He carried me to the top of the bank, where we were surrounded by the whole band of backwoodsmen.

“That he did!” cried Polly Ann, “and fetched a redskin yonder as clean as you could have done it, Tom.”

“The little deevil!” exclaimed Tom again.

I looked up, burning with this praise from Tom (for I had never thought of praise nor of anything save his happiness and Polly Ann’s).  I looked up, and my eyes were caught and held with a strange fascination by fearless blue ones that gazed down into them.  I give you but a poor description of the owner of these blue eyes, for personal magnetism springs not from one feature or another.  He was a young man,—­perhaps five and twenty as I now know age,—­woodsman-clad, square-built, sun-reddened.  His hair might have been orange in one light and sand-colored in another.  With a boy’s sense of such things I knew that the other woodsmen were waiting for him to speak, for they glanced at him expectantly.

“You had a near call, McChesney,” said he, at length; “fortunate for you we were after this band,—­shot some of it to pieces yesterday morning.”  He paused, looking at Tom with that quality of tribute which comes naturally to a leader of men.  “By God,” he said, “I didn’t think you’d try it.”

“My word is good, Colonel Clark,” answered Tom, simply.

Young Colonel Clark glanced at the lithe figure of Polly Ann.  He seemed a man of few words, for he did not add to his praise of Tom’s achievement by complimenting her as Captain Sevier had done.  In fact, he said nothing more, but leaped down the bank and strode into the water where the body of Weldon lay, and dragged it out himself.  We gathered around it silently, and two great tears rolled down Polly Ann’s cheeks as she parted the hair with tenderness and loosened the clenched hands.  Nor did any of the tall woodsmen speak.  Poor Weldon!  The tragedy of his life and death was the tragedy of Kentucky herself.  They buried him by the waterside, where he had fallen.

But there was little time for mourning on the border.  The burial finished, the Kentuckians splashed across the creek, and one of them, stooping with a shout at the mouth of the run, lifted out of the brambles a painted body with drooping head and feathers trailing.

“Ay, Mac,” he cried, “here’s a sculp for ye.”

“It’s Davy’s,” exclaimed Polly Ann from the top of the bank; “Davy shot that one.”

“Hooray for Davy,” cried a huge, strapping backwoodsman who stood beside her, and the others laughingly took up the shout.  “Hooray for Davy.  Bring him over, Cowan.”  The giant threw me on his shoulder as though I had been a fox, leaped down, and took the stream in two strides.  I little thought how often he was to carry me in days to come, but I felt a great awe at the strength of him, as I stared into his rough features and his veined and weathered skin.  He stood me down beside the Indian’s body, smiled as he whipped my hunting knife from my belt, and said, “Now, Davy, take the sculp.”