“And why should my father have told you this, Pathfinder?” the girl demanded a little earnestly.  “Perhaps he fancied you would think the better of me if you did not believe me a silly coward, as so many of my sex love to make themselves appear.”

Deception, unless it were at the expense of his enemies in the field, —­ nay, concealment of even a thought, —­ was so little in accordance with the Pathfinder’s very nature, that he was not a little embarrassed by this simple question.  In such a strait he involuntarily took refuge in a middle course, not revealing that which he fancied ought not to be told, nor yet absolutely concealing it.

“You must know, Mabel,” said he, “that the Sergeant and I are old friends, and have stood side by side —­ or, if not actually side by side, I a little in advance, as became a scout, and your father with his own men, as better suited a soldier of the king —­ on many a hard fi’t and bloody day.  It’s the way of us skirmishers to think little of the fight when the rifle has done cracking; and at night, around our fires, or on our marches, we talk of the things we love, just as you young women convarse about your fancies and opinions when you get together to laugh over your idees.  Now it was natural that the Sergeant, having such a daughter as you, should love her better than anything else, and that he should talk of her oftener than of anything else, —­ while I, having neither daughter, nor sister, nor mother, nor kith, nor kin, nor anything but the Delawares to love, I naturally chimed in, as it were, and got to love you, Mabel, before I ever saw you —­ yes, I did —­ just by talking about you so much.”

“And now you have seen me,” returned the smiling girl, whose unmoved and natural manner proved how little she was thinking of anything more than parental or fraternal regard, “you are beginning to see the folly of forming friendships for people before you know anything about them, except by hearsay.”

“It wasn’t friendship —­ it isn’t friendship, Mabel, that I feel for you.  I am the friend of the Delawares, and have been so from boyhood; but my feelings for them, or for the best of them, are not the same as those I got from the Sergeant for you; and, especially, now that I begin to know you better.  I’m sometimes afeared it isn’t wholesome for one who is much occupied in a very manly calling, like that of a guide or scout, or a soldier even, to form friendships for women, —­ young women in particular, —­ as they seem to me to lessen the love of enterprise, and to turn the feelings away from their gifts and natural occupations.”

“You surely do not mean, Pathfinder, that a friendship for a girl like me would make you less bold, and more unwilling to meet the French than you were before?”