“It’s one of yer own choosing, lass,” said he.

“Of my own choosing!” cried she.  “Come, Davy, we’ll go back to Grandpa.”

Tom grinned.

“I reckon the redskins won’t bother us till we git by the Nollichucky and Watauga settlements,” he said.

“The redskins!” said Polly Ann, indignant; “I reckon if one of ’em did git me he’d kiss me once in a while.”

Whereupon Tom, looking more sheepish still, tried to kiss her, and failed ignominiously, for she vanished into the dark woods.

“If a redskin got you here,” said Tom, when she had slipped back, “he’d fetch you to Nick-a-jack Cave.”

“What’s that?” she demanded.

“Where all the red and white and yellow scalawags over the mountains is gathered,” he answered.  And he told of a deep gorge between towering mountains where a great river cried angrily, of a black cave out of which a black stream ran, where a man could paddle a dugout for miles into the rock.  The river was the Tennessee, and the place the resort of the Chickamauga bandits, pirates of the mountains, outcasts of all nations.  And Dragging Canoe was their chief.

It was on the whole a merry journey, the first part of it, if a rough one.  Often Polly Ann would draw me to her and whisper:  “We’ll hold out, Davy.  He’ll never now.”  When the truth was that the big fellow was going at half his pace on our account.  He told us there was no fear of redskins here, yet, when the scream of a painter or the hoot of an owl stirred me from my exhausted slumber, I caught sight of him with his back to a tree, staring into the forest, his rifle at his side.  The day was dawning.

“Turn about’s fair,” I expostulated.

“Ye’ll need yere sleep, Davy,” said he, “or ye’ll never grow any bigger.”

“I thought Kaintuckee was to the west,” I said, “and you’re making north.”  For I had observed him day after day.  We had left the trails.  Sometimes he climbed tree, and again he sent me to the upper branches, whence I surveyed a sea of tree-tops waving in the wind, and looked onward to where a green velvet hollow lay nestling on the western side of a saddle-backed ridge.

“North!” said Tom to Polly Ann, laughing.  “The little devil will beat me at woodcraft soon.  Ay, north, Davy.  I’m hunting for the Nollichucky Trace that leads to the Watauga settlement.”

It was wonderful to me how he chose his way through the mountains.  Once in a while we caught sight of a yellow blaze in a tree, made by himself scarce a month gone, when he came southward alone to fetch Polly Ann.  Again, the tired roan shied back from the bleached bones of a traveller, picked clean by wolves.  At sundown, when we loosed our exhausted horses to graze on the wet grass by the streams, Tom would go off to look for a deer or turkey, and often not come back to us until long after darkness had fallen.

“Davy’ll take care of you, Polly Ann,” he would say as he left us.