Chapter 8

Now they are clapper-clawing one another; I'll go look on. That
dissembling abominable varlet, Diomed, has got that same scurvy,
doting, foolish young knave in his helm.
--Troilus and Cressida.

It is necessary, in order that the thread of the narrative should not
be spun to a length which might fatigue the reader, that he should
imagine a week to have intervened between the scene with which the
preceding chapter closed and the events with which it is our intention
to resume its relation in this. The season was on the point of
changing its character; the verdure of summer giving place more
rapidly to the brown and party-coloured livery of the fall.[*] The
heavens were clothed in driving clouds, piled in vast masses one above
the other, which whirled violently in the gusts; opening,
occasionally, to admit transient glimpses of the bright and glorious
sight of the heavens, dwelling in a magnificence by far too grand and
durable to be disturbed by the fitful efforts of the lower world.
Beneath, the wind swept across the wild and naked prairies, with a
violence that is seldom witnessed in any section of the continent less
open. It would have been easy to have imagined, in the ages of fable,
that the god of the winds had permitted his subordinate agents to
escape from their den, and that they now rioted, in wantonness, across
wastes, where neither tree, nor work of man, nor mountain, nor
obstacle of any sort, opposed itself to their gambols.

[*] The Americans call the autumn the "fall," from the fall of the
leaf.

Though nakedness might, as usual, be given as the pervading character
of the spot, whither it is now necessary to transfer the scene of the
tale, it was not entirely without the signs of human life. Amid the
monotonous rolling of the prairie, a single naked and ragged rock
arose on the margin of a little watercourse, which found its way,
after winding a vast distance through the plains, into one of the
numerous tributaries of the Father of Rivers. A swale of low land lay
near the base of the eminence; and as it was still fringed with a
thicket of alders and sumack, it bore the signs of having once
nurtured a feeble growth of wood. The trees themselves had been
transferred, however, to the summit and crags of the neighbouring
rocks. On this elevation the signs of man, to which the allusion just
made applies, were to be found.

Seen from beneath, there were visible a breast-work of logs and
stones, intermingled in such a manner as to save all unnecessary
labour, a few low roofs made of bark and boughs of trees, an
occasional barrier, constructed like the defences on the summit, and
placed on such points of the acclivity as were easier of approach than
the general