They had pitched for the night, on the bank of the north branch of the Sascatchawan. The night was dark and tempestuous. The lightnings flashed vividly from the dark cloud, and threatened to "melt the very elements with fervent heat." The hoarse thunders roared among the wildly careering clouds, and reverberated along the shores of the stream, and the cliffs of the distant mountains, as if those everlasting barriers were rent asunder, and nature were groaning from her utmost depths. The Indian feared not death, in whatever shape it might come. But he feared the angry voice of the Great Spirit. He shrunk with terror to the covert of his tent, and covered his eyes from the fearful glare of those incessant flashes, and prayed inwardly to his gods. The poor disconsolate captive lay trembling under the side of the tent. She thought of the storm that had swept over her beautiful home, and desolated her heart in the spring time of its love. She looked at her savage captors, now writhing in the agonies of superstitious fear, which her more absorbing private grief alone prevented her from sharing to the full. They heeded her not. They scarcely remembered that she was among them. Something whispered to her heart--"No eye but that of the Great Spirit sees you. He bids you escape from your enemies." In the ten-fold darkness that follows the all-revealing flash from the storm-cloud, Tula slipped noiselessly under the edge of the robe that sheltered her from the beating rain, and plunging into the stream, swam with the current a few rods, till she was arrested by a thick covert of overhanging shrubs, which grew to the water's edge. Thinking she might be able to cover her head with these bushes, while her body was hid by the water, she crept cautiously under, close to the bank, when, to her surprise and joy, she found that this shrubbery covered and curiously concealed a crevice in the jutting rock, sufficiently large to admit a free entrance to an ample cave within. Having carefully adjusted every limb and leaf without, and replaced with instinctive sagacity, the mosses that had been disturbed by her feet, she devoutly thanked the good spirit for her hope of deliverance, and anxiously watched for the morning.