o chanced that on the second day
after my arrival a pack-train came along, guided by a nettlesome old man
and a strong, black-haired lass of sixteen or thereabouts. The old man,
whose name was Ripley, wore a nut-brown hunting shirt trimmed with red
cotton; and he had no sooner slipped the packs from his horses than he
began to rail at Hans, who stood looking on.

"You damned Dutchmen be all Tories, and worse," he cried; "you stay here
and till your farms while our boys are off in the hill towns fighting
Cherokees. I wish the devils had every one of your fat sculps. Polly
Ann, water the nags."

Hans replied to this sally with great vigor, lapsing into Dutch. Polly
Ann led the scrawny ponies to the trough, but her eyes snapped with
merriment as she listened. She was a wonderfully comely lass, despite
her loose cotton gown and poke-bonnet and the shoepacks on her feet. She
had blue eyes, the whitest, strongest of teeth, and the rosiest of faces.

"Gran'pa hates a Dutchman wuss'n pizen," she said to me. "So do I.
We've all been burned out and sculped up river--and they never give us so
much as a man or a measure of corn."

I helped her feed the animals, and tether them, and loose their bells for
the night, and carry the packs under cover.

"All the boys is gone to join Rutherford and lam the Indians," she
continued, "so Gran'pa and I had to go to the settlements. There wahn't
any one else. What's your name?" she demanded suddenly.

I told her.

She sat down on a log at the corner of the house, and pulled me down
beside her.

"And whar be you from?"

I told her. It was impossible to look into her face and not tell her.
She listened eagerly, now with compassion, and now showing her white
teeth in amusement. And when I had done, much to my discomfiture, she
seized me in her strong arms and kissed me.

"Poor Davy," she cried, "you ain't got a home. You shall come home with
us."

Catching me by the hand, she ran like a deer across the road to where her
grandfather was still quarrelling violently with Hans, and pulled him
backward by the skirts of his hunting shirt. I looked for another and
mightier explosion from the old backwoodsman, but to my astonishment he
seemed to forget Hans's existence, and turned and smiled on her
benevolently.

"Polly Ann," said he, "what be you about now?"

"Gran'pa," said she, "here's Davy Trimble, who's a good boy, and his pa
is just killed by the Cherokees along with Baskin, and he