At length he came upon the object of his search, a woman past middle age, whose features were unmistakably those of the white race. She sat on the grass in the shade of a tree, near the door of a wigwam, her fingers busily employed in embroidering a moccasin. She seemed scarcely aware of his presence as he stood before her vainly striving to still the tumultuous beating of his heart. Controlling his voice by a great effort, he addressed her in English, in a quiet tone. "How do you do, mother?" She looked up for an instant, shook her head slowly, and dropped her eyes upon her work again. "You understand me?" he said inquiringly, "you have not forgotten your native tongue?" "Me squaw," was the laconic answer, unaccompanied by so much as a glance. He sat down on a stump near at hand, the very same on which Lyttleton had seated himself the previous night, and watched her silently for a moment, while he considered the best manner of approaching her so as to win her confidence and learn whether she could indeed tell him aught of that which all these years he had been trying to discover. "You are a white woman, why should you wish to conceal the fact?" he said at length in a soft, persuasive tone. "I have no design against you, but on the contrary would gladly do you any service in my power." Again she raised her head, this time giving him a steady look, and was it fancy that for a single instant there was something like a gleam of recognition in her eye. If so it was gone again before he could be sure it had been there; while she answered indifferently in the Shawnee tongue, that she did not understand what he had just said, and that she was not a pale face but an Indian woman, the wife of a Shawnee brave. Kenneth sat for a moment in perplexed silence; her assertion that she did not belong to the white race was evidently false, yet what could be her motive for making it? If she preferred to remain with the tribe no one could force her away, or would be likely to care to do so. As he watched her again busied with her work, apparently wholly careless of his presence, and studied her face, recalling the description that had been given him, calculating what her age might be, and the changes produced by the hardships and exposure of her wild life, the conviction grew upon him that it was possible, even probable, she was the very woman for whom he had so long and vainly searched. He determined upon a bold course. Leaning toward her and gazing full into her face, "Reumah Clark," he said, "have you quite forgotten the old life in the little valley among the mountains of Eastern Tennessee, the husband and children you then loved so dearly, the kind neighbors at whose house you were when the Indians swooped down so suddenly upon you all?" She had not been able to repress a slight start at the unexpected sound of that name, or to entirely preserve the stolidity of countenance with which she had begun the interview.