called in from their spring plowing and other
labors, and were now busily engaged in moving their stock and the
things they wished to save from the destructive torch of the
redskin. The women had their hands full with the children, the
cleaning of rifles and moulding of bullets, and the thousand and one
things the sterner tasks of their husbands had left them. Major
McColloch, Jonathan and Silas Zane, early in the day, had taken
different directions along the river to keep a sharp lookout for
signs of the enemy. Colonel Zane intended to stay in his oven house
and defend it, so he had not moved anything to the fort excepting
his horses and cattle. Old Sam, the negro, was hauling loads of hay
inside the stockade. Captain Boggs had detailed several scouts to
watch the roads and one of these was the young man, Clarke, who had
accompanied the Major from Fort Pitt.

The appearance of Alfred Clarke, despite the fact that he wore the
regulation hunting garb, indicated a young man to whom the hard work
and privation of the settler were unaccustomed things. So thought
the pioneers who noticed his graceful walk, his fair skin and smooth
hands. Yet those who carefully studied his clearcut features were
favorably impressed; the women, by the direct, honest gaze of his
blue eyes and the absence of ungentle lines in his face; the men, by
the good nature, and that indefinable something by which a man marks
another as true steel.

He brought nothing with him from Fort Pitt except his horse, a
black-coated, fine limbed thoroughbred, which he frankly confessed
was all he could call his own. When asking Colonel Zane to give him
a position in the garrison he said he was a Virginian and had been
educated in Philadelphia; that after his father died his mother
married again, and this, together with a natural love of adventure,
had induced him to run away and seek his fortune with the hardy
pioneer and the cunning savage of the border. Beyond a few months'
service under General Clark he knew nothing of frontier life; but he
was tired of idleness; he was strong and not afraid of work, and he
could learn. Colonel Zane, who prided himself on his judgment of
character, took a liking to the young man at once, and giving him a
rifle and accoutrements, told him the border needed young men of
pluck and fire, and that if he brought a strong hand and a willing
heart he could surely find fortune. Possibly if Alfred Clarke could
have been told of the f