Adventure Magazine Cover — page 114: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

108 with three white men who had emerged from the palisades as we scrambled ashore. “This place Ta-wan-ne-ars does not know,” he replied. “Yet it is on the river St. Lawrence, for there is no other stream of this size. I think, brother, that de Veulle is taking us to La Vierge du Bois.” “Tt matters little where he takes us,” I returned ill-naturedly. ‘Our end is like to be the same in any case.” ‘“‘At the least,’ said Ta-wan-ne-ars with a smile, ‘we shall have solved the riddle of the Doom Trail.” “And what will that avail us?” I coun- tered. “Joncaire told meall Isought to know of Jagara—but he told it to a dead man.” “Not yet dead, brother,” Ta-wan-ne-ars corrected me gently. “We have still a long way to go—and we have our search.” “Which is like to lead us into the halls of .’ I said rudely. But de Veulle and the three strange Frenchmen walked up at that moment, and Ta-wan-ne-ars was spared the neces- sity of an answer. “°Tis well,” de Veulle was saying. “We will rest the night, then. Ill lodge my prisoners in the stockade.” “And there is naught else?” asked one of the others. “The letter to Pére Hyacinthe—don’t forget that.” Whereat they all four laughed with a kind of sinister mystery and cast glances’ of amusement at us. “T would I might see the Moon Feast,” said another. “Some day, if you are accepted amongst the Ga-go-sa, you may,” returned de Veulle. “Be ready with the letter, I beg you. I must start early with the daylight if I am to be in time for the feast.” The Cahnuagas drove us from the bank with kicks and blows of their paddle-blades, and the white men followed leisurely, laughing now and then as we dodged some particularly vicious attack upon our heads and faces. As it was, when we were flung into a bare log-walled room within the pali- sade we were covered with bruises. “T'was the real beginning of our torment. 39 | IN THE morning our arms were § | untied and we were given a mess of =a half-cooked Indian meal. Then the rawhides were rebound, and we set forth upon a trail that led from the river south- Adventure eastward into the forest. A Cahnuaga walked behind each of us, tomahawk in hand. De Veulle himself brought up the rear, his musket always ready. I prefer not to think of that day. The heat of early Summer was in the air, and al- though it was cooler in the forest than in the open a host of insects attacked us; and with our hands bound, we could not fight them off. Ta-wan-ne-ars had the thick hide of his race, and they bothered him less than they did me; but we were both in agony by the time we made camp and the smoke- smudge kindled by our guards in self-pro- tection gave us temporary relief. The next day was much the same. If we hesitated in our pace or staggered, the savage nearest to us used the flat of his tomahawk or his musket-butt. Ta-wan- ne-ars walked before me in the column, and the sight of his indifference, his disdainful air toward all the slights put upon him, maintained my courage when otherwise it must have yielded. On the third day shortly after noon I was astonished to hear faintly, but very dis- tinctly, a bell ringing in the forest. And I remembered the words of the Cahnuaga Who had been last of his brethren to die in that fight in the glade on the Great Trail— ‘““A building with a tower and a bell that rings.” “La Vierge du “Bois welcomes you,’ hailed de Veulle from behind us. ‘The bell rings you in. Ah, there will be bright eyes and flushed cheeks at sight of you!” He laughed in a pleasant, melodious way. “White cheeks to flush for you, Ormerod, and red cheeks to grow duskier for our friend the chief here! What a fluttering of hearts there will be!” Could I have wrenched my hands free I would have snatched a tomahawk from the Cahnuaga before me. But I did what Ta-wan-ne-ars did—held my head straight and walked as if I had not heard. Some- thing told me the Seneca suffered as muchas I. We did not hear the bell again; but in mid-afternoon the forest ended upon the banks of a little river, and in the distance a wooden tower showed through the trees. As we drew nearer other buildings appeared, arranged in irregular fashion about a clear- ing. One of pretentious size stood by itself inside a palisade. Cahnuagas, including women and chil- dren, swarmed along the trail with guttural - COMMICLOOOKS €o)