eat effort would be made to drive back the thin white vanguard
that was now entering the finest hunting ground savages had ever
known--the vast green wilderness of the Mississippi Valley, where the
warriors had roamed and killed game for unknown generations. Northern and
southern tribes had often met and fought in _Kain-tuck-ee_, but always
each retreated after the conflict to north or to south, leaving
_Kain-tuck-ee_ as it was before--a land of forest and canebrake, inhabited
only by the wild beast.

Now, every warrior felt that the coming of the white stream over the
mountains, however slender it might be at first, threatened a change,
great and disastrous to them, unless checked at once. These white men cut
down the forest, built houses that were meant to stay in one place--houses
of logs--and plowed up the fields where the forest had been. They felt in
some dim, but none the less certain, way that not only their favorite
hunting grounds, but they and their own existence, were threatened.

They had failed the year before in a direct attack upon the new
settlements, but these little oases in the wilderness must in time perish
unless the white stream coming over the mountains still reached them,
nourishing them with fresh bone and sinew, and making them grow. A great
wagon train was coming, and this they would strike, surprising it in the
vast, dark wilderness when it was not dreaming that even a single warrior
was near.

A great defeat they had suffered at Wareville the year before still stung,
and the spur of revenge was added to the spur of need. What they felt they
ought to do was exactly what they wanted to do, and they were full of
hope. They did not know that the stream flowing over the mountains, now so
small, was propelled by a tremendous force behind it, the great white race
always moving onward, and they expected nothing less than a complete
triumph.

Active warriors passed through the deep woods, bearing belts and messages.
Their faces were eager, and always they urged war. A long journey lay
before them, but the blow would be a master stroke. They were received
everywhere with joy and approval. The tomahawks were dug up, the war
dances were danced, the war songs sung, and the men began to paint their
faces and bodies for battle. A hum and a murmur ran through the
northwestern forests, the hum and murmur of preparation and hope. Only the
five, on their little island in the lake, yet heard this hum and mu