During the balmy Indian summer, when the sharper lines of nature are softened by the haze, some came to us from across the mountains to make up for the deserters.  From time to time a little group would straggle to the gates of the station, weary and footsore, but overjoyed at the sight of white faces again:  the fathers walking ahead with watchful eyes, the women and older children driving the horses, and the babies slung to the pack in hickory withes.  Nay, some of our best citizens came to Kentucky swinging to the tail of a patient animal.  The Indians were still abroad, and in small war parties darted hither and thither with incredible swiftness.  And at night we would gather at the fire around our new emigrants to listen to the stories they had to tell,—­familiar stories to all of us.  Sometimes it had been the gobble of a wild turkey that had lured to danger, again a wood-owl had cried strangely in the night.

Winter came, and passed—­somehow.  I cannot dwell here on the tediousness of it, and the one bright spot it has left in my memory concerns Polly Ann.  Did man, woman, or child fall sick, it was Polly Ann who nursed them.  She had by nature the God-given gift of healing, knew by heart all the simple remedies that backwoods lore had inherited from the north of Ireland or borrowed from the Indians.  Her sympathy and loving-kindness did more than these, her never tiring and ever cheerful watchfulness.  She was deft, too, was Polly Ann, and spun from nettle bark many a cut of linen that could scarce be told from flax.  Before the sap began to run again in the maples there was not a soul in Harrodstown who did not love her, and I truly believe that most of them would have risked their lives to do her bidding.

Then came the sugaring, the warm days and the freezing nights when the earth stirs in her sleep and the taps drip from red sunrise to red sunset.  Old and young went to the camps, the women and children boiling and graining, the squads of men posted in guards round about.  And after that the days flew so quickly that it seemed as if the woods had burst suddenly into white flower, and it was spring again.  And then—­a joy to be long remembered—­I went on a hunting trip with Tom and Cowan and three others where the Kentucky tumbles between its darkly wooded cliffs.  And other wonders of that strange land I saw then for the first time:  great licks, trampled down for acres by the wild herds, where the salt water oozes out of the hoofprints.  On the edge of one of these licks we paused and stared breathless at giant bones sticking here and there in the black mud, and great skulls of fearful beasts half-embedded.  This was called the Big Bone Lick, and some travellers that went before us had made their tents with the thighs of these monsters of a past age.