r dart from the hunter's
rifle as thou from the cruel pirate who has pronounced thy death! I
could tell thee such deeds of him and these bloody men as would freeze
thy bosom, though it were wide and deep as the lakes of my country.
Yet I loved him once! He came a prisoner to my father's hut. I have
spilled my best blood for his escape. I have borne him where the white
man's feet never trod--through forests, where aught but the Indian or
the wild beast would have perished. I left my country and my kin--the
graves of my fathers--and how hath he requited me? He gave the ring of
peace to the red woman; but when he saw another and a fairer one of
thy race, she became his wife; and from that hour Oneida's love was
hate!--and I have waited and not complained, for my revenge was sure!
And shall I now bind the healing leaf upon the wound?--draw the arrow
from the flesh of mine enemies? Thou must die! for my revenge is
sweet."

"I will denounce thee to him, fiend! I will reveal"----

"He will not believe thee. His eye and ear are sealed. He would stake
his life on my fidelity. He knows not of the change."

"But he will discover it, monster, when thou art gone. He will track
thee to the verge of this green earth and the salt sea, and thou shall
not escape."

With a yell of unutterable scorn she cried--

"He may track the wild bee to its nest, and the eagle to his eyrie,
but he discerns not one footprint of Oneida's path!"

The pangs of death seemed to be upon him. He read his doom in the
kindling eye and almost demoniac looks of the being who addressed him.
She seemed like some attendant demon waiting to receive his spirit.
His brain grew dizzy. Death would have been welcome in comparison with
the horrors of its anticipation. He would have caught her; but she
glided from his grasp, and he was again left in that den of loneliness
and misery. How long he knew not; his first returning recollection was
the sound of bolts and the rude voices of his jailers.

In this extremity the remembrance of that Being in whom, and from
whom, are all power and mercy, flashed on his brain like a burst of
hope--like a sunbeam on the dark ocean of despair.

"God of my fathers, hear!" escaped from his lips in that appalling
moment. His soul was calmed by the appeal. Vain was the help of man,
but he felt as if supported and surrounded by the arm of Omnipotence,
while silently, and with a firm step, he followed his conductors.

One dim light on