unfamiliar with the more recent location of “cow-pens,” as the ranches were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of the settlers’ stations.  Nothing so alters the face of a country as the moral and physical convulsion of war.  Even many of the Indian towns were deserted and half charred,—­burned by the orders of the British commanders.  One such stood in a valley through which he passed on his homeward way; the tender vernal aspect of this green cove, held in the solemn quiet of the encircling mountains, might typify peace itself.  Yet here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in the absolute solitude,—­the great ribs of dead chargers, together with broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this sequestered bosky nook.

Something of a job this transit was, for with the spring freshets the water was high and the current strong, and he was compelled to use only one hand for swimming, the other holding high out of the water’s reach his powder horn.  For, despite any treaties of peace, this was no country for a man to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades’ curiosity concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it, a perpetual conundrum.

He had never, however, made so lonely a journey.  Not one human being did he meet—­neither red man nor white—­in all the long miles of the endless wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went.  Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to go and leave the majestic peace of the zenith.  The stars scintillated in the dark night as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far spaces of the heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to cook the supper that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach of wolf or panther while he slept.  He was doubtless in jeopardy often enough, but chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical till the fourth day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the partners of the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.

They waited for no reproaches for their desertion.  They were quick to upbraid.  As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment, and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he listened.  His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an intimation of gathering all its forces for