eminded the observant Odalie of the
claim to a certain sort of beauty arrogated for the youthful among
these denizens of the woods--a short-lived beauty, certainly.

Fifine had caught sight of other children, the families of the settlers
having gathered here to witness the parade. Here, too, were many of the
men; now a hunter, leaning on his rifle, with a string of quail, which
he called "pat-ridges," tied to one another with thongs detached from
the fringes of his buckskin shirt and looking themselves like some sort
of feathered ornament, as they hung over his shoulder and almost to his
knee, and a brace of wild turkeys, young and tender, at his belt;
another, attracted from the field by the military music and the prospect
of the rendezvous of the whole settlement, still carried a long sharp
knife over his shoulder, with which he had been cutting cane, clearing
new ground. A powerful fellow leaning on an ax was exhibiting to another
and an older settler a fragment of wood he had brought, and both
examined with interest the fiber; this was evidently a discovery, the
tree being unknown in the eastern section, for these people were as if
transplanted to a new world.

Odalie's attention was suddenly arrested by a man of gigantic build,
wearing the usual buckskin garb, and with a hard, stern, fierce face,
that seemed somehow peculiarly bare; he wore no queue, it is true, for
at this period many of the hunters cut their hair for convenience, and
only the conservative retained that expression of civilization. Under
his coonskin cap his head was tied up in a red cotton handkerchief, and
as he stood leaning against the red-clay wall of the rampart, talking
gravely to another settler, the children swarmed up the steep interior
slope of the fortifications behind him and from this coign of vantage
busied themselves, without let or hindrance, in pulling off his cap,
untying the handkerchief, and with shrill cries of excitement and
interest exposing to view the bare poll. For the man had been scalped
and yet had escaped with his life.

"_Quelle barbarie! Oh, quelle barbarie!_" murmured Odalie, wincing at
the sight.

Years ago it must have chanced, for the wounds had healed; but it had
left terrible scars which the juvenile element of the settlement prized
and loved to trace as one might the map of the promised land, were such
charts known to mere earthly map-makers. A frequent ceremony, this,
evidently, for the shrill cries were