iliating, at the same time that it was
authoritative.

"If there is nothing to fear, we will go out on the plain; the day is
too good to be lost in words, like women in the towns wrangling over
their tea and sugared cakes."

Without waiting for approbation or dissent, the squatter advanced to
the base of the rock, which formed a sort of perpendicular wall, nearly
twenty feet high around the whole acclivity. Ishmael, however, directed
his footsteps to a point where an ascent might be made through a narrow
cleft, which he had taken the precaution to fortify with a breast-work
of cottonwood logs, and which, in its turn, was defended by a
chevaux-de-frise of the branches of the same tree. Here an armed man was
usually kept, as at the key of the whole position, and here one of
the young men now stood, indolently leaning against the rock, ready to
protect the pass, if it should prove necessary, until the whole party
could be mustered at the several points of defence.

From this place the squatter found the ascent still difficult, partly by
nature and partly by artificial impediments, until he reached a sort of
terrace, or, to speak more properly, the plain of the elevation, where
he had established the huts in which the whole family dwelt. These
tenements were, as already mentioned, of that class which are so
often seen on the borders, and such as belonged to the infancy of
architecture; being simply formed of logs, bark, and poles. The area
on which they stood contained several hundred square feet, and was
sufficiently elevated above the plain greatly to lessen if not to remove
all danger from Indian missiles. Here Ishmael believed he might leave
his infants in comparative security, under the protection of their
spirited mother, and here he now found Esther engaged at her ordinary
domestic employments, surrounded by her daughters, and lifting her
voice, in declamatory censure, as one or another of the idle fry
incurred her displeasure, and far too much engrossed with the tempest
of her own conversation to know any thing of the violent scene which had
been passing below.

"A fine windy place you have chosen for the camp, Ishmael!" she
commenced, or rather continued, by merely diverting the attack from
a sobbing girl of ten, at her elbow, to her husband. "My word! if I
haven't to count the young ones every ten minutes, to see they are
not flying away among the buzzards, or the ducks. Why do ye all keep
hovering round the