his the
only object of their attention. On the sand bank alluded to in our last
chapter were to be dimly seen through the growing dusk, the dark
outlines of many of the savages, who, frantic with rage at their
inability to devote them to the same doom, were still unwilling to quit
a spot which approached them nearest to the last surviving objects of
their enmity. Around this point, were collected numerous canoes, filled
also with warriors; and, at the moment when the vessel, obeying the
impulse given by her flowing sails, glided from her anchorage, these
followed, scudding in her wake, and made a show of attacking her in the
stern. The sudden yawing of the schooner, however, in bringing her tier
of bristling ports into view, had checked the ardour of the pursuing
fleet; and the discharge of a single gun, destroying in its course
three of their canoes, and carrying death among those who directed
them, had driven them back, in the greatest hurry and confusion, to
their yelling and disappointed comrades.

The after-deck of the schooner presented a different, though not less
sombre and discouraging, scene. On a pile of mattresses lay the light
and almost inanimate form of Clara de Haldimar; her fair and redundant
hair overshadowing her pallid brow and cheek, and the dress she had
worn at the moment of her escape from the fort still spotted with the
blood of her generous but unfortunate preserver. Close at her side,
with her hands clasped in his, while he watched the expression of deep
suffering reflected from each set feature, and yet with the air of one
pre-occupied with some other subject of painful interest, sat, on an
empty shot-box, the young man in sailor's attire, whose cutlass had
performed the double service of destroying his own immediate opponent,
and avenging the death of the devoted Baynton. At the head of the rude
couch, and leaning against a portion of the schooner's stern-work,
stood his companion, who from delicacy appeared to have turned away his
eyes from the group below, merely to cast them vacantly on the dark
waters through which the vessel was now beginning to urge her course.

Such was the immediate position of this little party, when the gun
fired at the Indians was heard booming heavily along the lake. The loud
report, in exciting new sources of alarm, seemed to have dissipated the
spell that had hitherto chained the energies and perception of the
still weak, but now highly excited girl.

"Oh, C