“Rule!”

“It is true, dear!  Look at me.  Have I not degenerated into a savage?”

“No, no, no, Regulas Rothsay! you could never do that!  Ah! how much nobler you look to me in that rude forest garb than ever in the fine dress of the drawing room!  But tell me about your journey from the city into the wilderness, and of your life since.”

“I have been trying to do so, Cora, but every time I try to begin my narrative by reverting to the hour of my flight, I seem spellbound to that hour and cannot escape from it.  But I will try again,” he said, and he began his story.

He told her, in brief, that on leaving the Rockhold house and going out upon the sidewalk, he found the streets still alight with illuminated houses and alive with the orgies of revelers who had come to the inauguration.

In moving through the crowd he was unrecognized, for who could suspect the black-coated figure passing alone along the street at midnight to be the governor-elect of the State, in whose honor the assembled multitudes were getting drunk?

His first intention had been to take a hack, drive to the railway depot, and board the first train going West.  But the hacks were all engaged as sleeping berths by men who could not get accommodations in any of the houses of the overcrowded city.

So he set off to walk, and almost immediately came face to face with old Scythia, the friend of his childhood.

“Old Scythia!” exclaimed Corona, interrupting the narrative.

“Yes, dear; the old seeress of Raven Roost, as they used to call her.  Of course, I never, even as a boy, believed in the supernatural powers of divination ascribed to her, but I must credit her with wonderful intuitions.  She had divined the very crisis that had come, and in that hour of my agony and humiliation she exercised a strange power over me,” said Rothsay; and then he took up the thread of his narrative again.

He told her that on leaving the State capital he had taken neither railway carriage nor river steamboat, but had tramped, with old Scythia by his side, all the way from the Cumberland Mountains to the Southwestern frontier.

The journey had taken them all the summer, for they traveled very slowly—­sometimes walking no more than ten miles a day, sometimes sleeping on pallets made of leaves under the trees of the forest, sometimes reaching a pioneer’s log hut, where they could get a hot supper and a night’s lodging.  Sometimes stopping over Sunday in some settlement where there was no church, and where Rule, though not an ordained minister, would on Christian principles hold a service and preach a sermon.

So they journeyed over the mountains, and through the valleys and forests, until at length, in the end of October, they arrived at the poorest, loneliest, and most forlorn of all the pioneer settlements they had seen.

This was La Terrepeur, on the borders of the Indian Reserve.  It was a settlement of about twenty log huts, in a small valley shut in by densely wooded hills, and watered by a narrow brook.  It was too near the country of the Comanches for safety, and too far from the nearest fort for protection.  There was neither church nor school house within a hundred miles.