The Frontiersmen | Page 8

how the sun slowly dropped
down the skies that were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to
go and leave the majestic peace of the zenith. The stars scintillated in
the dark night as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far
spaces of the heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to
cook the supper that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach
of wolf or panther while he slept. He was doubtless in jeopardy often
enough, but chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical
till the fourth day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the
partners of the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.
They waited for no reproaches for their desertion. They were quick to
upbraid. As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment,
and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust
back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he
listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings,
the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an
intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how
the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of
the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the
misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could be
seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset rays
fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of the
palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the colors
of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a second
arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley. The
frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly
wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the
embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown

hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain.
"Looking out for me, I wonder?" he asked himself, and as this glow of
agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with
questions angrily admonished his silence.
"He has seen a wolf! He has seen a wolf! 'Tis plain!" cried old Mivane,
as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad
pioneers. "One would know that without being told!"
"You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the
cow-pens on the Keowee River can't round them up again!" cried one
of the settlers.
"The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!" declared another
pessimistically.
"And it was you that shot the wolf!" cried "X" rancorously.
"The herders are holding us responsible and have sent an ambassador,"
explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, "to inform
us that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass
down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle."
"Gadso! they can't all be lost!" exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.
"No, no! the herders go too far for damages--too far! They are putting
their coulter too deep!" said a farmer fresh from the field. He had still a
bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust in his
hand and fingered the kernels.
"They declare they'll seize our skins," cried another ambiguously,--then,
conscious of this, he sought to amend the matter,--"Not the hides we
wear,"--this was no better, for they were all arrayed in hides, save
Richard Mivane. "Not the hides that we were born in, but our deerhides,
our peltry,--they'll seize the pack-train from Blue Lick, and they declare
they'll call on the commandant of Fort Prince George to oppose its
passing with the king's troops."
An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,--save for the fresh notes of
a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the tower of the blockhouse,
above which the rainbow glowed in the radiant splendors of a misty
amber sky.
"The king's troops? Would the commandant respond?" anxiously
speculated one of the settlers.
The little handful of pioneers, with their main possessions in the fate of
the pack-train, looked at one another in dismay.

"And tell me, friend Feather-pate, why did it seem good to you to shoot
a wolf in the midst of a herd of cattle?" demanded Richard Mivane.
Ralph Emsden, bewildered by the results of this untoward chance, and
the further catastrophe shadowed forth in the threatened seizure of the
train, rallied with all his faculties at the note of scorn from this quarter.
"Sir, I did not shoot the wolf among the cattle. There