ar the
cannon, and that was all that could be done anyhow. There were men and
women about them, children, boys. The women were the most silent,--pale
and silent; the men uttered low exclamations or soliloquies, or talked
together. The boys were all but gleeful--save when they looked at the
grown people, and then they tried for solemnity. Some of the children
went to sleep. A mother nursed her babe. Near the foot of this hill,
through a hollow, there ran a branch,--Bacon Quarter Branch. Here, in
the seventeenth century, had occurred an Indian massacre. The heavy,
primeval woods had rung to the whoop of the savage, the groan of the
settler, the scream of English woman and child. To-day the woods had
been long cut, and the red man was gone. War remained--he had only
changed his war paint and cry and weapons.

Miriam clasped her thin brown hands about her knee, rested her chin on
them, and fastened her great brown eyes on the distant battle cloud.
Christianna, her sunbonnet pushed back, looked too, with limpid,
awe-struck gaze. Were Pap and Dave and Billy fighting in that cloud? It
was thicker than the morning mist in the hollow below Thunder Run
Mountain, and it was not fleecy, pure, and white. It was yellowish,
fierce, and ugly, and the sound that came from it made her heart beat
thick and hard. Was he there--Was Allan Gold there in the cloud? She
felt that she could not sit still; she wished to walk toward it. That
being impossible, she began to make a little moaning sound. A woman in
black, sitting on the grass near her, looked across. "Don't!" she said.
"If you do that, all of us will do it. We've got to keep calm. If we let
go, it would be like Rachel weeping. Try to be quiet."

Christianna, who had moaned as she crooned, hardly knowing it, at once
fell silent. Another woman spoke to her. "Would you mind holding my
baby? My head aches so. I must lie down here on the grass, just a
minute." Christianna took the baby. She handled it skilfully, and it was
presently cooing against her breast. Were Pap and Dave over there,
shooting and cutting? And Billy--Billy with a gun now instead of the
spear the blacksmith had made him? And Allan Gold was not teaching in
the schoolhouse on Thunder Run....

The woman took the baby back. The sun blazed down, there came a louder
burst of sound. A man with a field-glass, standing near, uttered a
"Tchk!" of despair. "Impenetrable curtain! The ancients managed things
better--they did not