was a handsome, blond lad with blue eyes and a serious manner.
His confidence in the protection of his mother was sublime.

"What's yer name?" Solomon asked, looking up at the lad whom he had
lifted high in the air.

"Whig Scott," the boy answered timidly with tears in his eyes.

"What! Be ye skeered o' me?"

These words came from the little lad as he began to cry. "No, sir. I
ain't skeered. I'm a brave man."

"Courage is the first virtue in which the young are schooled on the
frontier," Jack wrote in a letter to his friends at home in which he
told of the history of that day. "The words and manner of the boy
reminded me of my own childhood.

"Solomon held Whig in his lap and fed him and soon won his confidence.
The backs of the horses and the cow were so badly galled they could not
be ridden, but we were able to lash the packs over a blanket on one of
the horses. We drove the beasts ahead of us. The Indians had timbered
the swales here and there so that we were able to pass them with little
trouble. Over the worst places I had the boy on my back while Solomon
carried 'Mis' Scott' in his arms as if she were a baby. He was very
gentle with her. To him, as you know, a woman has been a sacred
creature since his wife died. He seemed to regard the boy as a
wonderful kind of plaything. At the camping-places he spent every
moment of his leisure tossing him in the air or rolling on the ground
with him."

[Illustration: Solomon Binkus with Whig Scott on his shoulder.]

"One day when the woman sat by the fire crying, the little lad touched
her brow with his hand and said:

"'Don't be skeered, mother. I'm brave. I'll take care o' you.'

"Solomon came to where I was breaking some dry sticks for the fire and
said laughingly, as he wiped a tear from his cheek with the back of his
great right hand:

"'Did ye ever see sech a gol' durn cunnin' leetle cricket in yer born
days--ever?'

"Always thereafter he referred to the boy as the Little Cricket.

"That would have been a sad journey but for my interest in these
reactions on this great son of Pan, with whom I traveled. I think that
he has found a thing he has long needed, and I wonder what will come of
it.

"When he had discovered, by tracks in the trail, that the Indians who
had run away from us were gone South, he had no further fear of being
molested.

"'They've gone on to tell what happened on the first o' the high slants
an' to warn their folks t