? When will we reach the level land and the
blue water?"

"Before many days, I trust," said Landless. "See, our faces are set to
the east--towards home."

She stood in silence for a moment, her face lifted, the color slowly
coming back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes, then said
suddenly:--

"Did my father send you after me?"

"No, madam."

"Then how are you here?"

He looked at her with a smile. "I broke gaol--and came."

A shadow crossed her face, but it was gone in a moment. "I am very
grateful," she said. "You have saved me from worse than death."

"It is I that am thankful," he answered.

They descended the hill in silence and found the Susquehannock, who had
preceded them, squatted before a fire which he had kindled upon a flat
rock beside one of the innumerable streamlets that wound here and there
over the land.

"The dogs yonder will need Iroquois eyes to spy out this trail," he said
with grim satisfaction, as they came up to him. "Let my brother and the
Gold Hair rest by the fire, and Monakatocka will go into the forest and
get them something to eat."

He was gone, his gigantic figure looking larger than life as he moved
through the mist which still filled the hollow between the hills, and
Landless and Patricia sat themselves down beside the fire. Landless
piled upon it the dead wood with which the ground was strewn, and the
flames leaped and crackled, sending up thin blue smoke against the
hillsid