n of Dragging Canoe or his men, and at length
we forded the Holston and came to the scattered settlement in Carter's
Valley.

I have since racked my brain to remember at whose cabin we stopped
there. He was a rough backwoodsman with a wife and a horde of children.
But I recall that a great rain came out of the mountains and down the
valley. We were counting over the powder gourds in our packs, when there
burst in at the door as wild a man as has ever been my lot to see. His
brown beard was grown like a bramble patch, his eye had a violet light,
and his hunting shirt was in tatters. He was thin to gauntness, ate
ravenously of the food that was set before him, and throwing off his
soaked moccasins, he spread his scalded feet to the blaze, and the
steaming odor of drying leather filled the room.

"Whar be ye from?" asked Tom.

For answer the man bared his arm, then his shoulder, and two angry
scars, long and red, revealed themselves, and around his wrists were
deep gouges where he had been bound.

"They killed Sue," he cried, "sculped her afore my very eyes. And they
chopped my boy outen the hickory withes and carried him to the Creek
Nation. At a place where there was a standin' stone I broke loose from
three of 'em and come here over the mountains, and I ain't had nothin',
stranger, but berries and chainey brier-root for ten days. God damn
'em!" he cried, standing up and tottering with the pain in his feet, "if
I can get a Deckard--"

"Will you go back?" said Tom.

"Go back!" he shouted, "I'll go back and fight 'em while I have blood in
my body."

He fell into a bunk, but his sorrow haunted him even in his troubled
sleep, and his moans awed us as we listened. The next day he told us his
story with more calmness. It was horrible indeed, and might well have
frightened a less courageous woman than Polly Ann. Imploring her not to
go, he became wild again, and brought tears to her eyes when he spoke of
his own wife. "They tomahawked her, ma'am, because she could not walk,
and the baby beside her, and I standing by with my arms tied."

As long as I live I shall never forget that scene, and how Tom pleaded
with Polly Ann to stay behind, but she would not listen to him.

"You're going, Tom?" she said.

"Yes," he answered, turning away, "I gave 'em my word."

"And your word to me?" said Polly Ann.

He did not answer.

We fixed on a Saturday to start, to give the horses time to rest, and in
the hope that we might