some reluctance. Being nearly sixteen now,
with an unusually powerful frame developed by a forest life, he was as
large as an ordinary man and quite as strong. He thought he ought to
have done with schools, and set up in man's estate but his father
insisted upon another winter under Mr. Pennypacker's care and Henry
yielded.

There were perhaps thirty boys and girls who sat on the rough wooden
benches in the school and received tuition. Mr. Pennypacker did not
undertake to guide them through many branches of learning, but what he
taught he taught well. He, too, had the feeling that these boys and
girls were to be the men and women who would hold the future of the West
in their hands, and he intended that they should be fit. There were
statesmen and generals among those red-faced boys on the benches, and
the wives and mothers of others among the red-faced girls who sat near
them, and he tried to teach them their duty as the heirs of a
wilderness, soon to be the home of a great race.

Among his favorite pupils was Paul who had not Henry's eye and hand in
the forest, but who loved books and the knowledge of men. He could
follow the devious lines of history when Henry would much rather have
been following the devious trail of a deer. Nevertheless, Henry
persisted, borne up by the emulation of his comrade, and the knowledge
that it was his last winter in school.

CHAPTER VI

THE VOICE OF THE WOODS

To study now was the hardest task that Henry had ever undertaken. It was
even easier to find food when he and Paul were unarmed and destitute in
the forest. The walls of the little log house in which he sat inclosed
him like a cell, the air was heavy and the space seemed to grow narrower
and narrower. Then just when the task was growing intolerable he would
look across the room and seeing the studious face of Paul bent over the
big text of an ancient history, he would apply himself anew to his labor
which consisted chiefly of "figures," a bit of the world's geography,
and a little look into the history of England.

Mr. Pennypacker would neither praise nor blame, but often when the boy
did not notice he looked critically at Henry. "I don't think your son
will be a great scholar," he said once to Mr. Ware, "but he will be a
Nimrod, a mighty hunter before men, and a leader in action. It's as
well, for his is the kind that will be needed most and for a long time
in this wilderness, and back there in the old lands, too."