The Girl Avenger; or, The Beautiful Terror of the MaumeeHarbaugh, T. C. (Thomas Chalmers)
General
The Girl Avenger; or, The Beautiful Terror of the Maumee
Harbaugh, T. C. (Thomas Chalmers)
Adventure stories; Dime novels; Frontier and pioneer life -- Fiction; Ohio -- Fiction
Their guns were concealed in the grass, and armed but with their
knives, concealed but ready for use, about their persons, they stood
erect, listened a moment, then marched boldly forward. The most
careful observer would have proclaimed the couple what they seemed to
be--what they counterfeited--an Indian boy and girl--for though they
kept together they roamed about the village with a nonchalance that
would deceive the most suspicious. Still, as a precautionary measure,
they kept in the shadows as much as possible, yet did not shrink from
walking into the glare of the ground fires whenever necessary. No
suspicion seemed to attach itself to the young would-be-rescuers, and
the lazy savages little dreamed that their deadliest foes were in their
very midst.
By-and-by in their seemingly aimless saunterings they approached the
prison cabin wherein a noble man waited for them--waited behind strong
logs and a guard of stalwart braves, whose eyes noted every thing that
came near in the fitful starlight.
The avengers were prepared to find the prison strongly guarded, and
knew that to rescue the young spy they must have recourse to a strategy
seldom if ever used in red villages. The strategy, as perilous and
startling in its character as it was unique, found birth in the Girl
Avenger’s brain, and Kenowatha joined in the scheme. Crouching in the
gloomy shadow of a lodge, the twain remained silent until the opaque
clouds that crept over the western horizon had completely clothed the
sky in blackness, and vailed the shining faces of the stars.
The prison-hut was built of strong beech logs, dove-tailed, after
the usual mode of constructing cabins in the West, and the roof was
composed of three layers of bark, each two inches thick, and secured
by strong wooden pins. The hut had been built for the express purpose
of securing prisoners, under the eye of the Girty brothers, and other
renegades, and many a noble red and white captive had marched, in the
noon of life, from its gloomy recesses to the fatal stake, beneath a
pellucid sky. The inmates of the prison-hut were secured to a stake in
the center of the structure, thus preventing them from self-escape.
Kenowatha and the Girl Avenger crept to the rear of the hut without
attracting the attention of the guards who stood at the door, and with
the noiseless and ghostly movements of the lizard, as it ascends the
slimy wall, Nanette began to ascend the cabin to its roof. Breathless,
and with drawn knife Kenowatha waited below, ready to give the signal
of danger or drive the keen blade into the heart of the first red-man
who approached.
The rough exterior of the logs aided the young She-wolf in her perilous
undertaking, and presently she found herself grasping the bark
coverings of the hut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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