No sooner had the sun begun to pit the snow hillocks than wild creatures came in from the mountains, haggard with hunger and hardship.  They had left their homes in Virginia and the Carolinas in the autumn; an unheralded winter of Arctic fierceness had caught them in its grip.  Bitter tales they told of wives and children buried among the rocks.  Fast on the heels of these wretched ones trooped the spring settlers in droves; and I have seen whole churches march singing into the forts, the preacher leading, and thanking God loudly that He had delivered them from the wilderness and the savage.  The little forts would not hold them; and they went out to hew clearings from the forest, and to build cabins and stockades.  And our own people, starved and snowbound, went out likewise,—­Tom and Polly Ann and their little family and myself to the farm at the river-side.  And while the water flowed between the stumps over the black land, we planted and ploughed and prayed, always alert, watching north and south, against the coming of the Indians.

But Tom was no husbandman.  He and his kind were the scouts, the advance guard of civilization, not tillers of the soil or lovers of close communities.  Farther and farther they went afield for game, and always they grumbled sorely against this horde which had driven the deer from his cover and the buffalo from his wallow.

Looking back, I can recall one evening when the long summer twilight lingered to a close.  Tom was lounging lazily against the big persimmon tree, smoking his pipe, the two children digging at the roots, and Polly Ann, seated on the door-log, sewing.  As I drew near, she looked up at me from her work.  She was a woman upon whose eternal freshness industry made no mar.

“Davy,” she exclaimed, “how ye’ve growed!  I thought ye’d be a wizened little body, but this year ye’ve shot up like a cornstalk.”

“My father was six feet two inches in his moccasins,” I said.

“He’ll be wallopin’ me soon,” said Tom, with a grin.  He took a long whiff at his pipe, and added thoughtfully, “I reckon this ain’t no place fer me now, with all the settler folks and land-grabbers comin’ through the Gap.”

“Tom,” said I, “there’s a bit of a fall on the river here.”

“Ay,” he said, “and nary a fish left.”

“Something better,” I answered; “we’ll put a dam there and a mill and a hominy pounder.”

“And make our fortune grinding corn for the settlers,” cried Polly Ann, showing a line of very white teeth.  “I always said ye’d be a rich man, Davy.”

Tom was mildly interested, and went with us at daylight to measure the fall.  And he allowed that he would have the more time to hunt if the mill were a success.  For a month I had had the scheme in my mind, where the dam was to be put, the race, and the wondrous wheel rimmed with cow horns to dip the water.  And fixed on the wheel there was to be a crank that worked the pounder in the mortar.  So we were to grind until I could arrange with Mr. Scarlett, the new storekeeper in Harrodstown, to have two grinding-stones fetched across the mountains.