Petulantly Louis chid these discordant minstrels of the night, and joyfully he hailed the first gush of moonlight that rose broad and full and red, over the Oak-hills to the eastward.
Louis envied the condition of the unconscious sleeper, who lay in happy forgetfulness of all her sorrows, her fair curls spread in unbound luxuriance over the dark shaggy neck of the faithful Wolfe, who seemed as if proud of the beloved burden that rested so trustingly upon him. Sometimes the careful dog just unclosed his large eyes, raised his nose from his shaggy paws, snuffed the night air, growled in a sort of under tone, and dosed again, but watchfully.
It would be no easy task to tell the painful feelings that agitated young Louis’s breast. He was angry with Hector, for having thus madly, as he thought, rushed into danger. “It was wilful and almost cruel,” he thought “to leave them the prey of such tormenting fears on his account;” and then the most painful fears for the safety of his beloved companion took the place of less kindly thoughts, and sorrow filled his heart. The broad moon now flooded the hills and vales with light, casting broad checkering shadows of the old oaks’ grey branches and now reddened foliage across the ground.
Suddenly the old dog raises his head, and utters a short half angry note: slowly and carefully he rises, disengaging himself gently from the form of the sleeping girl, and stands forth in the full light of the moon. It is an open cleared space, that mound beneath the pine-tree; a few low shrubs and seedling pines, with the slender waving branches of the late-flowering pearly tinted asters, the elegant fringed gentian, with open bells of azure blue, the last and loveliest of the fall flowers and winter-greens, brighten the ground with wreaths of shining leaves and red berries.
Louis is on the alert, though as yet he sees nothing. It is not a full free note of welcome, that Wolfe gives; there is something uneasy and half angry in his tone. Yet it is not fierce, like the bark of angry defiance he gives, when wolf, or bear, or wolverine is near.
Louis steps forward from the shadow of the pine branches, to the edge of the inclined plane in the foreground. The slow tread of approaching steps is now distinctly heard advancing--it may be a deer. Two figures approach, and Louis moves a little, within the shadow again. A clear shrill whistle meets his ear. It is Hector’s whistle, he knows that, and assured by its cheerful tone, he springs forward and in an instant is at his side, but starts at the strange, companion that he half leads, half carries. The moonlight streams broad and bright upon the shrinking figure of an Indian girl, apparently about the same age as Catharine: her ashy face is concealed by the long masses of raven black hair, which falls like a dark veil over her features; her step is weak and unsteady, and she seems ready to sink to the earth with sickness or fatigue. Hector, too, seems weary. The first words that’ Hector said were, “Help me, Louis, to lead this poor girl to the foot of the pine; I am so tired I can hardly walk another step.”