But we had scarce caught up ere we saw Tom standing rigid with his hand raised.  Before him, on a mound bared of cane, were the charred remains of a fire.  The sight of them transformed Weldon.  His eyes glared again, even as when we had first seen him, curses escaped under his breath, and he would have darted into the cane had not Tom seized him sternly by the shoulder.  As for me, my heart hammered against my ribs, and I grew sick with listening.  It was at that instant that my admiration for Tom McChesney burst bounds, and that I got some real inkling of what woodcraft might be.  Stepping silently between the tree trunks, his eyes bent on the leafy loam, he found a footprint here and another there, and suddenly he went into the cane with a sign to us to remain.  It seemed an age before he returned.  Then he began to rake the ashes, and, suddenly bending down, seized something in them,—­the broken bowl of an Indian pipe.

“Shawnees!” he said; “I reckoned so.”  It was at length the beseeching in Polly Ann’s eyes that he answered.

“A war party—­tracks three days old.  They took poplar.”

To take poplar was our backwoods expression for embarking in a canoe, the dugouts being fashioned from the great poplar trees.

I did not reflect then, as I have since and often, how great was the knowledge and resource Tom practised that day.  Our feeling for him (Polly Ann’s and mine) fell little short of worship.  In company ill at ease, in the forest he became silent and masterful—­an unerring woodsman, capable of meeting the Indian on his own footing.  And, strangest thought of all, he and many I could name who went into Kentucky, had escaped, by a kind of strange fate, being born in the north of Ireland.  This was so of Andrew Jackson himself.

The rest of the day he led us in silence down the trace, his eye alert to penetrate every corner of the forest, his hand near the trigger of his long Deckard.  I followed in boylike imitation, searching every thicket for alien form and color, and yearning for stature and responsibility.  As for poor Weldon, he would stride for hours at a time with eyes fixed ahead, a wild figure,—­ragged and fringed.  And we knew that the soul within him was torn with thoughts of his dead wife and of his child in captivity.  Again, when the trance left him, he was an addition to our little party not to be despised.

At dark Polly Ann and I carried the packs across a creek on a fallen tree, she taking one end and I the other.  We camped there, where the loam was trampled and torn by countless herds of bison, and had only parched corn and the remains of a buffalo steak for supper, as the meal was mouldy from its wetting, and running low.  When Weldon had gone a little distance up the creek to scout, Tom relented from the sternness which his vigilance imposed and came and sat down on a log beside Polly Ann and me.

“’Tis a hard journey, little girl,” he said, patting her; “I reckon I done wrong to fetch you.”