“It is my influence with the chief, Paul, that has secured you this good treatment in spite of their rage against you.  It is better to pretend to fall in with their ways, if we are to retain life, and ever to secure freedom.”

But Paul only turned his back again and remained silent.  Yet with the food and rest the ache died out of his head, and he was permitted to wash off the blood caused by the heavy blow from the flat of a tomahawk.  Then he crossed the Ohio with the band.

Paul was in a canoe with Red Eagle and two other warriors, and Braxton Wyatt was in another canoe not far away.  But Paul resolutely ignored him, and looked only at the great river, and the thick forest on either shore.  He was now more lonely than ever, and the Ohio that he was crossing seemed to him to be the boundary between the known and the unknown.  Below it was Wareville and Marlowe, tiny settlements in the vast surrounding wilderness, it was true, but the abodes of white people, nevertheless.  North of it, and he was going northward, stretched the forest that savages alone haunted.  The crossing of the river was to Paul like passing over a great wall that would divide him forever from his own.  All his vivid imagination was alive, and it painted the picture in its darkest and most somber colors.

They reached the northern shore without difficulty, hid the canoes for future use, and resumed their leisurely journey northward.  Braxton Wyatt, who seemed to Paul to have much freedom, resumed his advances toward a renewal of the old friendship, but Paul was resolute.  He could not overcome his repulsion, Braxton Wyatt might plead, and make excuses, and talk about the terror of torture and death, but Paul remained unconvinced.  He himself had not flinched at the crucial moment to undo what Wyatt was doing, and in his heart he could find no forgiveness for the one whom he called a renegade.

Wyatt refused to take offense.  He said, and Paul could not but hear, that Paul some day would be grateful for what he was doing, and that it was necessary in the forest to meet craft with craft, guile with guile.

The days passed in hunting, eating, resting, and marching, and Paul lost count of time, distance, and direction.  He had not Henry’s wonderful instinct in the wilderness, and he could not now tell at what point of the compass Wareville lay.  But he kept a brave heart and a brave face, and if at times he felt despair, he did not let anyone see it.

They came at last to a place where the forest thinned out, and then broke away, leaving a little prairie.  The warriors, who had previously been painting themselves in more hideous colors than ever, broke into a long, loud, wailing chant.  It was answered in similar fashion from a point beyond a swell in the prairie, and Paul knew that they had come to the Indian village.  The wailing chant was a sign that they had returned after disaster, and now all the old squaws were taking it up in reply.  Paul was filled with curiosity, and he watched everything.