as no fear of
redskins here, yet, when the scream of a painter or the hoot of an owl
stirred me from my exhausted slumber, I caught sight of him with his
back to a tree, staring into the forest, his rifle at his side. The day
was dawning.

"Turn about's fair," I expostulated.

"Ye'll need yere sleep, Davy," said he, "or ye'll never grow any
bigger."

"I thought Kaintuckee was to the west," I said, "and you're making
north." For I had observed him day after day. We had left the trails.
Sometimes he climbed tree, and again he sent me to the upper branches,
whence I surveyed a sea of tree-tops waving in the wind, and looked
onward to where a green velvet hollow lay nestling on the western side
of a saddle-backed ridge.

"North!" said Tom to Polly Ann, laughing. "The little devil will beat
me at woodcraft soon. Ay, north, Davy. I'm hunting for the Nollichucky
Trace that leads to the Watauga settlement."

It was wonderful to me how he chose his way through the mountains. Once
in a while we caught sight of a yellow blaze in a tree, made by himself
scarce a month gone, when he came southward alone to fetch Polly Ann.
Again, the tired roan shied back from the bleached bones of a traveller,
picked clean by wolves. At sundown, when we loosed our exhausted horses
to graze on the wet grass by the streams, Tom would go off to look for a
deer or turkey, and often not come back to us until long after darkness
had fallen.

"Davy'll take care of you, Polly Ann," he would say as he left us.

And she would smile at him bravely and say, "I reckon I kin look out for
Davy awhile yet."

But when he was gone, and the crooning stillness set in broken only by
the many sounds of the night, we would sit huddled together by the fire.
It was dread for him she felt, not for herself. And in both our minds
rose red images of hideous foes skulking behind his brave form as he
trod the forest floor. Polly Ann was not the woman to whimper.

And yet I have but dim recollections of this journey. It was no hardship
to a lad brought up in woodcraft. Fear of the Indians, like a dog
shivering with the cold, was a deadened pain on the border.

Strangely enough it was I who chanced upon the Nollichucky Trace, which
follows the meanderings of that river northward through the great Smoky
Mountains. It was made long ago by the Southern Indians as they threaded
their way to the Hunting Lands of Kaintuckee, and shared now by Indian
traders. The path was re