piece of bark from low-hanging eaves, now a fragment of half-rotten
puncheon from a doorstep, and as he groped into the dense darkness of
the council-house with his steel and flint he set them alight on the
hearth in the centre of the floor.

When he was once more warm and free of the fear of death, other fears
took hold upon him. In the first glimmers of the fire he could see
through the tall narrow doorless portal only the dark night outside and
a flickering glimpse against its blackness of the quivering crystals of
the snow,--these but vaguely, for the blue smoke eddying through the
great room veiled the opposite side, there being no chimney or window,
and he sat in the interior behind the fire.

He gazed furtively over his shoulder ever and anon, as the flames flared
up, revealing the deeply red walls of the dome-like place with here and
there a buffalo skin suspended against them, the inside of the hide
showing, painted in curious hieroglyphics, brilliant with color, and
instinct with an untranslated meaning; a number of conch shells lay
about, with jars and vases of clay, and those quaintly fashioned earthen
drums, the heads of tightly stretched deerskin,--all paraphernalia of
the savage worship which the cheera-taghe had conducted, now abandoned
as bewitched.

Sitting here comfortably in the place of those men of the "divine fire,"
Cuthbert Barnett, his rifle by his side, his knife in his belt, his
coonskin cap pushed back from his face, once more florid, warm, tingling
from the keen wind of the day and the change to this heated air, and
with perchance a drowsy eyelid, began to marvel anew as to the fate of
the cheera-taghe. Hardly a drowsy eyelid, he consciously had, however,
for he had resolved that he would not sleep. His situation here alone