His face was compassionate; perhaps he saw traces of tears about her eyes. He could not know why she had been weeping, or he might have accounted his sympathy wasted. For Hamish looked upon crockery as inanimate and a mere manufacture, yet endowed with a perverse ingenuity in finding occasions to come into disastrous contact with a boy's unsuspecting elbow, and get itself broken and the boy into disgrace. He had his gentle interpretation of her sorrow, and motioned to her, once more, to close her eyes, and pointed up at the skies, where Orion was unsheathing his glittering blade above the eastern mountains--a warning that the night was well-nigh spent and a chill day of early December on the way. And it seemed only an inappreciable interval of time before Odalie opened her eyes again, upon a crimson dawn, with the rime white on the sparse red and brown leaves and bare boughs; to see breakfast cooking under Hamish's ministrations; to see Fifine washing the cat's face with fresh water from the spring--very cold it was, as Fifine herself found it, when it came her turn to try it herself and cry "_Quelle barbarie!_"--to see the Indians getting a party to horse to go back and search for one of their number, who had become separated in some way; to see poor Hamish's face pale with fear and consciousness, and then harden with resolution to meet the worst like a man. At length they set forth in the frosty dawn of a new day, changing their route and making their progress further southward along untried ways she had never thought to travel. The sun came grandly up; the mountain range, wooded to the summit, flaunted in splendid array, red, and yellow, and even purple, with the heavy growths of the sweet-gum trees, and their wealth of lingering foliage. Here and there, along the heights, grim crags showed their beetling precipices, and where the leaves had fallen, covering great slopes with russet hues, the bare boles and branches of the forest rose frosted with fine lace-like effects. Sometimes, with a wild woodland call and a flash of white foam, a cataract dashed down the valley. The feeding deer lifted their heads to gaze after the party with evanescent curiosity and then fell to quietly grazing again: they had not known enough of man to acquire a fear of him. Sometimes arose the bellowing of distant herds of buffalo, filling the Cumberland spurs and coves with a wonted sound, to which they have now long been strangers.