“What will they do?  What can they do?” cried Heckewelder, bitterly.  “I tell you never before have I encountered such gloomy, stony Indians.  It seems to me that they are in no vacillating state.  They act like men whose course is already decided upon, and who are only waiting.”

“For what?” asked Jim, after a long silence.

“God only knows!  Perhaps for a time; possibly for a final decision, and, it may be, for a reason, the very thought of which makes me faint.”

“Tell us,” said Edwards, speaking quietly, for he had ever been the calmest of the missionaries.

“Never mind.  Perhaps it’s only my nerves.  I’m all unstrung, and could suspect anything to-night.”

“Heckewelder, tell us?” Jim asked, earnestly.

“My friends, I pray I am wrong.  God help us if my fears are correct.  I believe the Indians are waiting for Jim Girty.”

Chapter XXII.

Simon Girty lolled on a blanket in Half King’s teepee.  He was alone, awaiting his allies.  Rings of white smoke curled lazily from his lips as he puffed on a long Indian pipe, and gazed out over the clearing that contained the Village of Peace.

Still water has something in its placid surface significant of deep channels, of hidden depths; the dim outline of the forest is dark with meaning, suggestive of its wild internal character.  So Simon Girty’s hard, bronzed face betrayed the man.  His degenerate brother’s features were revolting; but his own were striking, and fell short of being handsome only because of their craggy hardness.  Years of revolt, of bitterness, of consciousness of wasted life, had graven their stern lines on that copper, masklike face.  Yet despite the cruelty there, the forbidding shade on it, as if a reflection from a dark soul, it was not wholly a bad countenance.  Traces still lingered, faintly, of a man in whom kindlier feelings had once predominated.

In a moment of pique Girty had deserted his military post at Fort Pitt, and become an outlaw of his own volition.  Previous to that time he had been an able soldier, and a good fellow.  When he realized that his step was irrevocable, that even his best friends condemned him, he plunged, with anger and despair in his heart, into a war upon his own race.  Both of his brothers had long been border ruffians, whose only protection from the outraged pioneers lay in the faraway camps of hostile tribes.  George Girty had so sunk his individuality into the savage’s that he was no longer a white man.  Jim Girty stalked over the borderland with a bloody tomahawk, his long arm outstretched to clutch some unfortunate white woman, and with his hideous smile of death.  Both of these men were far lower than the worst savages, and it was almost wholly to their deeds of darkness that Simon Girty owed his infamous name.