* * * * *

At the adze-smoothed table of a house which, for all its pioneer
crudity, reflected the spirit of tradition-loving inhabitants, sat a
young woman whose dark hair hung braided and whose dark eyes looked up
from time to time in thoughtful reminiscence.

She was writing with a goose-quill which she dipped into an ink-horn,
and as she nibbled at the end of her pen one might have seen that
whatever she was setting down lay close to her heart.

"Since I can not tell," she wrote, "whether or not I shall survive ye
comings of that new life upon which all my thoughts are set and should
such judgment be His Wille, I want that ye deare child shall have this
record of ye days its father and I spent here in these forest hills so
remote from ye sea and ye rivers of our dear Virginia and ye gentle
refinements we put behind us to become pioneers. This wish leads me to
the writing of a journall."

A shadow in the doorway cut the shaft of sunlight and the woman at the
writing table turned. On the threshold stood Kenneth Thornton and by the
hand he held a savage-visaged child clad in breech clout and moccasins,
but otherwise naked. Its eyes held the beady sharpness of the Indian,
and though hardly past babyhood, it stood haughtily rigid and
expressionless.

The face of the man was not flashing its smile now, but deeply grave,
and as his wife's gaze questioned him he spoke slowly.

"This is Peter Doane's boy," he said, briefly.

Dorothy Thornton shrank back with a gesture of repulsion, and the man
went on:

"A squaw with a travelling party of friendly Indians brought him in.
Mad-dog Doane is dead. His life ended in a drunken brawl in an Otari
village--but before he died he asked that the child be brought back to
us."

"Why?"

"Because," Thornton spoke seriously, "blood can't be silenced when death
comes. The squaw said Chief Mad-dog wanted his boy raised to be a white
brave.... He's half white, of course."

"And _he_ ventured to ask favours of _us_!" The woman's voice,
ordinarily gentle, hardened, and the man led the child over and laid his
own hand on her shoulder.

"The child is not to blame," he reminded her. "He's the fruit of
madness--but he has human life."

Dorothy rose, inclining her head in reluctant assent.

"I'll fetch him a white child's clothes," she said.

This was the story that the faded pages told and a small part of which
Dorothy Harper read as she sat in the la