nd
painted renegades.

Colonel Willett rose and we all stood up, but he signaled those who had
not finished eating to resume their places, and laying a familiar hand
on my arm led me to the sunny bench outside the door where, at his nod,
I seated myself beside him. He drew a map from his breast-pocket and
studied in silence; I waited his pleasure.

The veteran seemed to have grown no older since I had last seen him
four years since--indeed, he had changed little as I remembered him
first, sipping his toddy at my father's house, and smiling his shrewd,
kindly, whimsical smile while I teased him to tell me of the French
war, and how he had captured Frontenac.

I was but seventeen years old when he headed that revolt in New York
City, and, single-handed, halted the British troops on Broad Street and
took away their baggage. I was nineteen when he led the sortie from
Stanwix. I had already taken my post in New York when he was serving
with his Excellency in the Jerseys and with Sullivan in the west.

Of all the officers who served on the frontier, Marinus Willett was the
only man who had ever held the enemy at check. Even Sullivan, returning
from his annihilation of Indian civilization, was followed by a cloud
of maddened savages and renegades that settled in his tracks,
enveloping the very frontier which, by his famous campaign, he had
properly expected to leave unharassed.

And now Marinus Willett was in command, with meager resources, indeed,
yet his personal presence on the Tryon frontier restored something of
confidence to those who still clung to the devastated region, sowing,
growing, garnering, and grinding the grain that the half-starved army
of the United States required to keep life within the gaunt rank and
file. West Point, Albany, Saratoga called for bread; and the men of
Tryon plowed and sowed and reaped, leaving their dead in every
furrow--swung their scythes under the Iroquois bullets, cut their
blood-wet hay in the face of ambush after ambush, stacked their
scorched corn and defended it from barn, shack, and window. With torch
and hatchet renegade and Iroquois decimated them; their houses kindled
into flame; their women and children, scalped and throats cut, were
hung over fences like dead game; twelve thousand farms lay tenantless;
by thousands the widows and orphans gathered at the blockhouses, naked,
bewildered, penniless. There remained in all Tryon County but eight
hundred militia capable of res