ut for miles into the
rock. The river was the Tennessee, and the place the resort of the
Chickamauga bandits, pirates of the mountains, outcasts of all nations.
And Dragging Canoe was their chief.

It was on the whole a merry journey, the first part of it, if a rough
one. Often Polly Ann would draw me to her and whisper: "We'll hold out,
Davy. He'll never now." When the truth was that the big fellow was
going at half his pace on our account. He told us there was no fear of
redskins here, yet, when the scream of a painter or the hoot of an owl
stirred me from my exhausted slumber, I caught sight of him with his back
to a tree, staring into the forest, his rifle at his side. The day was
dawning.

"Turn about's fair," I expostulated.

"Ye'll need yere sleep, Davy," said he, "or ye'll never grow any bigger."

"I thought Kaintuckee was to the west," I said, "and you're making
north." For I had observed him day after day. We had left the trails.
Sometimes he climbed tree, and again he sent me to the upper branches,
whence I surveyed a sea of tree-tops waving in the wind, and looked
onward to where a green velvet hollow lay nestling on the western side of
a saddle-backed ridge.

"North!" said Tom to Polly Ann, laughing. "The little devil will beat me
at woodcraft soon. Ay, north, Davy. I'm hunting for the Nollichucky
Trace that leads to the Watauga settlement."

It was wonderful to me how he chose his way through the mountains. Once
in a while we caught sight of a yellow blaze in a tree, made by himself
scarce a month gone, when he came southward alone to fetch Polly Ann.
Again, the tired roan shied back from the bleached bones of a traveller,
picked clean by wolves. At sundown, when we loosed our exhausted horses
to graze on the wet grass by the streams, Tom would go off to look for a
deer or turkey, and often not come back to us until long after darkness
had fallen.

"Davy'll take care of you, Polly Ann," he would say as he left us.

And she would smile at him bravely and say, "I reckon I kin look out for
Davy awhile yet."

But when he was gone, and the crooning stillness set in broken only by
the many sounds of the night, we would sit huddled together by the fire.
It was dread for him she felt, not for herself. And in both our minds
rose red images of hideous foes skulking behind his brave form as he trod
the forest floor. Polly Ann was not the woman to whimper.

And yet I have but dim recollections of this jour