to discover such signs about it as might enable him to recover his lost way.  His spirits sunk as rapidly as they had risen, and he was preparing to make one more effort to escape from the forest, while the daylight yet lasted, or to find some stronghold in which to pass the night; when his attention was drawn to Telie Doe, who had ridden a little in advance, eagerly scanning the trees and soil around, in the hope that some ancient mark or footstep might point out a mode of escape.  As she thus looked about her, moving slowly in advance, her pony on a sudden began to snort and prance, and betray other indications of terror, and Telie herself was seen to become agitated and alarmed, retreating back upon the party, but keeping her eyes wildly rolling from bush to bush, as if in instant expectation of seeing an enemy.

“What is the matter?” cried Roland, riding to her assistance.  “Are we in enchanted land, that our horses must be frightened, as well as ourselves?”

“He smells the war-paint,” said Telie, with a trembling voice;—­“there are Indians near us.”

“Nonsense!” said Roland, looking around, and seeing, with the exception of the copse just passed, nothing but an open forest, without shelter or harbour for an ambushed foe.  But at that moment Edith caught him by the arm, and turned upon him a countenance more wan with fear than that she had exhibited upon first hearing the cries of Stackpole.  It expressed, indeed, more than alarm,—­it was the highest degree of terror, and the feeling was so overpowering that her lips, though moving as in the act of speech, gave forth no sound whatever.  But what her lips refused to tell, her finger, though shaking in the ague that convulsed every fibre of her frame, pointed out; and Roland, following it with his eyes, beheld the object that had excited so much emotion.  He started himself, as his gaze fell upon a naked Indian stretched under a tree hard by, and sheltered from view only by a dead bough lately fallen from its trunk, yet lying so still and motionless that he might easily have been passed by without observation in the growing dusk and twilight of the woods, had it not been for the instinctive terrors of the pony, which, like other horses, and, indeed, all other domestic beasts in the settlements, often thus pointed out to their masters the presence of an enemy.

The rifle of the soldier was in an instant cocked and at his shoulder, while the pedler and Emperor, as it happened, were too much discomposed at the spectacle to make any such show of battle.  They gazed blankly upon the leader, whose piece, settling down into an aim that must have been fatal, suddenly wavered, and then, to their surprise, was withdrawn.

“The slayer has been here before us,” he exclaimed,—­“the man is dead and scalped already!”