“Well done, young chips! well done, old block!” whispered Paul, whose spirits no danger nor situation could entirely depress. “As pretty a volley, as one would wish to hear on the wrong end of a rifle! What d’ye say, trapper! here is likely to be a three-cornered war. Shall I give’ em as good as they send?”

“Give them nothing but fair words,” returned the other, hastily, “or you are both lost.”

“I’m not certain it would much mend the matter, if I were to speak with my tongue instead of the piece,” said Paul, in a tone half jocular half bitter.

“For the sake of heaven, do not let them hear you !” cried Ellen. “Go, Paul, go; you can easily quit us now !”

Several shots in quick succession, each sending its dangerous messenger, still nearer than the preceding discharge, cut short her speech, no less in prudence than in terror.

“This must end,” said the trapper, rising with the dignity of one bent only on the importance of his object. “I know not what need ye may have, children, to fear those you should both love and honour, but something must be done to save your lives. A few hours more or less can never be missed from the time of one who has already numbered so many days; therefore I will advance. Here is a clear space around you. Profit by it as you need, and may God bless and prosper each of you, as ye deserve!”

Without waiting for any reply, the trapper walked boldly down the declivity in his front, taking the direction of the encampment, neither quickening his pace in trepidation, nor suffering it to be retarded by fear. The light of the moon fell brighter for a moment on his tall, gaunt, form, and served to warn the emigrants of his approach. Indifferent, however to this unfavourable circumstance, he held his way, silently and steadily towards the copse, until a threatening voice met him with a challenge of—

“Who comes; friend or foe?”

“Friend,” was the reply; “one who has lived too long to disturb the close of life with quarrels.”

“But not so long as to forget the tricks of his youth,” said Ishmael, rearing his huge frame from beneath the slight covering of a low bush, and meeting the trapper, face to face; “old man, you have brought this tribe of red devils upon us, and to-morrow you will be sharing the booty.”

“What have you lost?” calmly demanded the trapper.

“Eight as good mares as ever travelled in gears, besides a foal that is worth thirty of the brightest Mexicans that bear the face of the King of Spain. Then the woman has not a cloven hoof for her dairy, or her loom, and I believe even the grunters, foot sore as they be, are ploughing the prairie. And now, stranger,” he added, dropping the butt of his rifle on the hard earth, with a violence and clatter that would have intimidated one less firm than the man he addressed, “how many of these creatures may fall to your lot?”

“Horses have I never craved, nor even used; though few have journeyed over more of the wide lands of America than myself, old and feeble as I seem. But little use is there for a horse among the hills and woods of York—that is, as York was, but as I greatly fear York is no longer—as for woollen covering and cow’s milk, I covet no such womanly fashions! The beasts of the field give me food and raiment. No, I crave no cloth better than the skin of a deer, nor any meat richer than his flesh.”

The sincere manner of the trapper, as he uttered this simple vindication, was not entirely thrown away on the emigrant, whose dull nature was gradually quickening into a flame, that might speedily have burst forth with dangerous violence. He listened like one who doubted, though not entirely convinced; and he muttered between his teeth the denunciation, with which a moment before he intended to precede the summary vengeance he had certainly meditated.