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“Deerslayer, do you mean to marry Sumach, now she has neither husband nor brother to feed her?”

“Are such your idees of matrimony, Hetty? Ought the young to wive with the old—the paleface with the redskin—the Christian with the heathen? It’s ag‘in reason and natur’, and so you’ll see if you’ll think of it a moment.”

“I’ve always heard mother say,” returned Hetty, averting her face, more from a feminine instinct than from any consciousness of wrong, “that people should never marry until they loved each other better than brothers and sisters; and I suppose that is what you mean. Sumach is old, and you are young.”

“Ay, and she’s red, and I’m white. Besides, Hetty, suppose you was a wife, having married some young man of your own years, and state, and color—Hurry Harry, for instance”—Deerslayer selected this example, simply from the circumstance that he was the only young man known to both—“and that he had fallen on a warpath, would you wish to take to your bosom, for a husband, the man that slew him?”

“O! no, no, no,” returned the girl, shuddering. “That would be wicked, as well as heartless! No Christian girl could or would do that. I never shall be the wife of Hurry, I know; but were he my husband, no man should ever be it again after his death.”

“I thought it would get to this, Hetty, when you come to understand sarcumstances. ‘Tis a moral impossibility that I should ever marry Sumach; and though Injin weddin’s have no priests, and not much religion, a white man who knows his gifts and duties can’t profit by that, and so make his escape at the fitting time. I do think death would be more nat’ral like, and welcome, than wedlock with this woman.”

“Don’t say it too loud,” interrupted Hetty, impatiently; “I suppose she will not like to hear it. I’m sure Hurry would rather marry even me, than suffer torments, though I am feebleminded; and I am sure it would kill me to think he’d prefer death to being my husband.”

“Ay, gal; you ain’t Sumach, but a comely young Christian, with a good heart, pleasant smile, and kind eye. Hurry might be proud to get you, and that, too, not in misery and sorrow, but in his best and happiest days. Howsever, take my advice, and never talk to Hurry about these things; he’s only a borderer, at the best.”

“I wouldn’t tell him for the world!” exclaimed the girl, looking about her, like one affrighted, and blushing, she knew not why. “Mother always said young women shouldn’t be forward, and speak their minds before they’re asked; O! I never forget what mother told me. ’Tis a pity Hurry is so handsome, Deerslayer; I do think fewer girls would like him then, and he would sooner know his own mind.”

“Poor gal, poor gal, it’s plain enough how it is; but the Lord will bear in mind one of your simple heart and kind feelin‘s! We’ll talk no more of these things; if you had reason, you’d be sorrowful at having let others so much into your secret. Tell me, Hetty, what has become of all the Hurons, and why they let you roam about the p’int, as if you, too, was a prisoner!”

“I’m no prisoner, Deerslayer, but a free girl, and go when and where I please. Nobody dare hurt me! If they did, God would be angry—as I can show them in the Bible. No—no—Hetty Hutter is not afraid; she’s in good hands. The Hurons are up yonder in the woods, and keep a good watch on us both, I’ll answer for it, since all the women and children are on the lookout. Some are burying the body of the poor girl who was shot, so that the enemy and the wild beasts can’t find it. I told ’em that father and mother lay in the lake, but I wouldn’t let them know in what part of it, for Judith and I don’t want any of their heathenish company in our burying ground.”

“Ah’s me! Well it is an awful dispatch to be standing here, alive and angry, and with the feelin’s up and furious, one hour, and then to be carried away at the next, and put out of sight of mankind in a hole in the ’arth. No one knows what will happen to him on a warpath, that’s sartain.”

Here the stirring of leaves and the cracking of dried twigs interrupted the discourse,