“The rifle-guns, the beads, and the cloth,” he said, “that were distributed after the battle,—­does thee think they were plunder taken from the young Kentuckians they had vanquished?  Friend, these things were a price with which the white man in the red shawl paid the assassin villains for taking thee prisoner,—­thee and thee kinswoman.  His hirelings were vagabonds of all the neighbouring tribes, Shawnees, Wyandots, Delawares, and Piankeshaws, as I noted well when I crept among them; and old Wenonga is the greatest vagabond of all, having long since been degraded by his tribe for bad luck, drunkenness, and other follies, natural to an Injun.  My own idea is, that that white man thirsted for thee blood, having given thee up to the Piankeshaws, who, thee says, had lost one of their men in the battle; for which thee would certainly have been burned alive at their village:  but what was his design in captivating thee poor kinswoman that thee calls Edith, truly I cannot divine, not knowing much of thee history.”

“You shall hear it,” said Roland, with hoarse accents,—­“at least so much of it as may enable you to confirm or disprove your suspicions.  There is indeed one man whom I have always esteemed my enemy, the enemy also of Edith,—­a knave capable of any extremity, yet never could I have dreamed of a villany so daring, so transcendent as this!”

So saying, Roland, smothering his agitation as he could, proceeded to acquaint his rude friend, now necessarily his confidant, with so much of his history as related to Braxley, his late uncle’s confidential agent and executor;—­a man whom Roland’s revelations to the gallant and inquisitive Colonel Bruce, and still more, perhaps, his conversations with Edith in the wood, may have introduced sufficiently to the reader’s acquaintance.  But of Braxley, burning with a hatred he no longer chose to subdue, the feeling greatly exasperated, also, by the suspicion Nathan’s hints had infused into his mind, he now spoke without restraint; and assuredly, if one might have judged by the bitterness of his invectives, the darkness of the colours with which he traced the detested portrait, a baser wretch did not exist on the whole earth.  Yet to a dispassionate and judicious hearer it might have seemed that there was little in the evidence to bear out an accusation so sweeping and heavy.  Little, indeed, had the soldier to charge against him save his instrumentality in defeating hopes and expectations which had been too long indulged to be surrendered without anger and pain.  That this instrumentality, considering all the circumstances, was to be attributed to base and fraudulent motives, it was natural to suspect; but the proofs were far from being satisfactory, as they rested chiefly on surmises and assumptions.