spoke to me more of Tom McChesney. When, from time to time, the snow
melted on the hillsides, I sometimes surprised a deer there and shot him
with the heavy rifle. And so the months wore on till spring.

The buds reddened and popped, and the briers grew pink and white.
Through the lengthening days we toiled in the truck patch, but always
as I bent to my work Polly Ann's face saddened me--it had once been so
bright, and it should have been so at this season. Old Mr. Ripley grew
querulous and savage and hard to please. In the evening, when my work
was done, I often lay on the banks of the stream staring at the high
ridge (its ragged edges the setting sun burned a molten gold), and the
thought grew on me that I might make my way over the mountains into that
land beyond, and find Tom for Polly Ann. I even climbed the watershed to
the east as far as the O'Hara farm, to sound that big Irishman about the
trail. For he had once gone to Kentucky, to come back with his scalp
and little besides. O'Hara, with his brogue, gave me such a terrifying
notion of the horrors of the Wilderness Trail that I threw up all
thought of following it alone, and so I resolved to wait until I heard
of some settlers going over it. But none went from the Grape Vine
settlement that spring.

War was a-waging in Kentucky. The great Indian nations were making a
frantic effort to drive from their hunting grounds the little bands of
settlers there, and these were in sore straits.

So I waited, and gave Polly Ann no hint of my intention.

Sometimes she herself would slip away across the notch to see Mrs.
McChesney and the children. She never took me with her on these
journeys, but nearly always when she came back at nightfall her eyes
would be red, and I knew the two women had been weeping together. There
came a certain hot Sunday in July when she went on this errand, and
Grandpa Ripley having gone to spend the day at old man Winn's, I was
left alone. I remember I sat on the squared log of the door-step,
wondering whether, if I were to make my way to Salisbury, I could fall
in with a party going across the mountains into Kentucky. And wondering,
likewise, what Polly Ann would do without me. I was cleaning the long
rifle,--a labor I loved,--when suddenly I looked up, startled to see a
man standing in front of me. How he got there I know not. I stared at
him. He was a young man, very spare and very burned, with bright red
hair and blue eyes that had a kind