Those letters were, in rude tracing: 

REDBUD.

And to these Verty had added, with melancholy and listless smiles, the further letters: 

GOING TO—­

Unfortunately he was compelled to leave the remainder of the sentence unwritten.

CHAPTER V.

WINCHESTER.

Having followed the Indian boy from Apple Orchard to his lodge in the wilderness, and shown how he passed many of his hours in the hills, it is proper now that we should mount—­in a figurative and metaphorical sense—­behind Mr. Rushton, and see whither that gentleman also bends his steps.  We shall thus arrive at the real theatre of our brief history—­we mean at the old town of Winchester,

Every body knows, or ought to know, all about Winchester.  It is not a borough of yesterday, where the hum of commerce and the echo of the pioneer’s axe mingle together, as in many of our great western cities of the Arabian Nights:—­Winchester has recollections about it, and holds to the past—­to its Indian combats, and strange experiences of clashing arms, and border revelries, and various scenes of wild frontier life, which live for us now only in the chronicles;—­to its memories of Colonel Washington, the noble young soldier, who afterwards became, as we all have heard, so distinguished upon a larger field;—­to Thomas Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron, who came there often when the deer and the wolves of his vast possessions would permit him—­and to Daniel Morgan, who emptied many fair cups on Loudoun-street, and one day passed, with trumpets sounding, going to Quebec; again on his way to debate questions of importance with Tarleton, at the Cowpens—­lastly, to crush the Tory rising on Lost River, about the time when “it pleased heaven so to order things, that the large army of Cornwallis should be entrapped and captured at Yorktown, in Virginia,” as the chronicles inform us.  All these men of the past has Winchester looked upon, and many more—­on strange, wild pictures, and on many histories.  For you walk on history there and drink the chronicle:—­Washington’s old fort is crumbling, but still visible;—­Morgan, the strong soldier, sleeps there, after all his storms;—­and grim, eccentric Fairfax lies where he fell, on hearing of the Yorktown ending.

When we enter the town with Mr. Rushton, these men are elsewhere, it is true; but none the less present.  They are there forever.

The lawyer’s office was on Loudoun-street, and cantering briskly along the rough highway past the fort, he soon reached the rack before his door, and dismounted.  The rack was crooked and quailed—­the house was old and dingy—­the very knocker on the door frowned grimly at the wayfarer who paused before it.  One would have said that Mr. Rushton’s manners, house, and general surrounding, would have repelled the community, and made him a thousand enemies, so grim were they.  Not at all.  No lawyer