This little piece of land where the old Indian woman
had lived and brought up her boy, was rich and valuable. It was
therefore coveted by the white man. At first men had said: "She will die
soon; the boy will then sell the hut for a song, gamble off the money,
and then go the way of all who are stained with the dark and tawny blood
of the savage--death in a ditch from some unknown rifle, or death by the
fever in the new Reservation." But the old woman still lived on; and the
boy, by his industry, sobriety, duty and devotion to his mother, put to
shame the very best among the new generation of white men in the
mountains. The singular manhood of John Logan was the subject of remark
by all who knew him. With the few true men on this savage edge of the
world it made him fast friends; with the many outlaws and evil natures
it made him the subject of envy and bitter hatred.

What power behind this boy had lifted him up and led him on? Surely no
Indian woman, wholly unlettered in the ways of the white man, good and
true as she may have been, had brought him up to this high place on
which he now stood. Who was his father? and what strong hand had reached
out all these years and kept his mother there in that little hut with
her boy, while her tribe perished or passed away to the hated and
horrible Reservation down toward the sea?

Who was his father? The Camp had asked this a thousand times. The boy
himself had looked into the deep, pathetic eyes of his mother, and asked
the question in his heart for many and many a year; but he never opened
his lips to ask her. It was too sad, too sacred a subject, and he would
not ask of her what she would not freely give. And now she lay dying
there alone on the porch, as her boy stopped to talk with the two
children, "the babes in the wood," and her secret hidden in her own
heart.

And who were the "babes in the wood?" Little waifs, fugitives, hiding
from the man-hunters. As a rule in early days, when the settlers killed
off the adult Indians in their forays, they took the children and
brought them up in slavery. But the girl--the eldest, stronger and
lither of these two dark little creatures--darting, hiding, stealing
about this ruined old camp, was so wild and spirited, even from the
first, that no one wanted her. And then she was dangerously bright, and
above all, she did not quite look the Indian; men doubted if she really
were an Indian or no, sometimes. But I remember hearing old
Le