the defensive as he noted how the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise.  Every house of the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could be seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley.  The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly wrangling—­and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain.  “Looking out for me, I wonder?” he asked himself, and as this glow of agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with questions angrily admonished his silence.

“He has seen a wolf!  He has seen a wolf!  ’Tis plain!” cried old Mivane, as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad pioneers.  “One would know that without being told!”

“You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the cow-pens on the Keowee River can’t round them up again!” cried one of the settlers.

“The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!” declared another pessimistically.

“And it was you that shot the wolf!” cried “X” rancorously.

“The herders are holding us responsible and have sent an ambassador,” explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, “to inform us that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle.”

“Gadso! they can’t all be lost!” exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.

“No, no! the herders go too far for damages—­too far!  They are putting their coulter too deep!” said a farmer fresh from the field.  He had still a bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust in his hand and fingered the kernels.

“They declare they’ll seize our skins,” cried another ambiguously,—­then, conscious of this, he sought to amend the matter,—­“Not the hides we wear,”—­this was no better, for they were all arrayed in hides, save Richard Mivane.  “Not the hides that we were born in, but our deerhides, our peltry,—­they’ll seize the pack-train from Blue Lick, and they declare they’ll call on the commandant of Fort Prince George to oppose its passing with the king’s troops.”

An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,—­save for the fresh notes of a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the tower of the blockhouse, above which the rainbow glowed in the radiant splendors of a misty amber sky.

“The king’s troops?  Would the commandant respond?” anxiously speculated one of the settlers.