“John! this is not the heaven of a Christian,” cried Miss Temple; “you deal now in the superstition of your forefathers.”
“Fathers! sons!” said Mohegan, with firmness.—“all gone—all gone!—have no son but the Young Eagle, and he has the blood of a white man.”
“Tell me, John,” said Elizabeth, willing to draw his thoughts to other subjects, and at the same time yielding to her own powerful interest in the youth; “who is this Mr. Edwards? why are you so fond of him, and whence does he come?”
The Indian started at the question, which evidently recalled his recollection to earth.
Taking her hand, he drew Miss Temple to a seat beside him, and pointed to the country beneath them.
“See, daughter,” he said, directing her looks toward the north; “as far as your young eyes can see, it was the land of his.
But immense volumes of smoke at that moment rolled over their heath, and, whirling in the eddies formed by the mountains, interposed a barrier to their sight, while he was speaking.
Startled by this circumstance, Miss Temple sprang to her feet, and, turning her eyes toward the summit of the mountain, she beheld It covered by a similar canopy, while a roaring sound was heard in the forest above her like the rushing of winds.
“What means it, John?” she exclaimed: “we are enveloped in smoke, and I feel a heat like the glow of a furnace.”
Before the Indian could reply, a voice was heard crying In the woods:
“John! where are you, old Mohegan! the woods are on fire, and you have but a minute for escape.”
The chief put his hand before his mouth, and, making it lay on his lips, produced the kind of noise that had attracted Elizabeth to the place, when a quick and hurried step was heard dashing through the dried underbrush and bushes, and presently Edwards rushed to his side, with horror an every feature.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
“Love rules the court, the camp, the grove.”
—Lay of the Last Minstrel.
“IT would have been sad, indeed, to lose you in such manner, my old friend,” said Oliver, catching his breath for utterance.
“Up and away! even now we may be too late; the flames are circling round the point of the rock below, and, unless we can pass there, our only chance must be over the precipice.
Away! away! shake off your apathy, John; now is the time of need.”
Mohegan pointed toward Elizabeth, who, forgetting her danger, had sunk back to a projection of the rock as soon as she recognized the sounds of Edwards’ voice, and said with something like awakened animation:
“Save her—leave John to die.”
“Her! whom mean you?” cried the youth, turning quickly to the place the other indicated; but when he saw the figure of Elizabeth bending toward him in an attitude that powerfully spoke terror, blended with reluctance to meet him in such a place, the shock deprived him of speech.
“Miss Temple!” he cried, when he found words; “you here! is such a death reserved for you!”
“No, no, no—no death, I hope, for any of us, Mr. Edwards,” she replied, endeavoring to speak calmly; there is smoke, but no fire to harm us.
“Let us endeavor to retire.”
“Take my arm,” said Edwards; “there must be an opening in some direction for your retreat.
Are you equal to the effort?”
“Certainly.
You surely magnify the danger, Mr. Edwards.
Lead me out the way you came.”
“I will—I will,” cried the youth, with a kind of hysterical utterance.
“No, no—there is no danger—I have alarmed you unnecessarily.”
“But shall we leave the Indian—can we leave him, as he says, to die?”
An expression of painful emotion crossed the face of the young man; he stopped and cast a longing look at Mohegan but, dragging his companion after him, even against her will, he pursued his way with enormous strides toward the pass by which he had just entered the circle of flame.
“Do not regard him,” he said, in those tones that de note a desperate calmness; “he is used to the woods, and such scenes; and he will escape up the mountain—over the rock—or he can remain where he is in safety.”
“You thought not so this moment, Edwards!
Do not leave him there to meet with such a death,” cried Elizabeth, fixing a look on the countenance of her conductor that seemed to distrust his sanity.
“An Indian born! who ever heard of an Indian dying by fire?
An Indian cannot burn; the idea is ridiculous.
Hasten, hasten, Miss Temple, or the smoke may incommodate you.”
“Edwards! your look, your eye, terrifies me!
Tell me the danger; is it greater than it seems?
I am equal to any trial.”
“If we reach the point of yon rock before that sheet of fire, we are safe, Miss Temple,” exclaimed the young man in a voice that burst without the bounds of his forced composure.
“Fly! the struggle is for life!”
The place of the interview between Miss Temple and the Indian has already been described as one of those plat forms of rock, which form a sort of terrace in the mountains of that country, and the face of it, we have said, was both high and perpendicular.
Its shape was nearly a natural arc, the ends of which blended with the mountain, at points where its sides were less abrupt in their descent.
It was round one of these terminations of the sweep of the rock that Edwards had ascended, and it was toward the same place that he urged Elizabeth to a desperate exertion of speed.
Immense clouds of white smoke had been pouring over the summit of the mountain, and had concealed the approach and ravages of the element; but a crackling sound drew the eyes of Miss Temple, as she flew over the ground supported by the young man, toward the outline of smoke where she already perceived the waving flames shooting forward from the vapor, now flaring high in the air, and then bending to the earth, seeming to light into combustion every stick and shrub on which they breathed.
The sight aroused them to redoubled efforts; but, unfortunately, a collection of the tops of trees, old and dried, lay directly across their course; and at the very moment when both had thought their safety insured, the warm current of the air swept a forked tongue of flame across the pile, which lighted at the touch; and when they reached the spot, the flying pair were opposed by the surly roaring of a body of fire, as if a furnace were glowing in their path.
They recoiled from the heat, and stood on a point of the rock, gazing in a stupor at the flames which were spreading rap idly down the mountain, whose side, too, became a sheet of living fire.