out of the gates on the one scrawny horse the Indians had left them, gain the Salt River, and make his way thence through the water to some distant place where the listening savages could not hear his shot.  And now Tom took his turn.  Often did I sit with Polly Ann till midnight in the sentry’s tower, straining my ears for the owl’s hoot that warned us of his coming.  Sometimes he was empty-handed, but sometimes a deer hung limp and black across his saddle, or a pair of turkeys swung from his shoulder.

“Arrah, darlin’,” said Terence to Polly Ann, “’tis yer husband and James is the jools av the fort.  Sure I niver loved me father as I do thim.”

I would have given kingdoms in those days to have been seventeen and James Ray.  When he was in the fort I dogged his footsteps, and listened with a painful yearning to the stories of his escapes from the roving bands.  And as many a character is watered in its growth by hero-worship, so my own grew firmer in the contemplation of Ray’s resourcefulness.  My strange life had far removed me from lads of my own age, and he took a fancy to me, perhaps because of the very persistence of my devotion to him.  I cleaned his gun, filled his powder flask, and ran to do his every bidding.

I used in the hot summer days to lie under the elm tree and listen to the settlers’ talk about a man named Henderson, who had bought a great part of Kentucky from the Indians, and had gone out with Boone to found Boonesboro some two years before.  They spoke of much that I did not understand concerning the discountenance by Virginia of these claims, speculating as to whether Henderson’s grants were good.  For some of them held these grants, and others Virginia grants—­a fruitful source of quarrel between them.  Some spoke, too, of Washington and his ragged soldiers going up and down the old colonies and fighting for a freedom which there seemed little chance of getting.  But their anger seemed to blaze most fiercely when they spoke of a mysterious British general named Hamilton, whom they called “the ha’r buyer,” and who from his stronghold in the north country across the great Ohio sent down these hordes of savages to harry us.  I learned to hate Hamilton with the rest, and pictured him with the visage of a fiend.  We laid at his door every outrage that had happened at the three stations, and put upon him the blood of those who had been carried off to torture in the Indian villages of the northern forests.  And when—­amidst great excitement—­a spent runner would arrive from Boonesboro or St. Asaph’s and beg Mr. Clark for a squad, it was commonly with the first breath that came into his body that he cursed Hamilton.

So the summer wore away, while we lived from hand to mouth on such scanty fare as the two of them shot and what we could venture to gather in the unkempt fields near the gates.  A winter of famine lurked ahead, and men were goaded near to madness at the thought of clearings made and corn planted in the spring within reach of their hands, as it were, and they might not harvest it.  At length, when a fortnight had passed, and Tom and Ray had gone forth day after day without sight or fresh sign of Indians, the weight lifted from our hearts.  There were many things that might yet be planted and come to maturity before the late Kentucky frosts.