hat memories of
childhood rushed in upon me! what bitterness and grief!

At last the envious river swept us around a masking hill. I turned
slowly about, with all my heaviness plainly written in my look. Less
than three paces behind me stood the senorita, her dark eyes fixed upon
me with a soft pity far different from their usual mockery.

"You grieve!" she murmured.

"It is the grave of my mother."

Don Pedro dropped the handle of the steer-oar and turned to me with a
courtesy that went far deeper than outer form. "Your mother? May the
Virgin bless her!"

Alisanda made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved in quick prayer:
"_Ave Maria purisima_--"

After a little the don ventured a word of consolation: "It is a
beautiful place for a tomb,--serene and grand on its solitary hillcrest.
When my own time comes, may I rest as well!"

Serene!--beautiful! The words roused me from my unmanly weakness.

"You do not know!" I cried. "Her grave was dug among the ashes of our
home. She was murdered by the Shawnees."

"You speak of the Indian savages?" murmured Alisanda. "Is it so long ago
as that?"

"In my boyhood--in ninety-one--the Spring before St. Clair's terrible
defeat. The northern tribes raided the settlements from above Pittsburg
to the lower Kentucky, with a fury before unknown. The ferocious braves
crept by night through the very streets of Cincinnati and under the
walls of Fort Washington. Our home, outlying yonder on the Little Miami,
was one of the first struck. The memory of that morning is burned deep
into my brain. My father had gone into town to barter some skins for
flour, and my mother was part way down the hillside, ploughing for corn.
I had gone up to the cabin to fetch a jug of cider, and was half-way
back, when a score of Shawnees in their black war paint leaped from the
ravine and set upon my mother.

"I ran to help her, but she, striking bravely at the treacherous savages
with the ox-goad, screamed to me to fly for the guns. I turned as she
fell under the stroke of a tomahawk. The murderers leaped after me,
yelling and firing. Rifle balls and arrows whistled about me, some
piercing my shirt. But I gained the cabin unhurt. On the pegs beside the
door lay my father's rifle and his old Queen Anne musket of the
Revolution, which I had that morning charged half to the muzzle with
swanshot in preparation for a bear which had been stealing our porkers.

"Barring the door with one hand, I caught