might raise corn and provisions
during the summer; and that he had called the place Corn Island.

"Sure, there's the Colonel himself," cried Terence McCann, who was in the
bow, and indeed I could pick out the familiar figure among the hundred
frontiersmen that gathered among the stumps at the landing-place. As our
keel scraped they gave a shout that rattled in the forest behind them,
and Clark came down to the waterside.

"I knew that Harrodstown wouldn't fail me," he said, and called every man
by name as we waded ashore. When I came splashing along after Tom he
pulled me from the water with his two hands.

"Colonel," said Terence McCann, "we've brought ye a dhrummer b'y."

"We'd have no luck at all without him," said Cowan, and the men laughed.

"Can you walk an hundred miles without food, Davy?" asked Colonel Clark,
eying me gravely.

"Faith he's lean as a wolf, and no stomach to hinder him," said Terence,
seeing me look troubled. "I'll not be missing the bit of food the likes
of him would eat."

"And as for the heft of him," added Cowan, "Mac and I'll not feel it."

Colonel Clark laughed. "Well, boys," he said, "if you must have him, you
must. His Excellency gave me no instructions about a drummer, but we'll
take you, Davy."

In those days he was a man that wasted no time, was Colonel Clark, and
within the hour our little detachment had joined the others, felling
trees and shaping the log-ends for the cabins. That night, as Tom and
Cowan and McCann and James Ray lay around their fire, taking a
well-earned rest, a man broke excitedly into the light with a
kettle-shaped object balanced on his head, which he set down in front of
us. The man proved to be Swein Poulsson, and the object a big drum, and
he straightway began to beat upon it a tattoo with improvised drumsticks.

"A Red Stone man," he cried, "a Red Stone man, he have it in the
flatboat. It is for Tavy."

"The saints be good to us," said Terence, "if it isn't the King's own
drum he has." And sure enough, on the head of it gleamed the royal arms
of England, and on the other side, as we turned it over, the device of a
regiment. They flung the sling about my neck, and the next day, when the
little army drew up for parade among the stumps, there I was at the end
of the line, and prouder than any man in the ranks. And Colonel Clark
coming to my end of the line paused and smiled and patted me kindly on
the cheek.

"Have you put this man on the roll, Ha