Speeding back to the fort, he found his mistress standing in her cabin door-way waiting and watching his return. No need to be told the afflicting tidings, she read them in his hurried gait and dismayed countenance. She uttered not a cry, shed not a tear, but, with lips and cheeks blanched as with the hue of death, she sunk down upon a wooden settee that stood close behind her. And there, at the door of her desolate house, the widowed mother sat--continued to sit through the long, sad, weary hours of absence and suspense, waiting and watching, her eyes turned ever toward the perilous north. Fortunately about a dozen of the hunters belonging to the station had just come in from the forest, who, upon learning what had happened, promptly volunteered to set out at once in pursuit of the savages and rescue, if possible, the unlucky Bushie, the boy being a great favorite with everybody at the fort. No more work in the field that day for Big Black Burl--he must now leave the peace-path to tread the war-path. But, before setting out, he must touch up his toilet a little, for, though careless enough of his personal appearance as a field-hand, our colored hero took a great pride in coming out on grand occasions like the present in a guise more beseeming his high reputation as an Indian-fighter. So, going at once to his own cabin, where he kept all his war and martial rigging perpetually ready for use in a minute's notice, he dashed through the process with a celerity quite astonishing in one who was usually so heavy and deliberate in his motions. First, he drew on his moccasins, each of which was roomy enough to hide a half-grown raccoon; then, over his buckskin breeches he tied a pair of bear-skin leggins, hairy and wide; then, he drew on over his buckskin under-shirt a bear-skin hunting-shirt ample enough for the shoulders of Hercules, securing it at the waist with a broad leathern belt, into which he stuck his sheathed hunting-knife and his tomahawk, or battle-ax it might be called, it was so ponderous. His ammunition-pouch and powder-horn--that on the left-hand side, this on the right--he then slung over his shoulders by two wide leathern straps, crossing each other on breast and back. Last, he doffed his coon-skin cap and donned another of bear-skin, more portentous still in its dimensions; and with Betsy Grumbo--his long, black rifle; the longest, so said, in the Paradise--gleaming aslant his shoulder, the Fighting Nigger sallied from his cabin, completely armed and rigged for war. Giving a loud, fife-like whistle, he was instantly joined by a huge brindled dog of grim and formidable aspect. As he passed by the door where his mistress sat, in her mute, tearless, motionless grief, he turned to her for a moment, cap in hand, and with terrible sublimity said: "Miss Jemimy, you see me come back wid Bushie, or you neber see yo' ol' nigger no mo'."