they told of wives and children buried among the rocks.
Fast on the heels of these wretched ones trooped the spring settlers in
droves; and I have seen whole churches march singing into the forts,
the preacher leading, and thanking God loudly that He had delivered
them from the wilderness and the savage. The little forts would not hold
them; and they went out to hew clearings from the forest, and to build
cabins and stockades. And our own people, starved and snowbound, went
out likewise,--Tom and Polly Ann and their little family and myself
to the farm at the river-side. And while the water flowed between the
stumps over the black land, we planted and ploughed and prayed, always
alert, watching north and south, against the coming of the Indians.

But Tom was no husbandman. He and his kind were the scouts, the advance
guard of civilization, not tillers of the soil or lovers of close
communities. Farther and farther they went afield for game, and always
they grumbled sorely against this horde which had driven the deer from
his cover and the buffalo from his wallow.

Looking back, I can recall one evening when the long summer twilight
lingered to a close. Tom was lounging lazily against the big persimmon
tree, smoking his pipe, the two children digging at the roots, and Polly
Ann, seated on the door-log, sewing. As I drew near, she looked up at
me from her work. She was a woman upon whose eternal freshness industry
made no mar.

"Davy," she exclaimed, "how ye've growed! I thought ye'd be a wizened
little body, but this year ye've shot up like a cornstalk."

"My father was six feet two inches in his moccasins," I said.

"He'll be wallopin' me soon," said Tom, with a grin. He took a long
whiff at his pipe, and added thoughtfully, "I reckon this ain't no place
fer me now, with all the settler folks and land-grabbers comin' through
the Gap."

"Tom," said I, "there's a bit of a fall on the river here."

"Ay," he said, "and nary a fish left."

"Something better," I answered; "we'll put a dam there and a mill and a
hominy pounder."

"And make our fortune grinding corn for the settlers," cried Polly Ann,
showing a line of very white teeth. "I always said ye'd be a rich man,
Davy."

Tom was mildly interested, and went with us at daylight to measure the
fall. And he allowed that he would have the more time to hunt if the
mill were a success. For a month I had had the scheme in my mind, where
the dam was to be put, the r