within; the long slant of the red sunset
rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of
the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the
colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a
second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley.
The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly
wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the
embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown
hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain.
"Looking out for me, I wonder?" he asked himself, and as this glow of
agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with questions
angrily admonished his silence.

"He has seen a wolf! He has seen a wolf! 'Tis plain!" cried old Mivane,
as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad
pioneers. "One would know that without being told!"

"You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the
cow-pens on the Keowee River can't round them up again!" cried one of
the settlers.

"The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!" declared another
pessimistically.

"And it was _you_ that shot the wolf!" cried "X" rancorously.

"The herders are holding _us_ responsible and have sent an ambassador,"
explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, "to inform us
that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass
down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle."

"Gadso! they can't _all_ be lost!" exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.

"No, no! the herders go too far for damages--too far! They are putting
their coulter _too_ deep!" said a farmer fresh from the field. He had
still a bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust
in his hand and fingered the kernels.

"They declare they'll seize our skins," cried another
ambiguously,--then, conscious of this, he sought to amend the
matter,--"Not the hides we wear,"--this was no better, for they were all
arrayed in hides, save Richard Mivane. "Not the hides that we were born
in, but our deerhides, our peltry,--they'll seize the pack-train from
Blue Lick, and they declare they'll call on the commandant of Fort
Prince George to oppose its passing with the king's troops."

An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,--save for the fresh notes of
a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the to