women gathering in groups and running here and
there between the cabins. Urging on the mare, I cantered across the
fields, and the first person I met was James Ray.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Matter enough! An army of redskins has crossed the Ohio, and not a man
to take command. My God," cried Ray, pointing angrily at the swarms
about the land office, "what trash we have got this last year! Kentucky
can go to the devil, half the stations be wiped out, and not a thrip do
they care."

"Have you sent word to the Colonel?" I asked.

"If he was here," said Ray, bitterly, "he'd have half of 'em swinging
inside of an hour. I'll warrant he'd send 'em to the right-about."

I rode on into the town, Potts gone out of my mind. Apart from the
land-office crowds, and looking on in silent rage, stood a group of the
old settlers,--tall, lean, powerful, yet impotent for lack of a leader.
A contrast they were, these buckskin-clad pioneers, to the ill-assorted
humanity they watched, absorbed in struggles for the very lands they had
won.

"By the eternal!" said Jack Terrell, "if the yea'th was ter swaller 'em
up, they'd keep on a-dickerin in hell."

"Something's got to be done," Captain Harrod put in gloomily; "the red
varmints'll be on us in another day. In God's name, whar is Clark?"

"Hold!" cried Fletcher Blount, "what's that?"

The broiling about the land court, too, was suddenly hushed. Men stopped
in their tracks, staring fixedly at three forms which had come out of the
woods into the clearing.

"Redskins, or there's no devil!" said Terrell.

Redskins they were, but not the blanketed kind that drifted every day
through the station. Their war-paint gleamed in the light, and the white
edges of the feathered head-dresses caught the sun. One held up in his
right hand a white belt,--token of peace on the frontier.

"Lord A'mighty!" said Fletcher Blount, "be they Cricks?"

"Chickasaws, by the headgear," said Terrell. "Davy, you've got a hoss.
Ride out and look em over."

Nothing loath, I put the mare into a gallop, and I passed over the very
place where Polly Ann had picked me up and saved my life long since. The
Indians came on at a dog trot, but when they were within fifty paces of
me they halted abruptly. The chief waved the white belt around his head.

"Davy!" says he, and I trembled from head to foot. How well I knew that
voice!

"Colonel Clark!" I cried, and rode up to him. "Thank God you are come,
sir," sa