“You’ll have heard tell of Bacon’s rising in ’76?  Governor Berkeley had ridden the dominion with too harsh a hand, and in the matter of its defence against the Indians he was slack when he should have been tight.  The upshot was that Nathaniel Bacon took up the job himself, and after giving the Indians their lesson, turned his mind to the government of Virginia.  He drove Berkeley into Accomac, and would have turned the whole place tapsalteery if he had not suddenly died of a bowel complaint.  After that Berkeley and his tame planters got the upper hand, and there were some pretty homings and hangings.  There were two men that were lieutenants to Bacon, and maybe put the notion into his head.  One was James Drummond, a cousin of my own mother’s, and he got the gallows for his trouble.  The other was a man Richard Lawrence, a fine scholar, and a grand hand at planning, though a little slow in a fight.  He kept the ordinary at James Town, and was the one that collected the powder and kindled the fuse.  Governor Berkeley had a long score to settle with him, but he never got him, for when the thing was past hope Mr. Richard rode west one snowy night to the hills, and Virginia saw him no more.  They think he starved in the wilderness, or got into the hands of the wild Indians, and is long ago dead.”

I knew all about Dick Lawrence, for I had heard the tale twenty times.  “But surely they’re right,” I said, “It’s fifteen years since any man had word of him.”

“Well, you’ll see him within an hour,” said Ringan, “It’s a queer story, but it seems he fell in with a Monacan war party, and since he and Bacon had been fighting their deadly foes, the Susquehannocks, they treated him well, and brought him south into Carolina.  You must know, Andrew, that all this land hereaways, except for the little Algonquin villages on the shore, is Sioux country, with as many tribes as there are houses in Clan Campbell.  But cheek by jowl is a long strip held by the Tuscaroras, a murdering lot of devils, of whom you and I’ll get news sooner than we want.  The Tuscaroras are bad enough in themselves, but the worst part is that all the back country in the hills belongs to their cousins the Cherokees, and God knows how far north their sway holds.  The Long House of the Iroquois controls everything west of the coast land from Carolina away up through Virginia to New York and the Canadas.  That means that Virginia has on two sides the most powerful tribes of savages in the world, and if ever the Iroquois found a general and made a common attack things would go ill with the Tidewater.  I tell you that so that you can understand Lawrence’s doings.  He hates the Iroquois like hell, and so he likes their enemies.  He has lived for fifteen years among the Sioux, whiles with the Catawbas, whiles with the Manahoacs, but mostly with the Monacans.  We of the Free Companions see him pretty often, and bring him the news and little comforts, like good tobacco and eau de vie, that he cannot get among savages.  And we carry messages between him and the Tidewater, for he has many friends still alive there.  There’s no man ever had his knowledge of Indians, and I’m taking you to him, for he has something to tell you.”