Page:Salem - a tale of the seventeenth century (IA taleseventeenth00derbrich).pdf/304

 she murmured, in a voice broken by her sobs; "he little knows how wretched I am now. Ah! he would help me if he could—he said he would; but alas! alas! he can not help me—no one can help me now."

But Alice's friends were far too few to suffer her to forget one of them; and although she was sure Pashemet could not aid her, still she felt as if even the knowledge of his true, though distant, sympathy and sorrow for her in her dreadful affliction, if ineffectual, would yet be soothing to her lonely heart. So giving the little token into the hands of the faithful old Winny, she directed her to send it to Pashemet by the hands of an old neighbor, who belonged to the Naumkeag tribe of Indians, and tell him of her great distress, and of her grandmother's dreadful fate.

How and what was the Indian method of conveying tidings, secretly and speedily, through the intervening wilds and unbroken forests of a then uninhabited country, has, we believe, never yet been satisfactorily explained. We know that they were fleet of foot, and of untiring strength in the race; but whether information was thus posted on