“Poor Brough! what can they be doing with him?” was her question to herself. But the next moment she discovered that his howl was meant to be a hymn; and the peculiar volume which the negro gave to his utterance, led her to divine its import. There was little time allowed her for reflection. A moment after, and just when her boat was abreast of the bayou which Dunbar and his men were required to cross in penetrating the place of refuge, she heard the sudden pistol shooting under which Coulter had fallen. With a heart full of terror, trembling with anxiety and fear, Frederica had the strength of will to remain quiet for the present. Seizing upon an overhanging bough, she lay concealed within the shadow of the copse until the loyalists had rushed across the bayou, and were busy, with lighted torches, exploring the thickets. She had heard the bugle of Coulter sounded as he was about to fall, after being wounded, and her quick consciousness readily enabled her to recognize it as her lover’s. But she had heard no movement afterward in the quarter from which came the blast, and could not conceive that he should have made his way to join his comrades in the space of time allowed between that and the moment when she heard them taking to the river with their horses. This difficulty led to new fears, which were agonizing enough, but not of a sort to make her forgetful of what was due to the person whom she came to save. She waited only until the torrent had passed the straits—until the bayou was silent—when she fastened her little boat to the willows which completely enveloped her, and boldly stepped upon the land. With a rare instinct which proved how deeply her heart had interested itself in the operations of her senses, she moved directly to the spot whence she had heard the bugle-note of her lover. The place was not far distant from the point where she had been in lurking. Her progress was arrested by the prostrate trunk of a great cypress, which the hurricane might have cast down some fifty years before. It was with some difficulty that she scrambled over it; but while crossing it she heard a faint murmur, like the voice of one in pain, laboring to speak or cry aloud. Her heart misgave her. She hurried to the spot. Again the murmur—now certainly a moan. It is at her feet, but on the opposite side of the cypress, which she again crosses. The place was very dark, and in the moment when, from loss of blood, he was losing consciousness, Richard Coulter had carefully crawled close to the cypress, whose bulk, in this way, effectually covered him from passing footsteps. She found him, still warm, the flow of blood arrested, and his consciousness returning. “Richard! it is me—Frederica!”