ight of the
attic window, they could not even catch a glimpse of the top of a tepee,
of a skulking wolf-dog, or of the shaggy coat of a grazing pony.

After her mother and the three big brothers had returned to the table,
the little girl, whom the barking had called from a bowl of grits and
skimmed milk and a wash-pan of kerosene in which her chilblained feet
were soaking, struggled to the top of the rain-barrel at the corner of
the house and anxiously eyed the rising smoke. Fresh in her mind was the
murder of the Englishman at Crow Creek, whose full granaries and fat
coops had long tempted roving thieves from the west; and the slaying of
the Du Bois family on the James, just a few miles away. Many a winter's
evening, about the sitting-room stove, and often in the twilight of
summer days, sheltered by her mother's skirts, she had heard these
stories, and that other, almost within her own memory, terrible and
thrilling to frontier ears,--the massacre of the Little Big Horn.

The big brothers always laughed at her fright and at the idea of any
possible danger; yet they taught her to know an Indian camp-fire, the
trail of an Indian pony, and the print of moccasined feet, and told her,
if she ever met any braves on the plains, to leave the herd to take care
of itself and ride home on the run. So, remembering only their warnings
and forgetting their confident boasting and how sure and awful was the
punishment meted out from the forts to erring wards of the nation, her
days were haunted by prowling savages that waited behind every hillock,
ridge, and stack; and she cried aloud in her sleep at night when, on
dream-rides, there was ever an ugly, leering face and a horrid,
clutching hand at her stirrup.

But if the big brothers did not share her fear of the Indians, yet they
guarded well the farm-house and barn when the Sioux passed in their
pungs in winter or on fleet ponies during the summer months. And when,
that morning, the fire marked the near-by camp, there was no scattering
to the thawed fields where the plows stood upright in the furrows. The
eldest brother busied himself in the handy sorghum patch; the youngest
rounded up the cattle and sheep and drove them south just across the
reservation road to the first bit of unturned prairie; and the biggest
got out the muskets and loaded them, and leashed the worst-tempered dogs
in the pack.

And so the morning passed. In the sorghum patch the eldest brother
placidly droppe