eir making warlike
inroads upon their white neighbours during that season. The maize-stalks,
accordingly, soon fell before the knives and hatchets of the Kentuckians;
while the wigwams were given to the flames. When the last of the rude
habitations had fallen, crashing, to the earth, the victors began their
retreat towards the frontier; so that within a very few hours after they
first appeared, as if bursting from the earth, amid the amazed
barbarians, nothing remained upon the place of conflict and site of a
populous village, save scattered ruins and mangled corses.

Their own dead the invaders bore to a distance, and interred in the
deepest dens of the forest; and then, with their prisoners, carried with
them as the surest means of inducing the tribe to beg for peace, in order
to effect their deliverance, they resumed the path, which, in good time,
led them again to the Settlements.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

With the battle at the Black-Vulture's town, the interest of our history
ceases; and there it may be said to have its end. The deliverance of the
cousins, the one from captivity and death, the other from a fate to her
more dreadful than death; the restoration of the will of their uncle; and
the fall of the daring and unprincipled villain to whose machinations
they owed all their calamities, had changed the current of their
fortunes, which was now to flow in a channel where the eye could no
longer trace obstructions. The last peal of thunder had dissipated the
clouds of adversity, and the star of their destiny shone out with all its
original lustre. The future was no longer one of mere hope; it presented
all the certainty of happiness of which human existence is capable.

Such being the case, it would be a superfluous and unprofitable task to
pursue our history further, were it not that other individuals, whose
interests were so long intermingled with those of the cousins, have a
claim upon our notice. And first, before speaking of the most important
of all, the warlike man of peace, the man-slaying hater of blood, the
redoubtable Nathan Slaughter, let us bestow a word upon honest Pardon
Dodge, whose sudden re-appearance on the stage of life so greatly
astonished the young Virginian.

This resuscitation, however, as explained by Dodge himself, was, after
all, no such wonderful matter. Swept from his horse by the violence of
the flood, in the memorable flight from the ruin, a happy accident had
flung him upon th