ith a muscular development to
match his stately height. His tawny hair had been darkened by
exposure to hot suns, and his handsome face was deeply imbrowned
from the influences of weather in all seasons. His blue eyes had
that direct yet far-away look which comes to men who live face to
face with nature, and learn to know her in all her moods, and to
study her caprices in the earning of their daily bread.

Humphrey Angell was not more than twenty years of age, and he had
lived ten years in the forest. He had come there as a child with
his father, who had emigrated in his young life from England to the
settlement of Pennsylvania, and had afterwards become one of the
scattered settlers on the debatable ground between the French and
English borders, establishing himself in the heart of the boundless
forest, and setting to work with the utmost zeal and industry to
gather round himself a little farmstead where he could pass his own
later years in peace, and leave it for an inheritance to his two
sons.

Humphrey could remember Pennsylvania a little, although the life in
the small democratic township seemed now like a dream to him. All
his interests centred in the free forest, where he had grown to
manhood. Now and again a longing would come upon him to see
something of the great, tumultuous, seething world of whose
existence he was dimly aware. There were times in the long winter
evenings when he and his brother, the old father, and the brother's
wife would sit round the stove after the children had been put to
bed, talking of the past and the future. Then old Angell would tell
his sons of the life he had once led in far-away England, before
the spirit of adventure drove him forth to seek his fortune in the
New World; and at such times Humphrey would listen with eager
attention, feeling the stirrings of a like spirit within him, and
wondering whether the vast walls of the giant forest would for ever
shut him in, or whether it would be his lot some day to cross the
heaving, mysterious, ever-moving ocean of which his father often
spoke, and visit the country of which he was still proud to call
himself a son.

Yet he loved his forest home and the free, wild life he led. Nor
was the element of peril lacking to the daily lot--peril which had
not found them yet, but which might spring upon them unawares at
any moment. For after years of peace and apparent goodwill on the
part of the Indians of the Five Nations, as this tract o