The Frontiersmen | Page 2

dusk where she knelt beside him,--he stood
on the shelf that served as banquette to bring him within reach of the
loophole, placed so high in the hope that a chance shot entering might
range only among the rafters,--"How quick you are! How you help
me!"
The thunderous crash of the double volley of the settlers firing twice,
by the aid of their feminine auxiliaries, to every volley of the Indians,
overwhelmed for the moment the tumult of the fiendish whoops in the
wild darkness outside, and then the fusillade of the return fire, like
leaden hail, rattled against the tough log walls of the station.
"Are you afraid, Nan?" he asked, as he received again the loaded
weapon from her hand.
"_Afraid?_--No!" exclaimed Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane--hardly
taller than the ramrod with which she was once more driving the charge
home.

He saw her face, delicate and blonde, in the vivid white flare from the
rifle as he thrust it through the loophole and fired. "You think I can take
care of you?" he demanded, while the echo died away, and a lull
ensued.
"I know you can," she replied, adjusting with the steady hand of an
expert the patching over the muzzle of the discharged weapon in the
semi-obscurity.
A blood-curdling shout came from the Cherokees in the woods with a
deeper roar of musketry at closer quarters; and a hollow groan within
the blockhouse, where there was a sudden commotion in the dim light,
told that some bullet had found its billet.
"They are coming to the attack again--Hand me the
rifle--quick--quick--Oh, Nan, how you help me! How brave you are--I
love you! I love you!"
"Look out now for a flash in the pan!" Peninnah Penelope Anne merely
admonished him.
Being susceptible to superstition and a ponderer on omens, Ralph
Emsden often thought fretfully afterward on the double meaning of
these words, and sought to displace them in their possible evil influence
on his future by some assurance more cheerful and confident. With this
view he often earnestly beset her, but could secure nothing more
pleasing than a reference to the will of her grandfather and a
protestation to abide by his decision in the matter.
Now Peninnah Penelope Anne's grandfather was deaf. His was that
hopeless variety of the infirmity which heard no more than he desired.
His memory, however, was unimpaired, and it may be that certain
recollections of his own experiences in the past remained with him,
making him a fine judge of the signs of the present. Emsden, appalled
by the necessity of shrieking out his love within the acute and
well-applied hearing facilities of the families of some ten "stationers,"
to use the phrase of the day, diligently sought to decoy, on successive
occasions, Richard Mivane out to the comparative solitudes of the
hunting, the fishing, the cropping. In vain. Richard Mivane displayed
sudden extreme prudential care against surprise and capture by Indians,
when this was possible, and when impossible he developed unexpected
and unexampled resources of protective rheumatism. The young lover
was equally precluded from setting forth the state of his affections and

the prospects of his future in writing. Apart from the absurdity of thus
approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old Mivane
would permit no such intimation of the extent of his affliction,--it being
a point of pride with him that he was merely slightly hard of hearing,
and suffered only from the indistinctness of the enunciation of people
in general. And indeed, it was variously contended that he was so deaf
that he could not hear a gun fired at his elbow; and yet that he heard all
manner of secrets which chanced to be detailed in his presence, in
inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, and had not the smallest
hesitation afterward in their disclosure, being entitled to them by right
of discovery, as it were.
Emsden, in keen anxiety, doubtful if his suit were seriously
disapproved, or if these demonstrations were only prompted by old
Mivane's selfish aversion to give away his granddaughter, finally
summoned all his courage, and in a stentorian roar proclaimed to the
old gentleman his sentiments.
Richard Mivane was a man of many punctilious habitudes, who wore
cloth instead of buckskin, however hard it might be to come by, and
silver knee-buckles and well-knit hose on his still shapely calves, and a
peruke carefully powdered and tended. He had a keen, wrinkled,
bloodless face, discerning, clever, gray eyes, heavy, overhanging,
grizzled eyebrows, and a gentlemanly mouth of a diplomatic, well-bred,
conservative expression.
It was said at Blue Lick Station that he had fled from his own country,
the north of England, on account of an affair of honor,--a duel in early
life,--and that however distasteful the hardships and comparative
poverty