r the most part quiet and resolute men,
who asked no more than leave to till a few acres of the wilderness, and to
eat what they had sown; but there were among them others of a different
kind--fanatics, outcasts, men with wrongs--and behind them the human
vultures who fatten on rapine. As yet, the latter found no occupation
waiting them, but their sight was keen, and they knew their time would
come.

It was a week later, and a hot afternoon, when Muller laid the big
crosscut saw down on the log he was severing and slowly straightened his
back. Then he stood up, red and very damp in face, a burly,
square-shouldered man, and, having mislaid his spectacles, blinked about
him. On three sides of him the prairie, swelling in billowy rises, ran
back to the horizon; but on the fourth a dusky wall of foliage followed
the crest of a ravine, and the murmur of water came up faintly from the
creek in the hollow. Between himself and its slender birches lay piled
amidst the parched and dusty grass, and the first courses of a wooden
building, rank with the smell of sappy timber, already stood in front of
him. There was no notch in the framing that had not been made and pinned
with an exact precision. In its scanty shadow his daughter sat knitting
beside a smouldering fire over which somebody had suspended a big
blackened kettle. The crash of the last falling trunk had died away, and
there was silence in the bluff; but a drumming of hoofs rose in a sharp
staccato from the prairie.

"Now," said Muller quietly, "I think the chasseurs come."

The girl looked up a moment, noticed the four mounted figures that swung
over the crest of a rise, and then went on with her knitting again. Still,
there was for a second a little flash in her pale blue eyes.

The horsemen came on, the dust floating in long wisps behind them, until,
with a jingle of bridle and stirrup, they pulled up before the building.
Three of them were bronzed and dusty, in weather-stained blue shirts, wide
hats, and knee-boots that fitted them like gloves; and there was ironical
amusement in their faces. Each sat his horse as if he had never known any
other seat than the saddle; but the fourth was different from the rest. He
wore a jacket of richly embroidered deerskin, and the shirt under it was
white; while he sat with one hand in a big leather glove resting on his
hip. His face was sallow and his eyes were dark.

"Hallo, Hamburg!" he said, and his voice had a little comman