“I like that Onondaga,” he said, “and I don’t want him to freeze to death in the forest.  Why, the earth and all the trees are coated with ice now, and even if a man lives he is able to make no progress.”

Once more Robert smiled serenely.

“You’re thinking of the men you knew in Philadelphia, Will,” he said.  “They, of course, couldn’t make such a flight through a white forest, but Tayoga is an altogether different kind of fellow.  He’ll merely exert himself a little more, and go on as fast as ever.”

Wilton looked at the vast expanse of glittering ice, and then drew the folds of a heavy cloak more closely about his body.

“I rejoice,” he said, “that it’s the Onondaga and not myself who has to make the great journey.  I rejoice, too, that we have built this fort.  It’s not Philadelphia, that fine, true, comfortable city, but it’s shelter against the hard winter that I see coming so fast.”

Colden, still following the advice of Willet, kept his men busy, knowing that idleness bred discontent and destroyed discipline.  At least a dozen soldiers, taught by Willet and Robert, had developed into excellent hunters, and as the game was abundant, owing to the absence of Indians, they had killed deer, bear, panther and all the other kinds of animals that ranged these forests.  The flesh of such as were edible was cured and stored, as they foresaw the day when many people might be in Fort Refuge and the food would be needed.  The skins also were dressed and were put upon the floor or hung upon the walls.  The young men working hard were happy nevertheless, as they were continually learning new arts.  And the life was healthy to an extraordinary degree.  All the wounded were as whole as before, and everybody acquired new and stronger muscles.

Their content would have been yet greater in degree had they been able to learn what was going on outside, in that vast world where France and Britain and their colonies contended so fiercely for the mastery.  But they looked at the wall of the forest, and it was a blank.  They were shut away from all things as completely as Crusoe on his island.  Nor would they hear a single whisper until Tayoga came back—­if he came back.

On the second day after the Onondaga’s departure the air softened, but became darker.  The glittering white of the forest assumed a more somber tinge, clouds marched up in solemn procession from the southwest, and mobilized in the center of the heavens, a wind, touched with damp, blew.  Robert knew very well what the elements portended and again he was sorry for Tayoga, but as before, after the first few moments of discouragement his courage leaped up higher than ever.  His brilliant imagination at once painted a picture in which every detail was vivid and full of life, and this picture was of a vast forest, trees and bushes alike clothed in ice, and in the center of it a slender figure, but straight, tall and strong, Tayoga himself speeding on like the arrow from the bow, never wavering, never weary.  Then his mind allowed the picture to fade.  Wilton might not believe Tayoga could succeed, but how could this young Quaker know Tayoga as he knew him?