At length he arrived at a piece of
firm ground, which ran out like a peninsula into the deep bosom of the
swamp. It had been one of the strongholds of the Indians during their
wars with the first colonists. Here they had thrown up a kind of fort
which they had looked upon as almost impregnable, and had used as a
place of refuge for their squaws and children. Nothing remained of the
Indian fort but a few embankments gradually sinking to the level of the
surrounding earth, and already overgrown in part by oaks and other
forest trees, the foliage of which formed a contrast to the dark pines
and hemlocks of the swamp.
It was late in the dusk of evening that Tom Walker reached the old
fort, and he paused there for a while to rest himself. Any one but he
would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place,
for the common people had a bad opinion of it from the stories handed
down from the time of the Indian wars; when it was asserted that the
savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit.
Tom Walker, however, was not a man to be troubled with any fears of the
kind.
He reposed himself for some time on the trunk of a fallen hemlock,
listening to the boding cry of the tree-toad, and delving with his
walking-staff into a mound of black mould at his feet. As he turned up
the soil unconsciously, his staff struck against something hard. He
raked it out of the vegetable mould, and lo! a cloven skull with an
Indian tomahawk buried deep in it, lay before him.
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