"When did you last see him?" she asked, imploringly. "Fighting against a hundred braves in the forest, where the pawaws of the French have put up two trees, _thus_," said he, crossing his fingers to indicate a cross made by the Jesuits near the Horican. "Alas! my mother taught me that the way of the cross was the way to heaven. Oh, my husband!--and that at the foot of that cross I should give up my whole heart. God, who bringeth good out of evil, will order all things for the best; but can this be, if my husband, my friend, my protector, the father of my babe, be slain? May he not have been preserved for himself and this little one? Oh, yes--God is kind. His will is adorable," continued the poor girl, kissing her babe in a wild rapture of resignation and despair. She recalled with sorrow and horror the many whom she had seen so barbarously destroyed, and others whom she believed to have perished; the brave soldiers, the kind old colonel, and the poor little boy, his son, to whom she had been almost a mother, during the terrors of the recent siege. Their voices lingered in her ear; their faces hovered before her. Orono visited the place where he had last seen the "white chief," as he not inaptly named MacGillivray; but could discover no trace of him. Many of the dead had already been interred by the soldiers of Montcalm, who now possessed the shattered remains of Fort William Henry; others had been devoured by wild animals. No body answering the description of Roderick had been, found or seen among the slain by the Iroquois. He was known to have a gold bracelet of Mary's, rivetted round his sword arm; but that might have been cut off, or buried with him, undiscovered. Mary felt a great repugnance for the old squaw; yet the poor Indian was kind and attentive in her own barbarous fashion; and the patient, while her heart was swollen almost to bursting, conversed with her, in the hope of obtaining surer protection for her little one, and discovering some traces of its father. "What would it avail you, were he found?" asked the squaw. "Why?" "The Red warriors would immediately take his scalp, for the oracles of the pawaws have driven them mad. After three days of conjuration, they have told us--" "They--are the pawaws a tribe of the Iroquois?" "They are our wise men--our oracles." "And they told--what?" "That the devils would not hinder the pale faces from being masters of our country. We have fought bravely; but the brandy, the gold and silver of the Yengees are more powerful than the prophesies of the lying pawaws or the knives of our warriors." "Every Red man in the land has dug up the war-hatchet," said a strange guttural voice; "the print of the white moccassins will soon be effaced on the prairies and in the woods--their graves alone will remain--their scalps and their bones."