“Spoken like a sensible rogue,” said the stranger, with a voice all frankness and approval, but with a lowering look of impatience, which Nathan, who had watched the proceedings of the pair with equal amazement and interest, could observe from the chink, though it was concealed from Doe by the position of the speaker, who had risen from his stool, as if to depart, but who now sat down again, to satisfy the fears of his partner in villany.  To this he immediately addressed himself, but in tones lower than before, so that Nathan could no longer distinguish his words.

But Nathan had heard enough.  The conversation, as far as he had distinguished it, chimed strangely in with all his own and Roland’s suspicions; there was, indeed, not a word uttered that did not confirm them.  The confessions of the stranger, vague and mysterious as they seemed, tallied in all respects with Roland’s account of the villanous designs imputed to the hated Braxley; and it was no little additional proof of his identity, that, in addressing Doe, whom he styled throughout as Jack, he had, once at least, called him by the name of Atkinson,—­a refugee, whose connection with the conspiracy in Roland’s story Nathan had not forgotten.  It was not, indeed, surprising that Abel Doe should possess another name; since it was a common practice among renegades like himself, from some sentiment of shame or other obvious reasons, to assume an alias and nom de guerre, under which they acquired their notoriety:  the only wonder was, that he should prove to be that person whose agency in the abduction of Edith would, of all other men in the world, go furthest to sustain the belief of Braxley being the principal contriver of the outrage.

Such thoughts as these may have wandered through Nathan’s mind; but he took little time to con them over.  He had made a discovery at that moment of more stirring importance and interest.  Allowing that Edith Forrester was the prisoner of whom the disguised stranger and his sordid confederate spoke, and there was little reason to doubt it, he had learned, out of their own mouths, the place of her concealment, to discover which was the object of his daring visit to the village.  Her prison-house was the wigwam of Wenonga, the chief,—­if chief he could still be called, whom the displeasure of his tribe had robbed of almost every vestige of authority; and thither Nathan, to whom the vile bargaining of the white-men no longer offered interest, supposing he could even have overheard it, instantly determined to make his way.

But how was Nathan to know the cabin of the chief from the dozen other hovels that surrounded the Council-house.  That was a question which, perhaps Nathan did not ask himself:  for creeping softly from Doe’s hut, and turning into the street (if such could be called the irregular winding space that separated the two lines of cabins composing the village), he stole forward, with nothing of the hesitation or doubt which might have been expected from one unfamiliar with the village.