"
"Earth, fire and water may all join against him, but at the time
appointed he will come. I know it."
The great cold, and it was hard, fierce and bitter, lasted two
days. At night the popping of the contracting timbers sounded like a
continuous pistol fire, but Willet had foreseen everything. At his
instance, Colden had made the young soldiers gather vast quantities of
fuel long ago from a forest which was filled everywhere with dead
boughs and fallen timber, the accumulation of scores of years.
Then another great thaw came, and the fickle climate proceeded to show
what it could do. When the thaw had been going on for a day and a
night a terrific winter hurricane broke over the forest. Trees were
shattered as if their trunks had been shot through by huge cannon
balls. Here and there long windrows were piled up, and vast areas were
a litter of broken boughs.
"As I reckon, and allowing for the marvels you say he can perform,
Tayoga is now in the vale of Onondaga, Lennox," said Wilton. "It's
lucky that he's there in the comfortable log houses of his own people,
because a man could scarcely live in the forest in such a storm as
this, as he would be beaten to death by flying timbers.
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