swung him to the right and he discerned a faintly visible path, scarcely more than a deer runway, that led toward the east. For a good half-hour he traveled, now turning right and now left, and at last the woods thinned and a rocky hillside meadow came into sight. Along the border of this they passed and crossed a muddy stream, and, with the morning sunlight full in their faces, mounted a bushy ridge and went down the other side of it and into a tract of marshy ground grown head-high with yellowing rushes and interspersed with alder and white birch. A dog barked suddenly from close at hand, so unexpectedly that David, picking his steps across the swamp, started and went floundering to his knees in the slimy water. In another instant the rushes were gone, trampled flat by many feet, and a little island sprang from the marsh, and David saw many Indians and some rude huts of branches and bark before him. A mangy dog rushed at his legs and ran off howling as one of the boy’s captors struck him with his bow. The sunlit air was filled with the smoke of fires, voices growled, and David was thrust into the midst of a group of painted savages.
More curious than unfriendly they seemed,
