wouldn't fail me," he said, and called every
man by name as we waded ashore. When I came splashing along after Tom he
pulled me from the water with his two hands.

"Colonel," said Terence McCann, "we've brought ye a dhrummer b'y."

"We'd have no luck at all without him," said Cowan, and the men laughed.

"Can you walk an hundred miles without food, Davy?" asked Colonel Clark,
eying me gravely.

"Faith he's lean as a wolf, and no stomach to hinder him," said Terence,
seeing me look troubled. "I'll not be missing the bit of food the likes
of him would eat."

"And as for the heft of him," added Cowan, "Mac and I'll not feel it."

Colonel Clark laughed. "Well, boys," he said, "if you must have him, you
must. His Excellency gave me no instructions about a drummer, but we'll
take you, Davy."

In those days he was a man that wasted no time, was Colonel Clark, and
within the hour our little detachment had joined the others, felling
trees and shaping the log-ends for the cabins. That night, as Tom
and Cowan and McCann and James Ray lay around their fire, taking
a well-earned rest, a man broke excitedly into the light with a
kettle-shaped object balanced on his head, which he set down in front of
us. The man proved to be Swein Poulsson, and the object a big drum,
and he straightway began to beat upon it a tattoo with improvised
drumsticks.

"A Red Stone man," he cried, "a Red Stone man, he have it in the
flatboat. It is for Tavy."

"The saints be good to us," said Terence, "if it isn't the King's own
drum he has." And sure enough, on the head of it gleamed the royal arms
of England, and on the other side, as we turned it over, the device of a
regiment. They flung the sling about my neck, and the next day, when the
little army drew up for parade among the stumps, there I was at the end
of the line, and prouder than any man in the ranks. And Colonel Clark
coming to my end of the line paused and smiled and patted me kindly on
the cheek.

"Have you put this man on the roll, Harrod?" says he.

"No, Colonel," answers Captain Harrod, amid the laughter of the men at
my end.

"What!" says the Colonel, "what an oversight! From this day he is
drummer boy and orderly to the Commander-in-chief. Beat the retreat, my
man."

I did my best, and as the men broke ranks they crowded around me,
laughing and joking, and Cowan picked me up, drum and all, and carried
me off, I rapping furiously the while.

And so I became a kind of h