All the time at the back of my head were other thoughts than merchandise.  The picture which Frew had drawn of Virginia as a smiling garden on the edge of a burning pit was stamped on my memory.  I had seen on my travels the Indians that dwelled in the Tidewater, remnants of the old great clans of Doeg and Powhatan and Pamunkey.  They were civil enough fellows, following their own ways, and not molesting their scanty white neighbours, for the country was wide enough for all.  But so far as I could learn, these clanlets of the Algonquin house were no more comparable to the fighting tribes of the West than a Highland caddie in an Edinburgh close is to a hill Macdonald with a claymore.  But the common Virginian would admit no peril, though now and then some rough landward fellow would lay down his spade, spit moodily, and tell me a grim tale.  I had ever the notion to visit Frew and finish my education.

It was not till the tobacco ships had gone and the autumn had grown late that I got the chance.  The trees were flaming scarlet and saffron as I rode west through the forests to his house on the South Fork River.  There, by a wood fire in the October dusk, he fed me on wild turkey and barley bread, and listened silently to my tale.

He said nothing when I spoke of my schemes for getting the better of the Englishman and winning Virginia to my side.  Profits interested him little, for he grew his patch of corn and pumpkins, and hunted the deer for his own slender needs.  Once he broke in on my rigmarole with a piece of news that fluttered me.

“You mind the big man you were chasing that night you and me first forgathered?  Well, I’ve seen him.”

“Where?” I cried, all else forgotten.

“Here, in this very place, six weeks syne.  He stalked in about ten o’ the night, and lifted half my plenishing.  When I got up in my bed to face him he felled me.  See, there’s the mark of it,” and he showed a long scar on his forehead.  “He went off with my best axe, a gill of brandy, and a good coat.  He was looking for my gun, too, but that was in a hidy-hole.  I got up next morning with a dizzy head, and followed him nigh ten miles.  I had a shot at him, but I missed, and his legs were too long for me.  Yon’s the dangerous lad.”

“Where did he go, think you?” I asked.

“To the hills.  To the refuge of every ne’er-do-weel.  Belike the Indians have got his scalp, and I’m not regretting it.”

I spent three days with Frew, and each day I had the notion that he was putting me to the test.  The first day he took me over the river into a great tangle of meadow and woodland beyond which rose the hazy shapes of the western mountains.  The man was twenty years my elder, but my youth was of no avail against his iron strength.  Though I was hard and spare from my travels in the summer heat, ’twas all I could do to keep up with him, and only my pride kept me from crying halt.  Often when he stopped I could have wept with fatigue, and had no breath for a word, but his taciturnity saved me from shame.