“Nay! nay! Cornelis, blame us not,” they answered, almost in a breath. “We were sharp beset. ’Twas not easy to gather in all the outlying people in season. There be others as well not saved in the block. The savage, too, is far more friendly to you than to us English. There’s right good hope that at the worst the lost are but captives.” This cold comfort seemed to madden the bereaved man. Muttering to himself in his own tongue, and darting wild looks around, as if his brain were turned and he were about to run amuck, he suddenly sprang on his horse, which panted there, fagged and dripping. “Oben der gate!” he shouted, in a tone so commanding that, though several tried to seize his horse’s head by the bit, fearing some act of desperate folly, others unbarred the entrance. Cornelis dashed through as swiftly as an Indian arrow. Two miles of clearing and forest lay between him and his cabin. The way was thick with savages thirsting for blood. Cornelis spurred on, numb to all sense of danger. The smoke even yet curled from the embers of smouldering homesteads at every turn. But he saw only one house in his mind’s eye--that was a cabin perched in the midst of a clearing on top of a great rock, with flames bursting from its roof; he heard but one sound--the shrieking of wife and children in their last peril. Perhaps it was the wild gestures of the rider, signalling as if to unseen beings, the motions of a maniac, which barred any pursuit at the outset, for the American Indian as well as the Mohammedan of the East fancies the madman under the protection of God; perhaps it was that many of the savages felt more kindly to Cornelis than to other whites. It was not till he neared the base of the precipice, on the crest of which he had built his home, that he saw six Indians on his track, leaping at a pace which outran the strides of his weary horse. The Dutchman turned in his saddle, and his unerring aim dropped one of the pursuers; then he urged his way amid the gloom of the great trees up the hill. When he gained the clearing at the top he saw what had once been his happy home, now only a pile of cold ashes and half-charred logs. He had no time to search if by chance there might yet remain some ghastly relic of those he had loved and lost. The red men were upon him, running as fleetly as stag-hounds, for now they were on the level.