ll these days just to lose what we went so far after an' worked so
hard for."

They retreated rapidly upon the great jutting peninsula of rocky soil,
which fortunately was covered with a good growth of trees, and tethered
the horses in a thick grove near the end.

"Now, we'll just unload our salt an' make a wall," said Ross with a
trace of a smile. "They can shoot our salt as much as they please, just
so they don't touch us."

The bags of salt were laid in the most exposed place across the
narrowest neck of the peninsula and they also dragged up all the fallen
tree trunks and boughs that they could find to help out their primitive
fortification. Then they sat down to wait, a hard task for men, but
hardest of all for two boys like Henry and Paul.

Two of the men went back with the horses to watch over them and also to
guard against any possible attempt to scale the cliff in their rear, but
the others lay close behind the wall of salt and brushwood. The sun
swung up toward the zenith and shone down upon a beautiful world. All
the wilderness was touched with the tender young green of spring and
nothing stirred but the gentle wind. The silky blue sky smiled over a
scene so often enacted in early Kentucky, that great border battle
ground of the white man and the red, the one driven by the desire for
new and fertile acres that he might plow and call his own, the other by
an equally fierce desire to retain the same acres, not to plow nor even
to call his own, but that he might roam and hunt big game over them at
will.

The great red eye of the sun, poised now in the center of the heavens,
looked down at the white men crouched close to the earth behind their
low and primitive wall, and then it looked into the forest at the red
men creeping silently from tree to tree, all the eager ferocity of the
man hunt on the face of everyone.

But Paul and Henry, behind their wall, saw nothing and heard nothing but
the breathing of those near them. They fingered their rifles and through
the crevices between the bags studied intently the woods in front of
them, where they beheld no human being nor any trace of a foe. Henry
looked from tree to tree, but he could see no flitting shadow. Where the
patches of grass grew it moved only with the regular sweep of the
breeze. He began to think that Ross and Sol must be mistaken. The
warriors had abandoned the pursuit. He glanced at Ross, who was not a
dozen feet away, and the leader's face was