It was a merry camping party as they fared along through the wilderness, and she had occasion to make many sage observations on the inconsistency and the unwisdom of man!  That the prospect of killing some Frenchman, or being themselves cruelly killed, in a national quarrel which neither faction, the cow-drivers nor the Blue Lick Stationers, half understood, should so endear men to each other was a sentiment into which she could not enter.  It was better, after all, to be a woman, she said to herself, and sit soberly at home and sew the rational sampler, and let the world wag on as it would and the cutthroats work their wild will on each other.  The least suggestion that brought the thought of the French to their minds was received with eyes alight, and nerves aquiver, and blood all in a rush.  The favorite of the whole camp was a young fellow who had achieved that enviable station by virtue of an inane yet inconceivably droll intonation of the phrase, “Bong chure” (Bon jour), delivered at all manner of unconformable times and in inappropriate connections, and invariably greeted with shouts of laughter.  And when at last the party reached the vicinity of Blue Lick and the stationers swarmed out to meet them, taking the news of the French invasion at second hand, each repeating it to the other, and variously recounting it back again, never dreaming that it was supposed to have originally issued from the station, she meditated much upon this temperamental savagery in man, and the difficulty it occasioned in conforming him to those sagacious schemes for his benefit which she nourished in her inventive little pate.  The antagonisms of the Blue Lick Stationers and the cow-drivers from the Keowee vanished like mist.  On the one hand the stationers were assured that the stampede of the cattle was now regarded as inadvertent, and although it had occasioned an immense deal of vexatious trouble to the ranchmen, all were now well rounded up and restored to the cow-pens as of yore.  And the ranchmen in turn received a thousand thanks for their neighborly kindness in the restoration of the horses of the Blue Lick Stationers, who knew that the animals had not been decoyed off by the herders, as a malicious report sought to represent, but had merely returned to their “old grass,” according to their homing propensities.  And both parties loved the British soldiers, who had reinforced them, and intended to go a-scouting with the military expedition; and the soldiers earnestly reciprocated by assisting in the preparations for the defense of the station.  Especially active and efficient was the only artilleryman among them, and the paradisaic peace amidst all the preparations for war was so complete that his acrid scorn of that pride of the settlement, the little swivel gun, and of the stationers’ methods of handling it, occasioned not even a murmur of resentment.