n from the woods bordering
the north bank of the Ohio River. Scattered through the clearing are
rude houses, built of the forest logs. Bounding the space upon three
sides, and so close that its storm music sounds plain in every ear, is
the forest itself. On the fourth side flows the wide river, covered
now, firm and silent, with a thick ice blanket. Across the river on
the Kentucky shore, softened by the blue haze of distance, another
forest crowds down to the very water's edge.

It is night, and of the cabins in the clearing each reflects, in one
way or another, the character of its builder. Here a broad pencil of
light writes "Careless!" on the black sheet of the forest; there a
mere thread escaping tells of patient carpentry.

At one end of the clearing, so near the forest that the top of a
falling tree would have touched it, stood a cabin, individual in its
complete darkness except for a dull ruddy glow at one end, where a
window extended as high as the eaves. An open fire within gnawed at
the half-green logs, sending smoke and steam up the cavernous chimney,
and casting about the room an uncertain, fitful light--now bright,
again shadowy.

It was a bare room that the flickering firelight revealed, bare alike
as to its furnishings and the freshness of its peeled logs, the spaces
between which had been "chinked" with clay from the river-bank.
Scarcely a thing built of man was in sight which had not been designed
to kill; scarcely a product of Nature which had not been gathered at
cost of animal life. Guns of English make, stretched horizontally
along the walls upon pegs driven into the logs; in the end opposite
the wide fireplace, home-made cooking utensils dangled from the end
of a rough table, itself a product of the same factory. In front of
the fire, just beyond the blaze and the coals and ashes, were heaped
the pelts of various animals; black bear and cinnamon rested side by
side with the rough, shaggy fur of the buffalo, brought by Indians
from the far western land of the Dakotas.

Upon the heap, dressed in the picturesque utility garb of buckskin,
homespun, and "hickory" which stamped the pioneer of his day, a big
man lay at full length: a large man even here, where the law of the
fittest reigned supreme. A stubbly growth of beard covered his face,
giving it the heavy expression common to those accustomed to silent
places, and dim forest trails.

Aside from his size, there was nothing striking or handsom