This was spoken so loud that Keller heard the latter part of the speech, and his eyes met those of the priest. All criminals look that way in their trouble; but not for holier purpose and better hope looked the caught culprit then.

Who sheds blood here?' he at length exclaimed, straightening himself upon the stool. 'Who but this red devil?—who puts blood on his door-sill, and white man's blood at that, but him? Why don't you chain him? Let me go!'

There is no blood on his door-sill, Mr. Keller, and no blood on his hands, and those who came here to shed his blood are unhurt, and you are unharmed, though had you succeeded in your scheme, the Indian would be now lying on this floor, with his blood upon your hands. Thank GOD that it is not so.' The priest in speaking, had approached within a few feet of Rude, and when he paused, he extended his hand, as if he would touch the person of the latter in obedience to some instinct of his nature, that while it made him condemn the crime, could teach him to bear to the tainted sore the balm that the good Samaritan poured into the wounds of him of the parable.

Keller saw the hand extended to him, and doubtless understood the motive of the action; but whether he did or not, it made no difference; for he sprang suddenly upon his feet, and before his intention could be intercepted, he struck the priest's hand away from him, with a loud and blasphemous oath.

'Hands off, I say! I'm no prisoner in an Indian's cabin; and no d-d Jesuit shall lay his finger on me. I say to all of you, stand off!' and he looked around the room for something with which to arm himself, determined, it now seemed, to do and dare the worse.

Recoiling from the blow for an instant, and an instant only, the minister of GOD, whose creed was charity and peace, again approached the desperate man; approached him with a face as calm as an angel's, and a heart as brave as a martyr's, and before he could seize on any weapon of offence, he clenched his reaching arm, and pinioned it in his grasp. But the left-hand arm of the ruffian was free, and as powerful as free, and with the force of a machine, it struck the priest over the temple. There was war then. There appeared to be murder too, for as the blow was sent with stunning and killing effect, the priest staggered and fell, with a dull, dead sound upon the floor.

There seemed to be sacrilege as well as murder, and I determined to avenge both the martyr and the man. It was not my fate to do so, however often during that eventful day, my heart had beat to do a deed of mischief.

Before I could clench with the brute, I saw a huge black hand fly into the air; a great gray-sleeved arm whirled before my eyes, and then something in the shape of Rude Keller, except that it seemed more limp and helpless, was tossed into the air for a moment, as if a mine had been sprung under its feet; and then, with something like a red mask upon some portion of it near its head, with four limbs, that seerned all broken to pieces, it fell in a great lump, with a hideous shout as of sick death, some five feet from where I first saw it rise into the air. And there it lay, and no one went to it, but the dog who smelt the

blood on its face, and growled and snarled for a while, and then sat by it and waited, as if he wanted to see whether the thing would kick him again. The tiger looked no longer at the dog, but with a dull breathing, slumbered on his first death-watch. The grave was not very far off from that mass of once mighty, but now helpless, humanity, that Sampson, the giant, had smote with something as strong as the jaw-bone of an ass. But the priest came to, and with a gourd I dipped water from a bucket that Mike fetched from the Indian's spring, and bathed the bruised temple; and while he laid that temple on my breast, I prayed to him to pray for me; and while in his silent worship, I felt that his soul was on its knees, and that my poor name was nearer to the throne, because he spoke it, than it had been for many a day, since my mother, on her dying-bed, told her MAKER that she wished HIM to bless her son, another group came into that dread cabin-room, a woman and a young girl; and the woman went by all others with a wild and insolent manner, and squatting down by the body of the half-dead man in the corner, she took his head in her hands, and placed the bloody thing in her lap, and in her silent thinking, cursed him and us; and the younger one, with an angel's form in rags, and lips compressed, and eyes that looked of terror and of dreams, stopped in the centre of the room, and looked around at all. In the eyes of all she saw what she seemed not often to have found, and then she knelt down by the priest and kissed his hand.

me.

CHAPTER TWELFTH.

SHE kissed the very hand that Rude had struck. It was a womanly deed, and done in that accidental way, without a previous thought, by which the gentle sex sometimes illustrate their weakness and their force. Beautiful as the act appeared to me, it was also another phase of the complication of circumstances in which I found myself. What she was, I knew at once. Why she stopped and knelt by the priest, instead of going straight to the bleeding thing she called her parent, puzzled She had scarcely noticed the crippled object that was huddled like a rag-bag in the corner, simply an old, worn-out coat and pair of pantaloons, with vest and other garments of man's attire, with a mask put on and painted hands attached; but she had turned away from it, not in loathing, that I could see, but quickly, and had fallen on her knees before the better thing her father had thrown in violence on the floor; and by that prostrate form, whose bruised temple I was bathing, she knelt, making strong the resemblance to some sweet picture of an Italian master, in which is painted one of the Marys by the side of the great CRUCIFIED. Heaven help me, but I mean no profanation by this simile. And with his luminous eyes looked the good man at her, that young and ragged thing, that young element of joy, and greater than a king felt he, when to the regal hand come the courtiers of his realm to kiss their empty homage on the jewelled glove held forth for their worship.

Meantime, the woman who had entered with her, held the ruffian's head upon her lap, and sometimes gazed fixedly upon it, and then she raised her eyes and gazed at the different figures that composed the

company. Once or twice she directed her attention upon the priest and the young girl; and a deep dark fire, smothered in clouding smoke, shone in the look; but when she turned upon the Indian, she seemed at once to recognize in him the person of all others upon whom she was to vent her wrath. Benny stood by the fire-place and looked with a steady look at the changing lights and shades that glimmered and darkened amid the burning wood. Old Mike too, had resumed his seat by the hearth, and was calm once more; but from the face of the priest the reverent negro never withdrew his gaze.

