Stuart's next question she thought a bit of his fun. "Have you here," he said, with deep gravity, "some stout gown, fashioned with plaits and fullness in the skirt, and a cape or fichu,--is that what you call it,--about the shoulders? And, yes,--that large red hood, calash, that you wore the first day you arrived at the fort,"--his ready smile flickered,--"on an understanding so little pleasing to your taste. Go get them on, and meet me at the northwestern bastion." The young soldier, Daniel Eske, still standing guard in the block-house tower, looked out on a scene without incident. The river shone in the clear June daylight; the woods were dark, and fresh with dew and deeply green, and so dense that they showed no token of broken boughs and riven hole, results of the cannonade they had sustained, which still served to keep at a distance, beyond the range of the guns, the beleaguering cordon of savages, and thus prevent surprise or storm. Nevertheless there were occasional lurking Indians, spies, or stragglers from the main line, amongst the dense boughs of the blooming rhododendron; he saw from time to time skulking painted faces and feathers fluttering from lordly scalp-locks, which rendered so much the more serious and probable the imputation of communicating with the enemy that the presence and gestures of Choo-qualee-qualoo, still lingering there, had contrived to throw upon him. Her folly might have cost him his life. He might have been sentenced to be shot by his own comrades, discovered to be holding communication with the enemy, and that enemy the Cherokees,--good sooth! Suddenly rampant in his mind was a wild strange suspicion of treachery. His abrupt cry, "Halt, or I fire!" rang sharply on the air, and his musket was thrust through the window, aiming in intimidation down alongside the parapet, where upon the exterior slope of the rampart the beautiful Carolina girl, the French wife of the Scotch settler, had contrived to creep through the embrasure below the muzzle of the cannon, for the ground had sunk a trifle there with the weight of the piece or through some defect of the gabions that helped build up the "cheek," and she now stood at full height on the berm, above the red clay slope of the scarp, signing to Choo-qualee-qualoo with one hand, and with the other motioning toward the muzzle of his firelock, mutely imploring him to desist.