Ringan’s face changed.

“You are right, my lady.  No Tortugas or Spanish isles for Ninian Campbell.  Give him the steeps of Glenorchy on an October morn when the deer have begun to bell.  My sorrow, but we are far enough from our desires—­all but Andrew, who is a prosaic soul.  And here comes Shalah with ugly news!”

The Indian spoke rapidly to me.  “The woods are full of men.  I do not think we are discovered, but we cannot stay here.  Our one hope is to gain the cover of the mist.  There is an open space beyond this thicket, and we must ride our swiftest.  Quick, brother.”

“The men?” I gasped.  “Cherokees?”

“Nay,” he said, “not Cherokees.  I think they are those you seek from beyond the mountains.”

The next half-hour is a mad recollection, wild and confused, and distraught with anxiety.  The thought of Elspeth among savages maddened me, the more so as she had just spoken of Medwyn Glen, and had sent my memory back to fragrant hours of youth.  We scrambled out of the thicket and put our weary beasts to a gallop.  Happily it was harder ground, albeit much studded with clumps of fern, and though we all slipped and stumbled often, the horses kept their feet.  I was growing so dizzy in the head that I feared every moment I would fall off.  The mist had now come low down the hill, and lay before us, a line, of grey vapour drawn from edge to edge of the vale.  It seemed an infinite long way off.

Shalah on foot kept in the rear, and I gathered from him that the danger he feared was behind.  Suddenly as I stared ahead something fell ten yards in advance of us in a long curve, and stuck, quivering in the soil.

It was an Indian arrow.

We would have reined up if Shalah had not cried on us to keep on.  I do not think the arrow was meant to strike us.  ’Twas a warning, a grim jest of the savages in the wood.

Then another fell, at the same distance before our first rider.

Still Shalah cried us on.  I fell back to the rear, for if we were to escape I thought there might be need of fighting there.  I felt in my belt for my loaded pistols.

We were now in a coppice again, where the trees were short and sparse.  Beyond that lay another meadow, and, then, not a quarter-mile distant, the welcome line of the mist, every second drawing down on us.

A third time an arrow fell.  Its flight was shorter and dropped almost under the nose of Elspeth’s horse, which swerved violently, and would have unseated a less skilled horsewoman.

“On, on,” I cried, for we were past the need for silence, and when I looked again, the kindly fog had swallowed up the van of the party.

I turned and gazed back, and there I saw a strange sight.  A dozen men or more had come to the edge of the trees on the hill-side.  They were quite near, not two hundred yards distant, and I saw them clearly.  They carried bows or muskets, but none offered to use them.  They were tall fellows, but lighter in the colour than any Indians I had seen.  Indeed, they were as fair as many an Englishman, and their slim, golden-brown bodies were not painted in the maniac fashion of the Cherokees.  They stood stock still, watching us with a dreadful impassivity which was more frightening to me than violence.  Then I, too, was overtaken by the grey screen.