It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and thus earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on Indian territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had become more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant’s operations had extended the frontier by some seventy miles.  It may be, too, that the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private purchase; for the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from the Indians was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the events to be herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further west and of an earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.

Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not the hand of brother against brother,—­they were spared that grief,—­but one tender, struggling community against another.

And it came about in this wise.

One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the “port-hole” of the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the little swivel gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph Emsden ride out from the stockade gate for a week’s absence with a party of hunters; with bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and hand to her in farewell.

“Before all the men!” she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal his preference.  And although the men (there were but two or three and not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to imply) said with a grin “Command me!” they said it sotto voce and only to each other.

Spring was once more afoot in the land.  They daily marked her advance as they went.  Halfway up the mountains she had climbed:  for the maples were blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes even more splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant ranges, the elms had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all bore great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready for kindling for some great festival.  It is a wonderful thing to hear a wind singing in myriads of their branches at once.  The surging tones of this oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented ravines and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains.  Now and again the flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects.  The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse’s hoofs might be crushed unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer’s heart not less sincere because unaesthetic.  The farmer’s toil had hardly yet begun, the winter’s hunt being just concluded, and each of the stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.