The episode deals with an easy-mannered gentleman named Potts, who was the agent for a certain Major Colfax of Virginia.  Tom owned under a Henderson grant; the Major had been given this and other lands for his services in the war.  Mr. Potts arrived one rainy afternoon and found me standing alone under the little lean-to that covered the hopper.  How we served him, with the aid of McCann and Cowan and other neighbors, and how we were near getting into trouble because of the prank, will be seen later.  The next morning I rode into Harrodstown not wholly easy in my mind concerning the wisdom of the thing I had done.  There was no one to advise me, for Colonel Clark was far away, building a fort on the banks of the Mississippi.  Tom had laughed at the consequences; he cared little about his land, and was for moving into the Wilderness again.  But for Polly Ann’s sake I wished that we had treated the land agent less cavalierly.  I was soon distracted from these thoughts by the sight of Harrodstown itself.

I had no sooner ridden out of the forest shade when I saw that the place was in an uproar, men and women gathering in groups and running here and there between the cabins.  Urging on the mare, I cantered across the fields, and the first person I met was James Ray.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Matter enough!  An army of redskins has crossed the Ohio, and not a man to take command.  My God,” cried Ray, pointing angrily at the swarms about the land office, “what trash we have got this last year!  Kentucky can go to the devil, half the stations be wiped out, and not a thrip do they care.”

“Have you sent word to the Colonel?” I asked.

“If he was here,” said Ray, bitterly, “he’d have half of ’em swinging inside of an hour.  I’ll warrant he’d send ’em to the right-about.”

I rode on into the town, Potts gone out of my mind.  Apart from the land-office crowds, and looking on in silent rage, stood a group of the old settlers,—­tall, lean, powerful, yet impotent for lack of a leader.  A contrast they were, these buckskin-clad pioneers, to the ill-assorted humanity they watched, absorbed in struggles for the very lands they had won.

“By the eternal!” said Jack Terrell, “if the yea’th was ter swaller ’em up, they’d keep on a-dickerin in hell.”

“Something’s got to be done,” Captain Harrod put in gloomily; “the red varmints’ll be on us in another day.  In God’s name, whar is Clark?”

“Hold!” cried Fletcher Blount, “what’s that?”

The broiling about the land court, too, was suddenly hushed.  Men stopped in their tracks, staring fixedly at three forms which had come out of the woods into the clearing.

“Redskins, or there’s no devil!” said Terrell.

Redskins they were, but not the blanketed kind that drifted every day through the station.  Their war-paint gleamed in the light, and the white edges of the feathered head-dresses caught the sun.  One held up in his right hand a white belt,—­token of peace on the frontier.