ts
defence against the Indians he was slack when he should have been
tight. The upshot was that Nathaniel Bacon took up the job himself, and
after giving the Indians their lesson, turned his mind to the
government of Virginia. He drove Berkeley into Accomac, and would have
turned the whole place tapsalteery if he had not suddenly died of a
bowel complaint. After that Berkeley and his tame planters got the
upper hand, and there were some pretty homings and hangings. There were
two men that were lieutenants to Bacon, and maybe put the notion into
his head. One was James Drummond, a cousin of my own mother's, and he
got the gallows for his trouble. The other was a man Richard Lawrence,
a fine scholar, and a grand hand at planning, though a little slow in a
fight. He kept the ordinary at James Town, and was the one that
collected the powder and kindled the fuse. Governor Berkeley had a long
score to settle with him, but he never got him, for when the thing was
past hope Mr. Richard rode west one snowy night to the hills, and
Virginia saw him no more. They think he starved in the wilderness, or
got into the hands of the wild Indians, and is long ago dead."

I knew all about Dick Lawrence, for I had heard the tale twenty times.
"But surely they're right," I said, "It's fifteen years since any man
had word of him."

"Well, you'll see him within an hour," said Ringan, "It's a queer
story, but it seems he fell in with a Monacan war party, and since he
and Bacon had been fighting their deadly foes, the Susquehannocks, they
treated him well, and brought him south into Carolina. You must know,
Andrew, that all this land hereaways, except for the little Algonquin
villages on the shore, is Sioux country, with as many tribes as there
are houses in Clan Campbell. But cheek by jowl is a long strip held by
the Tuscaroras, a murdering lot of devils, of whom you and I'll get
news sooner than we want. The Tuscaroras are bad enough in themselves,
but the worst part is that all the back country in the hills belongs to
their cousins the Cherokees, and God knows how far north their sway
holds. The Long House of the Iroquois controls everything west of the
coast land from Carolina away up through Virginia to New York and the
Canadas. That means that Virginia has on two sides the most powerful
tribes of savages in the world, and if ever the Iroquois found a
general and made a common attack things would go ill with the
Tidewater. I tell you that