shed her a happy honeymoon, and me he
patted on the head and called a brave lad. And soon we had passed beyond
the corn-field into the Wilderness again.

Our way was down the Nollichucky, past the great bend of it below Lick
Creek, and so to the Great War-path, the trail by which countless parties
of red marauders had travelled north and south. It led, indeed,
northeast between the mountain ranges. Although we kept a watch by day
and night, we saw no sign of Dragging Canoe or his men, and at length we
forded the Holston and came to the scattered settlement in Carter's
Valley.

I have since racked my brain to remember at whose cabin we stopped there.
He was a rough backwoodsman with a wife and a horde of children. But I
recall that a great rain came out of the mountains and down the valley.
We were counting over the powder gourds in our packs, when there burst in
at the door as wild a man as has ever been my lot to see. His brown
beard was grown like a bramble patch, his eye had a violet light, and his
hunting shirt was in tatters. He was thin to gauntness, ate ravenously
of the food that was set before him, and throwing off his soaked
moccasins, he spread his scalded feet to the blaze, and the steaming odor
of drying leather filled the room.

"Whar be ye from?" asked Tom.

For answer the man bared his arm, then his shoulder, and two angry scars,
long and red, revealed themselves, and around his wrists were deep gouges
where he had been bound.

"They killed Sue," he cried, "sculped her afore my very eyes. And they
chopped my boy outen the hickory withes and carried him to the Creek
Nation. At a place where there was a standin' stone I broke loose from
three of 'em and come here over the mountains, and I ain't had nothin',
stranger, but berries and chainey brier-root for ten days. God damn
'em!" he cried, standing up and tottering with the pain in his feet, "if
I can get a Deckard--"

"Will you go back?" said Tom.

"Go back!" he shouted, "I'll go back and fight 'em while I have blood in
my body."

He fell into a bunk, but his sorrow haunted him even in his troubled
sleep, and his moans awed us as we listened. The next day he told us his
story with more calmness. It was horrible indeed, and might well have
frightened a less courageous woman than Polly Ann. Imploring her not to
go, he became wild again, and brought tears to her eyes when he spoke of
his own wife. "They tomahawked her, ma'am, because she could not