There, the Indian told him, they would
meet fierce savages and undoubtedly have their throats cut, which kindly
warning was quite enough to drive the Quaker to Santa Lucia headlong. He
was sure of the worst designs on the part of the cannibal, from a
strange glance which he fixed upon the baby as he drove them before him
to his village, saying with a treacherous laugh, that after they had
gone there for a purpose he had, they might go to Santa Lucia as they
would.
It was a bleak, chilly afternoon as they toiled mile after mile along
the beach, the Quaker woman far behind the others with her baby in her
arms, carrying it, as she thought, to its death. Overhead, flocks of
dark-winged grakles swooped across the lowering sky, uttering from time
to time their harsh, foreboding cry; shoreward, as far as the eye could
see, the sand stretched in interminable yellow ridges, blackened here
and there by tufts of dead palmetto-trees; while on the other side the
sea had wrapped itself in a threatening silence and darkness. A line of
white foam crept out of it from horizon to horizon, dumb and treacherous,
and licked the mother's feet as she dragged herself heavily after the
others.
From time to time the Indian stealthily peered over her shoulder,
looking at the child's thin face as it slept upon her breast.
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