all freemen and we know no other scale."

* * * * *

That fall, when the mountains were painted giants, magnificently
glorified from the brush and palette of the frost; when the first crops
had been gathered, a spirit of festivity and cheer descended on the
block-houses of Fort Parish. Then into the outlying cabins emboldened
spirits began moving in escape from the cramp of stockade life.

Against the palisades of Wautaga besieging red men had struck and been
thrown back. Cheering tidings had come of Colonel William Christian's
expedition against the Indian towns.

The Otari, or hill warriors, had set their feet into the out-trail of
flight and acknowledged the chagrin of defeat, all except Dragging
Canoe, the ablest and most implacable of their chiefs who, sullenly
refusing to smoke the pipe, had drawn far away to the south, to sulk out
his wrath and await more promising auspices.

Then Caleb Parish's log house had risen by the river bank a half mile
distant from the stockade, and more and more he came to rely on the one
soul in his little garrison whose life seemed talisman-guarded and whose
woodcraft was a sublimation of instinct and acquired lore which even the
young braves of the Otari envied.

Young Peter Doane, son of "Lige Doane of the forest," and not yet a man
in years, came and went through the wilderness as surely and fleetly as
the wild things, and more than once he returned with a scalp at his
belt--for in those days the whites learned warfare from their foes and
accepted their rules. The little community nodded approving heads and
asked no questions. It learned valuable things because of Peter's
adventurings.

But when he dropped back after a moon of absence, it was always to Caleb
Parish's hearth-stone that Peter carried his report. It was over Caleb
Parish's fire that he smoked his silent pipe, and it was upon Caleb
Parish's little daughter that he bent his silently adoring glances.

Dorothy would sit silent with lowered lashes while she dutifully sought
to banish aloofness and the condescension which still lingered in her
heart--and the months rounded into seasons.

The time of famine long known as the "hard winter" came. The salt gave
out, the powder and lead were perilously low.

The "traces" to and through the Wilderness road were snow-blocked or
slimy with intermittent thaws, and the elder Dorothy Parish fell ill.

Learned physicians might have found and