Sampson, after his deed of prowess, had gone back to his old age; but I could observe in his half-anxious face a certain inexpressible and insuppressible smile of satisfaction, perhaps of humor, and he gave me one or two furtive looks, that plainly asked me if I did not think him a very clever old fellow. Indeed I did.

All at once a shrill voice sounded from the corner where the man lay and the woman sat, and I looked over in that direction.

Will you let him die like a dog among you, and you Christians and white people? How many were upon him? Negroes, Indian, and priest, and the white stranger, (meaning me,) and not one of you dare take hold of him by himself. Wake up Rude, and look at the gang of cowards all about you. Wake up, I say, man, and be a man! Who struck him, I say, and drew his blood? Priest is n't it blood for blood, eye for eye, tooth for tooth? Look here, he is dying, and you won't come near him to help him. Get up there, you huzzy; get off your knees and let that man's hand alone; what 's he to you? Look at your father and get up and come away from people that hate him, hate you, hate me. Young devil! I say come here! Will you let your father die and not fetch him a drink of water, when they can pour pailsfull over the preacher's head?'.

She stopped, for at that moment the contused brain of the ruffian began to resume its functions, and some power over his limbs returned. He drew his hand across his face and then held it before him, placing it in such a position that the light could fall full upon it. From his face his hand received a broad stain of blood. That sight seemed to revive the wild demon in his heart, for he threw his hand in front of him as if he would throw it away from him entirely, and he vainly tried to get upon his legs.

'Not yet,' I heard her mutter in his ear. That voice seemed also to revive him; for he turned toward the woman as if he had seen her for the first time, and spoke to her.

'Yes,' she answered, they came straight to the house and told me where you were.'

So it was as I had thought. The news of the attack and of Rude Keller's imprisonment was carried to his wife by his escaped comrades, and she had started forthwith to his rescue. The tigress had sought her mate, and finding him, had crouched down by his side and almost lapped the blood from his clotted wounds, and had growled and snarled her fury at his foes; and what, following the figure out, she would call her cub, was in their hands, and fiercely she glared upon them as she saw the gentle priest bless the poor being with his saintly look. 'Go,' said the priest to me, and see if you can do any thing for that poor man. He must be suffering, and it is not right in us, so many here, to let him want for aid. Go! I am well again; and you too, my child,' speaking to the girl, go to him and help him. It is your duty; go, I beg you.'

The girl got up from her knees, as if to obey the clergyman. There was a something of wildness in her whole appearance that wonderfully impressed me. Wildness is the word, for none other can convey the impression she made upon me then. And with that wildness, not of the brain, mark me, but of the natural being of the girl, there was a harmonious unity of beauty, of intellectual expression and physical development. Her face was radiant with intelligence, and a certain look, that I cannot well describe, appeared to me to be the result of some

dreamy quality of the mind, some perpetual recollection as of things that had been, coming back to her in dim and scarcely distinct vibrations from the young, small part of her life. Her hair was nearly black, and yet not black. It was the hair of a blonde seen in twilight, or when the moon shines; and it fell in clusters, not school-girlish, upon her shoulders; and her shoulders fell like the sculptor's lines of beauty, until they were lost in patched-up rags and queer rig of dress, halfbaby's and half-woman's. Had she begged a ribbon from some village belle, or was that bunch of tasteful color, bark stripped from the autumn forest, or leaves from the red dog-wood and the silver maple? There were feeling and gentleness and gentle blood, in the very arrangement of that something of color, that trembled on her bosom with the beating of her heart. Keep a sun-bonnet on her face for a week, but let her go out into the air of the pleasant woods, and her skin, now brown, would be as pure as the japonica that the bride of yesterday bore in the hand, the hand she gave away in love. The years of this young fawn of the gladed woods were not more than sixteen, and her wild vigor of look and limb made me think that she could go on to be sixty and yet keep on with her loveliness. There was a grace in the few movements she had made, that told of a brave, good heart, that knew how to beat in keeping with her lithe young limbs when they stepped along the humble pathway of her daily work; and yet, after all, I saw in her but the daughter of a ruffian and his dam; but who has not seen the tiniest and the gentlest petaled flower glimmer in its purple wardrobe among the savage scenery of a rock-hemmed way? Hereafter I will have to refer frequently perhaps in these pages to this halfheroine of mine, and therefore will dwell no longer upon a description of her now. My pencil in this chapter has but feebly sketched those lineaments, that my pen has equally failed in bringing before my reader; all that I can add now is, that no novel that I have lately read has in its pages a being so full of all the things that would charm a novelist or a novel-reader, as this calico-gowned daisy, with the loving heart, whom I have made to sit to me for her portrait. If I could tell my public what she now says of all this, they would be induced to give to her, perhaps, more of real every-day sympathy than at this moment they are disposed to yield. Perhaps she is reading now these very lines that you are dwelling on. God bless her.

So the maid stood up as if to obey the wishes of the priest.

'You

Did you wait for him to order you?' exclaimed the woman. shall not come when he says so, but you shall come when I wish it. Come now, I tell you, and none of your high airs about it, either.'

As she spoke she rose from the floor, her eyes flashing and brow all flushed with fury; and stamped her foot, and with the gesture of a bedlam queen, uttered her command to the girl: 'Come to your father!'

The lips of the girl parted as if to speak; but she did not, and without a sign in answer, she walked with almost a sullen air across the room and approached the Indian, upon whose arm she laid her hand and pointed to the priest: Who struck him? Tell me, Oga-ka-nin, who struck the Father?'