The Indian glided before them and led the way over the friendly rocks. They left them and found themselves upon a carpet of pine needles, and then in a dell where the fern grew rankly and the rich black earth gave like a sponge beneath their feet. Here the Indian made Landless carry Patricia, and himself came last, walking backwards in the footprints of the other, and pausing after each step to do all that Indian cunning could suggest to cover their trail. They came to more rocky ledges and walked along them for a long distance, then found and went up a wide and shallow stream. Slowly the pale light of dawn diffused itself through the forest. In the branches overhead myriads of birds began to flutter and chirp, the squirrels commenced their ceaseless chattering, and through the white mist, at bends of the stream, they saw deer coming from the fern of the forest to drink. A great hill rose before them, bare of trees, covered only with a coarse growth of grass and short blue thistles in which already buzzed a world of bees; they climbed it and from the summit watched a ball of fire rise into the cloudless blue. The morning wind, blowing over that illimitable forest, fanned their brows, and a tide of woodland sound and incense swept up to them from the world below. Around them were the Blue Mountains--gigantic masses, cloudy peaks, vast ramparts rising from a sea of mist--mysterious fastnesses, scarcely believed in and never seen by the settlers of the level land--a magic country in which they placed much gold and the wandering colonists of Roanoke, the South Sea, and long-gowned Eastern peoples. "Oh, the mountains!" said Patricia. "The dreadful, frowning mountains! When will we be quit of them? When will we reach the level land and the blue water?" "Before many days, I trust," said Landless. "See, our faces are set to the east--towards home." She stood in silence for a moment, her face lifted, the color slowly coming back to her cheeks and the light to her eyes, then said suddenly:-- "Did my father send you after me?" "No, madam." "Then how are you here?" He looked at her with a smile. "I broke gaol--and came." A shadow crossed her face, but it was gone in a moment. "I am very grateful," she said. "You have saved me from worse than death." "It is I that am thankful," he answered. They descended the hill in silence and found the Susquehannock, who had preceded them, squatted before a fire which he had kindled upon a flat rock beside one of the innumerable streamlets that wound here and there over the land. "The dogs yonder will need Iroquois eyes to spy out this trail," he said with grim satisfaction, as they came up to him. "Let my brother and the Gold Hair rest by the fire, and Monakatocka will go into the forest and get them something to eat."