"We must trust for the best, my dear lady," said he, cheerily. "The first thing will be the child's knowing you. That clearly proven, the question will be as to Cornplanter. It will be a knock-down blow, but the Seneca has great qualities. He may set his face against it like flint, yet I shall be surprised if he thinks of self alone in the matter. And what idea did you get of Cornplanter?" he concluded, turning to Mark. "Pretty good for an Indian," said Mark, moodily; "but ef he don't give up Nellie to mother, I'll brain him with his own hatchet, ef I die for it next minute." "Well crowed, young cockeril," laughed the Colonel, "but we'll find better weapons than tomahawks. It's the heart and not the skull we've got to reach." There was no need to waste time, and quick outfit was made for the journey to the Seneca village, about eighty miles away. Cornplanter received the message from the Indian runner, giving warning of Colonel Johnson's proposed visit, but with no further hint of purpose. Yet he felt a keen pang of foreboding. Stoic as he was, there was something in the air that mocked him with the notion of fate lying in ambush close at hand. As Ma-za-ri-ta afterwards recalled, the chief treated her with a clinging, pathetic tenderness during these days she had never known before. And finally, when he saw with Colonel Johnson the youth who had been his recent guest, and a pale-faced woman with questioning gaze that wandered and hunted like that of a mad-woman, it was no longer guesswork. It was as if a bullet had pierced his chest. The Englishman knew his man, and made a plain appeal with all the fling of that bullet. Cornplanter heard with a stern, impassive face. "My father's words are good and just," he said. "Let Ma-za-ri-ta decide," and hope knocked again faintly at the gate that his little sister would not know the white woman who had come to rob him of his heart's blood. The girl was led from her lodge, unknowing the test, and ran gayly to her Indian brother's side, and looked curiously at the little white group in the centre of the watchful throng of red men. Her eyes glanced smilingly at her Indian friends, till they were fastened as if by a magnet on the white woman's face, and there they hung, fascinated, open-mouthed, spellbound, as though they could never drink their fill. The woman stood, arms half extended, burning eyes unquenched by their own tears, lips dumbly moving. Fear, wonder, longing, doubt, swept over the girl's face, till all thought was swallowed up in a light unspeakable, and her tongue babbled "ma-ma." She tottered, but Mrs. Lytte leaped at her and locked her fast with convulsive cries and sobs. The chief's rigid face was that of a bronze man. All listened for his lips to speak. But it seemed as if the jaws were locked. And when the voice came his followers scarcely knew its hollow accents: