severe reckoning.  I would recommend you, however,”—­and he spoke in mockery,—­“when next you drive a weapon into the chest of an unresisting enemy, to be more certain of your aim.  Had that been as true as the blow from the butt of your rifle, I should not have lived to triumph in this hour.  I little deemed,” he pursued, still addressing the nearly heart-broken officer in the same insolent strain, “that my intrigue with that dark-eyed daughter of the old Canadian would have been the means of throwing your companion so speedily into my power, after his first narrow escape.  Your disguise was well managed, I confess; and but that there is an instinct about me, enabling me to discover a De Haldimar, as a hound does the deer, by scent, you might have succeeded in passing for what you. appeared.  But” (and his tone suddenly changed its irony for fierceness) “to the point, sir.  That you are the lover of this girl I clearly perceive, and death were preferable to a life embittered by the recollection that she whom we love reposes in the arms of another.  No such kindness is meant you, however.  To-morrow you shall return to the fort; and, when there, you may tell your colonel, that, in exchange for a certain miniature and letters, which, in the hurry of departure, I dropped in his apartment, some ten days since, Sir Reginald Morton, the outlaw, has taken his daughter Clara to wife, but without the solemnisation of those tedious forms that bound himself in accursed union with her mother.  Oh! what would I not give,” he continued, bitterly, “to witness the pang inflicted on his false heart, when first the damning truth arrests his ear.  Never did I know the triumph of my power until now; for what revenge can be half so sweet as that which attains a loathed enemy through the dishonour of his child?  But, hark! what mean those sounds?”

A loud yelling was now heard at some distance in rear of the tent.  Presently the bounding of many feet on the turf was distinguishable; and then, at intervals, the peculiar cry that announces the escape of a prisoner.  Wacousta started to his feet, and fiercely grasping his tomahawk, advanced to the front of the tent, where he seemed to listen for a moment attentively, as if endeavouring to catch the direction of the pursuit.

“Ha! by Heaven!” he exclaimed, “there must be treachery in this, or yon slippery captain would not so soon be at his flight again, bound as I had bound him.”  Then uttering a deafening yell, and rushing past Sir Everard, near whom he paused an instant, as if undecided whether he should not first dispose of him, as a precautionary measure, he flew with the speed of an antelope in the direction in which he was guided by the gradually receding sounds.

“The knife, Miss de Haldimar,” exclaimed Sir Everard, after a few moments of breathless and intense anxiety.  “See, there is one in the belt that Ellen Halloway has girt around her loins.  Quick, for Heaven’s sake, quick; our only chance of safety is in this.”