“Egad,” cried Captain Sevier, “I have so many times found the boldest plan the safest that I have become a coward that way.  What do you say to it, Mr. Robertson?”

Mr. Robertson leaned his square shoulders over the table.

“He may fall in with a party going over,” he answered, without looking up.

Polly Ann looked at Tom as if to say that the whole Continental Army could not give her as much protection.

We left that hospitable place about nine o’clock, Mr. Robertson having written a letter to Colonel Daniel Boone,—­shut up in the fort at Boonesboro,—­should we be so fortunate as to reach Kaintuckee:  and another to a young gentleman by the name of George Rogers Clark, apparently a leader there.  Captain Sevier bowed over Polly Ann’s hand as if she were a great lady, and wished her a happy honeymoon, and me he patted on the head and called a brave lad.  And soon we had passed beyond the corn-field into the Wilderness again.

Our way was down the Nollichucky, past the great bend of it below Lick Creek, and so to the Great War-path, the trail by which countless parties of red marauders had travelled north and south.  It led, indeed, northeast between the mountain ranges.  Although we kept a watch by day and night, we saw no sign of Dragging Canoe or his men, and at length we forded the Holston and came to the scattered settlement in Carter’s Valley.

I have since racked my brain to remember at whose cabin we stopped there.  He was a rough backwoodsman with a wife and a horde of children.  But I recall that a great rain came out of the mountains and down the valley.  We were counting over the powder gourds in our packs, when there burst in at the door as wild a man as has ever been my lot to see.  His brown beard was grown like a bramble patch, his eye had a violet light, and his hunting shirt was in tatters.  He was thin to gauntness, ate ravenously of the food that was set before him, and throwing off his soaked moccasins, he spread his scalded feet to the blaze, and the steaming odor of drying leather filled the room.

“Whar be ye from?” asked Tom.

For answer the man bared his arm, then his shoulder, and two angry scars, long and red, revealed themselves, and around his wrists were deep gouges where he had been bound.

“They killed Sue,” he cried, “sculped her afore my very eyes.  And they chopped my boy outen the hickory withes and carried him to the Creek Nation.  At a place where there was a standin’ stone I broke loose from three of ’em and come here over the mountains, and I ain’t had nothin’, stranger, but berries and chainey brier-root for ten days.  God damn ’em!” he cried, standing up and tottering with the pain in his feet, “if I can get a Deckard—­”

“Will you go back?” said Tom.

“Go back!” he shouted, “I’ll go back and fight ’em while I have blood in my body.”