Your pale-faced
chief, whom I shall this night adopt by the name of Wolf-hunter, must
ever be revered by our tribesmen for his deeds of skill and daring. He
has driven our enemies from our hunting-ground. Yon skulking thieves
that destroyed our game, and tore the white squaw's papoose from her
arms, and bore it over the high hills to where the Susquehanna winds her
course among the alder groves, there the pale chief left them in their
leafy bed of gore, and returned the white papoose to the embrace of her
mother. The Indians who returned to avenge their fallen tribesmen have
been slain by him, and their bones will ever rest on our hunting-ground,
unmolested either by sire or son. He has met this day in deadly combat
the gray wolves of the forest that destroyed our venison. They spared
neither the deer nor its fawn; and to-night they sleep in death, high on
the bleak mountain-side. The God of battle helps him in every strife,
and no arm has yet been found able to cope with his. And we should be
proud of such a friend to lead the hunt and move the whirlwind of the
battle on."

Mayall related the story of his adventure with the wolves to Mr. Powel,
one of the first settlers of the Adaca Valley, and at the same time
informed him that Molly Brant, then an Indian maiden of beautiful form
and suavity of manners, was with the Indians at their camp, and was
after that the wife of Sir William Johnson. He said her manners were as
gentle as the south wind that rocked the tree-tops in autumn.

CHAPTER V.

The place of rest where the red man unstrung his bow and slept two
hundred years ago, beneath the shades of an overgrown forest, where the
grandsires of that much-abused race planted their orchard, which bore
the gems of bright abundance in autumn's golden days to regale their
taste and satisfy their appetites, whilst they rested from the chase,
this Garden of Eden so much famed in Indian story, the red man's
resting-place, where he gathered in his stock of furs for his winter
clothing and dried his venison to sustain his own life and the life of
his family during the cold stormy winters of this latitude, around whose
fertile plain the towering hills stand as sentinels to guard the plain
below from furious winds and drifting storms, was highly esteemed by the
Indian tribes for the abundance of fish that inhabited the waters of the
Susquehanna and its tributaries.

There has long been a story of revolutionary days connec