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226 swung him to the right and he discerned a faintly visible path, scarcely more than a  deer runway, that led toward the east. For a good half-hour he traveled, now turning  right and now left, and at last the woods  thinned and a rocky hillside meadow came  into sight. Along the border of this they passed and crossed a muddy stream, and,  with the morning sunlight full in their faces,  mounted a bushy ridge and went down the  other side of it and into a tract of marshy  ground grown head-high with yellowing  rushes and interspersed with alder and white  birch. A dog barked suddenly from close at hand, so unexpectedly that David, picking  his steps across the swamp, started and went  floundering to his knees in the slimy water. In another instant the rushes were gone, trampled flat by many feet, and a little island  sprang from the marsh, and David saw many  Indians and some rude huts of branches and  bark before him. A mangy dog rushed at his legs and ran off howling as one of the boy’s  captors struck him with his bow. The sunlit air was filled with the smoke of fires, voices  growled, and David was thrust into the midst  of a group of painted savages.

More curious than unfriendly they seemed,