reached the cause of her
malady--but there were no such physicians. Perhaps the longings that she
repressed and the loneliness that she hid under her smile were costing
her too dearly in their levies upon strength and vitality. She, who had
been always fearless, became prey to a hundred unconfessed dreads. She
feared for her husband, and with a frenzy of terror for her daughter.
She woke trembling out of atrocious nightmares. She was wasting to a
shadow, and always pretending that the life was what she would have
chosen.

It was on a bitter night after a day of blizzard and sleet. Caleb Parish
sat before his fire, and his eyes went constantly to the bed where his
wife lay half-conscious and to the seated figure of the tirelessly
watchful daughter.

Softly against the window sounded a guarded rap. The man looked quickly
up and inclined his ear. Again it came with the four successive taps to
which every pioneer had trained himself to waken, wide-eyed, out of his
most exhausted sleep.

Caleb Parish strode to the door and opened it cautiously. Out of the
night, shaking the snow from his buckskin hunting shirt, stepped Peter
Doane with his stoical face fatigue drawn as he eased down a bulky pack
from galled shoulders.

"Injins," he said, crisply. "Get your women inside the fort right
speedily!"

The young man slipped again into the darkness, and Parish, lifting the
half-conscious figure from the bed, wrapped it in a bear-skin rug and
carried it out into the sleety bluster.

That night spent itself through a tensity of waiting until dawn.

When the east grew a bit pale, Caleb Parish returned from his varied
duties and laid a hand on his wife's forehead to find it fever-hot. The
woman opened her eyes and essayed a smile, but at the same moment there
rode piercingly through the still air the long and hideous challenge of
a war-whoop.

Dorothy Parish, the elder, flinched as though under a blow and a look of
horror stamped itself on her face that remained when she had died.

* * * * *

Spring again--and a fitful period of peace--but peace with disquieting
rumours.

Word came out of the North of mighty preparations among the Six Nations
and up from the South sped the report that Dragging Canoe had laid aside
his mantle of sullen mourning and painted his face for war.

Dorothy Parish, the wife, had been buried before the cabin built by the
river bank, and Dorothy, the daughter, kept ho