The door stood wide.  A woman walked back and forth over a puncheon floor, tending supper.  Dogs rushed to meet us, and the playing of children could be heard.  A man, gun in hand, stepped to his door, a sentinel.  He lowered its muzzle, and made us welcome, and helped us put our horses under shelter with his own.

It was not often we had a woman’s handiwork in corn bread and game to feed ourselves upon, or a bed covered with homespun sheets.

I slept as the children slept, until a voice rang in the clearing: 

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!”

Every sleeper in the cabin sat upright or stirred.  We said in whispered chorus: 

“Johnny Appleseed!”

A tapping, light and regular, on the window, followed.  The man was on the floor in a breath.  I heard the mother groping among the children, and whispering: 

“Don’t wake the baby!”

The fire had died upon the hearth, and they lighted no candle.  When Johnny Appleseed gave his warning cry in the clearing, and his cautious tap on the window, and was instantly gone to other clearings and other windows, it meant that the Indians were near.

Skenedonk and I, used to the night alarm and boots and saddle in a hurry, put ourselves in readiness to help the family.  I groped for clothing, and shoved small legs and arms into it.  The little creatures, obedient and silent, made no whimper at being roused out of dreams, but keenly lent themselves to the march.

We brought the horses, and put the woman and children upon them.  The very dogs understood, and slunk around our legs without giving mouth.  The cabin door was shut after us without noise, closing in what that family called home; a few pots and pans; patchwork quilts; a spinning-wheel; some benches; perhaps a child’s store of acorn cups and broken yellow ware in a log corner.  In a few hours it might be smoking a heap of ashes; and the world offered no other place so dear.  What we suffer for is enriched by our suffering until it becomes priceless.

So far on the frontier was this cabin that no community block-house stood near enough to give its inmates shelter.  They were obliged to go with us to Fort Stephenson.

Skenedonk pioneered the all-night struggle on an obscure trail; and he went astray sometimes, through blackness of woods that roofed out the stars.  We floundered in swales sponging full of dead leaves, and drew back, scratching ourselves on low-hung foliage.

By dawn the way became easier and the danger greater.  Then we paused and lifted our rifles if a twig broke near by, or a fox barked, or wind rushed among leaves as a patter of moccasins might come.  Skenedonk and I, sure of the northern Indians, were making a venture in the west.  We knew nothing of Tecumseh’s swift red warriors, except that scarcely a year had passed since his allies had tomahawked women and children of the garrison on the sand teach at Chicago.