Yet Humphrey felt as though this man was in some sort different from those he had met in the woods at rare times when out hunting.  His voice, his words, his phraseology seemed in some sort strange, and he asked him wonderingly: 

“From whence are you, friends?”

“From the land of the far south—­from the rolling plains of the giant Mississippi, that vast river of which perchance you have heard?”

“Ay, verily,” answered Humphrey, with a touch of bitterness in his tone.  “I have heard of that great river, which the French King claims to have discovered, and which they say he will guard with a chain of forts right away from Canada, and will thus command all the New World of the West, pinning us English within the limits of that portion of land lying betwixt the ocean and the range of the Allegheny Mountains,” and Humphrey waved his hand in that direction, and looked questioningly at the men before him.

He had an impression that all who came from the far south, from the colony of Louisiana, as he had heard it called, must be in some sort French subjects.  And yet these men spoke his own tongue, and seemed to be friends and brothers.

“That was the chimera of the French Monarch more than a century ago.  Methinks it is little nearer its accomplishment now than when our forefathers, acting as pioneers, made a small settlement in a green valley near to the mouth of the giant river, waiting for the King to send his priests and missionaries to convert the heathen from their evil ways, and found a fair Christian realm in that fair land.”

“Then were your forefathers French subjects?” asked Humphrey, rather bewildered.  “If so, how come you to speak mine own tongue as you do?”

“I come of no French stock!” cried the companion stranger, who had remained silent until now, looking searchingly round the clearing, and examining Humphrey himself with curiosity; “I have no drop of French blood in my veins, whatever Julian may have.  I am Fritz Neville.  I come of an English family.  But you shall hear all later on, as we sit by our fire at night.  I would hear all your tale of desolation and woe.  We, for our part, have no cause to love the French oppressors, whose ambition and greed seem to know no bounds.  Can you give us shelter by your hearth tonight?  Food we have of our own, since we find game in sufficient abundance in these forest tracks.”

As he spoke he unslung from his shoulders a fine young fawn which they had lately shot, and Humphrey made eager answer to the request for hospitality.

“Would that we had better to offer!  But the homestead is burnt.  My brother lies sick of a fever in yon shed—­a fever brought on by loss of blood and by anguish of mind.  I have been alone in this place with him hard upon a week now, and to me it seems as though years instead of days had passed over my head since the calamity happened.”

“I can well believe that,” said the first speaker, whom his companion had spoken of as Julian.  “There be times in a man’s life when hours are as days and days as years.  But let me see your brother if he be sick.  I have some skill in the treatment of fevers, and I have brought in my wallet some simples which we find wonderfully helpful down in the south, from where I come.  I doubt not I can bring him relief.”