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Page 57
By his side, and within two feet of the renegade, lay extended the
beautiful form of Ella Barnwell--with nothing but a blanket and her own
garments between her and the earth--with none but a similar covering
over her--with her head resting upon a stone, and apparently asleep. We
say apparently asleep; but the drowsy son of Erebus and Nox had not yet
closed her eyelids in slumber; for there were thoughts in her breast
more potent than all his persuasive arts of forgetfulness, or those
of his prime minister, Morpheus. Was she thinking of her own hard
fate--away there in that lonely forest--with not a friend nigh that
could render her assistance--with no hope of escape from the awful doom
to which she was hastening? Or was she thinking of him, for whom her
heart yearned with all the thousand, undefined, indescribable sympathies
of affection?--of him who so lately had been her companion?--for
the heart of love measures duration, not by the cold mathematical
calculation of minutes and hours, and days and weeks, and months and
years, but by events and feelings; and the acquaintance of weeks may
seem the friend of years, and the acquaintance of years be almost
forgotten in weeks;--was she thinking of him, we say--of Algernon? who,
even in misery, had been torn from her side, had said perchance his last
trembling farewell, and gone to suffer a death at which humanity must
shudder! Ay, all these thoughts, and a thousand others, were rushing
wildly through her feverish brain. She thought of her own fate--of
his--of her relations--pictured out in her imagination the terrible doom
of each--and her tender heart became wrung to the most excruciating
point of agony.
By the side of Ella, was her adopted mother--buried in that troubled
sleep which great fatigue sends to the body, even when the mind is
ill at ease, filling it with startling visions--and around the fire,
as we said before, lay the dusky forms of the savages, lost to all
consciousness of the outer world. The position of Ella was such, that,
by slightly turning her head, she could command a view of the features
of the renegade; whose strange workings, as before noted, served to fix
her attention and divide her thoughts between him, as the cause of her
present unhappiness, and that unhappiness itself--and she gazed on his
loathsome, contorted countenance, with much the same feeling as one
might be supposed to gaze upon a serpent coiling itself around the
body, whose deadly fangs, either sooner or later, would assuredly give
the fatal stroke of death. She noted the sudden start of Girty, and the
wildness with which he peered around him, with feelings of hope and
fear--hope, that rescue might be at hand--fear, lest something more
dreadful was about to happen. At length Girty started again, and turned
his head toward Ella so suddenly, that she had not time to withdraw her
eyes ere his were fixed searchingly upon them.
"And are you too awake?" he said, with something resembling a sigh.
"I thought the innocent could ever sleep!"
"Not when the guilty are abroad, with deeds of death, and friends
exposed," returned Ella, bitterly.
"Ah! true--true!" rejoined Girty, again looking toward the fire, in a
musing mood.
"Well may you muse and writhe under the tortures of your guilty acts,"
continued Ella, in the same bitter tone; "for you have much to answer
for, Simon Girty."
"And who told you the past tortured me?" cried Girty, quickly, turning
on her a fierce expression.
"Your changing features and guilty starts," answered Ella.
"Ha! then you have been a spy upon me, have you?" said Girty, pressing
the words slowly through his clenched teeth, knitting his shaggy brows,
and fixing his eye with intensity upon hers, until she quailed and
trembled beneath its seeming fiery glance; which the light, whereby it
was seen, rendered more demon-like than usual; while it made shadow
chase shadow, like waves of the sea, across his face: "You have been
a spy upon my actions, eh? Beware! Ella Barnwell--beware! Do not
put your head in the lion's mouth too often, or he may think the bait
troublesome; and by ----! had other than you told me what I just now
heard, he or she had not lived to repeat it."
"Far better an early death and innocence, than a long life of guilt and
misery," returned Ella, at once regaining her boldness of speech; "Far
better the fate you speak of, than mine."
"And would you prefer being wedded to death, rather than me?" asked
Girty, quickly, in surprise.
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