rocky waste, that skirts the
northern borders of the great valley of prairies. As they advanced, they
grew more and more secure against pursuit, and less watchful of their
captive. At length, she suddenly disappeared from their view.

They had pitched for the night, on the bank of the north branch of the
Sascatchawan. The night was dark and tempestuous. The lightnings flashed
vividly from the dark cloud, and threatened to "melt the very elements
with fervent heat." The hoarse thunders roared among the wildly
careering clouds, and reverberated along the shores of the stream, and
the cliffs of the distant mountains, as if those everlasting barriers
were rent asunder, and nature were groaning from her utmost depths. The
Indian feared not death, in whatever shape it might come. But he feared
the angry voice of the Great Spirit. He shrunk with terror to the covert
of his tent, and covered his eyes from the fearful glare of those
incessant flashes, and prayed inwardly to his gods.

The poor disconsolate captive lay trembling under the side of the tent.
She thought of the storm that had swept over her beautiful home, and
desolated her heart in the spring time of its love. She looked at her
savage captors, now writhing in the agonies of superstitious fear, which
her more absorbing private grief alone prevented her from sharing to the
full. They heeded her not. They scarcely remembered that she was among
them. Something whispered to her heart--"No eye but that of the Great
Spirit sees you. He bids you escape from your enemies."

In the ten-fold darkness that follows the all-revealing flash from the
storm-cloud, Tula slipped noiselessly under the edge of the robe that
sheltered her from the beating rain, and plunging into the stream, swam
with the current a few rods, till she was arrested by a thick covert of
overhanging shrubs, which grew to the water's edge. Thinking she might
be able to cover her head with these bushes, while her body was hid by
the water, she crept cautiously under, close to the bank, when, to her
surprise and joy, she found that this shrubbery covered and curiously
concealed a crevice in the jutting rock, sufficiently large to admit a
free entrance to an ample cave within. Having carefully adjusted every
limb and leaf without, and replaced with instinctive sagacity, the
mosses that had been disturbed by her feet, she devoutly thanked the
good spirit for her hope of deliverance, and anxiously watched for the