For another cloud had risen in the horizon:  another problem for Clark to face of greater portent than all the others.  A messenger from Captain Bowman at Cohos came riding down the street on a scraggly French pony, and pulled up before headquarters.  The messenger was Sergeant Thomas McChesney, and his long legs almost reached the ground on either side of the little beast.  Leaping from the saddle, he seized me in his arms, set me down, and bade me tell Colonel Clark of his arrival.

It was a sultry August morning.  Within the hour Colonel Clark and Tom and myself were riding over the dusty trace that wound westward across the common lands of the village, which was known as the Fort Chartres road.  The heat-haze shimmered in the distance, and there was no sound in plain or village save the tinkle of a cowbell from the clumps of shade.  Colonel Clark rode twenty paces in front, alone, his head bowed with thinking.

“They’re coming into Cahokia as thick as bees out’n a gum, Davy,” said Tom; “seems like there’s thousands of ’em.  Nothin’ will do ’em but they must see the Colonel,—­the varmints.  And they’ve got patience, they’ll wait thar till the b’ars git fat.  I reckon they ’low Clark’s got the armies of Congress behind him.  If they knowed,” said Tom, with a chuckle, “if they knowed that we’d only got seventy of the boys and some hundred Frenchies in the army!  I reckon the Colonel’s too cute for ’em.”

The savages in Cahokia were as the leaves of the forest.  Curiosity, that mainspring of the Indian character, had brought the chiefs, big and little, to see with their own eyes the great Captain of the Long Knives.  In vain had the faithful Bowman put them off.  They would wait.  Clark must come.  And Clark was coming, for he was not the man to quail at such a crisis.  For the crux of the whole matter was here.  And if he failed to impress them with his power, with the might of the Congress for which he fought, no man of his would ever see Kentucky again.

As we rode through the bottom under the pecan trees we talked of Polly Ann, Tom and I, and of our little home by the Salt River far to the southward, where we would live in peace when the campaign was over.  Tom had written her, painfully enough, an affectionate scrawl, which he sent by one of Captain Linn’s men.  And I, too, had written.  My letter had been about Tom, and how he had become a sergeant, and what a favorite he was with Bowman and the Colonel.  Poor Polly Ann!  She could not write, but a runner from Harrodstown who was a friend of Tom’s had carried all the way to Cahokia, in the pocket with his despatches, a fold of nettle-bark linen.  Tom pulled it from the bosom of his hunting shirt to show me, and in it was a little ring of hair like unto the finest spun red-gold.  This was the message Polly Ann had sent,—­a message from little Tom as well.