Colonel Clark pulled me down again.

"Davy," said he, almost roughly, I thought, "remember that we have been
joking. Do you understand?--joking. You have a tongue in your mouth, but
sense enough in your head, I believe, to hold it." He turned to Tom.
"McChesney, this is a queer lad you brought us," said he.

"He's a little deevil," agreed Tom, for that had become a formula with
him.

It was all very mysterious to me, and I lay awake many a night with
curiosity, trying to solve a puzzle that was none of my business. And
one day, to cap the matter, two woodsmen arrived at Harrodstown with
clothes frayed and bodies lean from a long journey. Not one of the
hundred questions with which they were beset would they answer, nor say
where they had been or why, save that they had carried out certain orders
of Clark, who was locked up with them in a cabin for several hours.

The first of October, the day of Colonel Clark's departure, dawned crisp
and clear. He was to take with him the disheartened and the cowed, the
weaklings who loved neither work nor exposure nor danger. And before he
set out of the gate he made a little speech to the assembled people.

"My friends," he said, "you know me. I put the interests of Kentucky
before my own. Last year when I left to represent her at Williamsburg
there were some who said I would desert her. It was for her sake I made
that journey, suffered the tortures of hell from scalded feet, was near
to dying in the mountains. It was for her sake that I importuned the
governor and council for powder and lead, and when they refused it I said
to them, 'Gentlemen, a country that is not worth defending is not worth
claiming.'"

At these words the settlers gave a great shout, waving their coonskin
hats in the air.

"Ay, that ye did," cried Bill Cowan, "and got the amminition."

"I made that journey for her sake, I say," Colonel Clark continued, "and
even so I am making this one. I pray you trust me, and God bless and
keep you while I am gone."

He did not forget to speak to me as he walked between our lines, and told
me to be a good boy and that he would see me in the spring. Some of the
women shed tears as he passed through the gate, and many of us climbed to
sentry box and cabin roof that we might see the last of the little
company wending its way across the fields. A motley company it was, the
refuse of the station, headed by its cherished captain. So they started
back over the weary road t