"Will you walk back a little?" I asked her. "There is something here we do not understand. I will join you in a moment. "For God's sake, what is it, Enoch?" I demanded, as I confronted him. "Tell me quick." "Well, we've had our five days' tussle for nothing, and you're minus a nigger. That's about what it comes to." "Speak out, can't you! Is he dead? What was the yell we heard?" "It was all done like a flash of lightning. We were coming up the side nighest us here--we had got just where that spruce, you know, hangs over--when all at once that hump-backed nigger of yours raised a scream like a painter, and flung himself head first against the canoe. Over it went, and he with it--rip, smash, plumb to the bottom!" The negroes broke forth in a babel of mournful cries at this, and clustered about us. I grew sick and faint under this shock of fresh horrors, and was fain to lean on Enoch's arm, as I turned to walk back to where I had left Daisy. She was not visible as we approached, and I closed my eyes in abject terror of some further tragedy. Thank God, she had only swooned, and lay mercifully senseless in the tall grass, her waxen face upturned in the twilight. Chapter XXXVII. The Peaceful Ending of It All. In the general paralysis of suffering and despair which rested now upon the Valley, the terrible double tragedy of the gulf passed almost unnoted. Women everywhere were mourning for the husbands, sons, lovers who would never return. Fathers strove in vain to look dry-eyed at familiar places which should know the brave lads--true boys of theirs--no more. The play and prattle of children were hushed in a hundred homes where some honest farmer's life, struck fiercely at by a savage or Tory, still hung in the dread balance. Each day from some house issued forth the procession of death, until all our little churchyards along the winding river had more new graves than old--not to speak of that grim, unconsecrated God's-acre in the forest pass, more cruel still to think upon. And with all this to bear, there was no assurance that the morrow might not bring the torch and tomahawk of invasion to our very doors. So our own strange tragedy had, as I have said, scant attention. People listened to the recital, and made answer: "Both dead at the foot of the cliff, eh? Have you heard how William Seeber is to-day?" or "Is it true that Herkimer's leg must be cut off?"