Despite the stunned despair which possessed his mental faculties, his physical senses were keenly acute.  He marked unconsciously the details of the rising of the wind bringing the storm hitherward.  A searching flash of lightning showed the figure of the sentinel, half crouching before the blast, at his post in the open portal.  The rain was presently falling heavily, and ever and anon a great suffusion of yellow glare in its midst revealed the myriads of slanting lines as it came.  He inhaled the freshened fragrance it brought from the forests.  He noted the repeated crash of the thunder, the far-away rote of the echoes, the rhythmic beat of the torrents on the ground, and their tumultuous swift dash down the slope of the dome-shaped roof, and suddenly among these turmoils,—­he could hardly believe his ears,—­a mild little whimper of protest.

The sentinel heard it too.  MacVintie saw his dark figure in the doorway as he turned his head to listen.  A woman’s voice sounded immediately, bidding a child beware how he cried, lest she call the great white owl, the Oo-koo-ne-kah, to catch him!

The flare of the lightning revealed a pappoose the next moment, upright in his perpendicular cradle, as it swung on his mother’s back, in the drenching downpour of the rain, for the woman had advanced to the sentinel and was talking loudly and eagerly.

Kenneth silently recognized the small creature who had moved him to a trivial charity which had resulted in so strangely disproportionate a disaster.  Doubtless, however, the squaws would never have been able to return to their accustomed place but for the food which he had given them, sustaining them on the journey home.

It would imply some mission of importance surely, he thought, to induce the woman to expose the child to a tempest like this; and indeed the pappoose, buffeted by the wind, the rain full in his face, lifted up his voice again in a protest so loud and vehement that his mother was enabled to see the great white owl, whose business it is to remove troublesome little Cherokees from the sphere of worry of their elders, already winging his way hither.  One might wonder if the Oo-koo-ne-kah would do worse for him than his maternal guardian, but pelted by the pitiless rain he promptly sank his bleatings to a mere babble of a whimper.  Thereby Kenneth was better enabled to hear what the woman was saying to the sentinel.

An important mission indeed, as MacVintie presently gathered, for she must needs lift her voice stridently to be heard above the din of the elements.  Some powder, only a little it was true, had been sent by the French to the town, and a share had been left at the house of the sentinel that night in the general distribution.  But there was no one at home.  All his family were across the mountains, whither, according to the custom of the Cherokees, they had gone to find and bring back the body of his brother, who had been killed in the fight at Etchoee.  And the leak in the roof!  She, his nearest neighbor, had just bethought herself of the leak in the roof!  Would not the powder, the precious powder, be ruined?  Had he not best go to see at once about it?