were
twenty miles away, was only a strip of sunny grass, dotted over with the
stumps of trees that had been felled lest they afford cover for attacking
savages. A man, riding at the head of the invading party, beckoned,
somewhat imperiously, to the pioneer; and the latter, still with his
musket in the hollow of his arm, strode across the greensward, and
finding himself in the midst, not of rude traders and rangers, but of
easy, smiling, periwigged gentlemen, handsomely dressed and accoutred,
dropped the butt of his gun upon the ground, and took off his
squirrel-skin cap.

"You are deep in the wilderness, good fellow," said the man who had
beckoned, and who was possessed of a stately figure, a martial
countenance, and an air of great authority. "How far is it to the
mountains?"

The pioneer stared at the long blue range, cloudlike in the distance. "I
don't know," he answered. "I hunt to the eastward. Twenty miles, maybe.
You're never going to climb them?"

"We are come out expressly to do so," answered the other heartily, "having
a mind to drink the King's health with our heads in the clouds! We need
another axeman to clear away the fallen trees and break the nets of
grapevine. Wilt go along amongst our rangers yonder, and earn a pistole
and undying fame?"

The woodsman looked from the knot of gentlemen to the troop of hardy
rangers, who, with a dozen ebony servants and four Meherrin Indians, made
up the company. Under charge of the slaves were a number of packhorses.
Thrown across one was a noble deer; a second bore a brace of wild turkeys
and a two-year-old bear, fat and tender; a third had a legion of pots and
pans for the cooking of the woodland cheer; while the burden of several
others promised heart's content of good liquor. From the entire troop
breathed a most enticing air of gay daring and good-fellowship. The
gentlemen were young and of cheerful countenances; the rangers in the rear
sat their horses and whistled to the woodpeckers in the sugar-trees; the
negroes grinned broadly; even the Indians appeared a shade less saturnine
than usual. The golden sunshine poured upon them all, and the blue
mountains that no Englishman had ever passed seemed for the moment as soft
and yielding as the cloud that slept along their summits. And no man knew
what might be just beyond the mountains: Frenchmen, certainly, and the
great lakes and the South Sea: but, besides these, might there not be
gold, glittering stones, new