which every pioneer had trained himself to waken, wide-eyed, out of his most exhausted sleep.
Caleb Parish strode to the door and opened it cautiously. Out of the night, shaking the snow from his buckskin hunting shirt, stepped Peter Doane with his stoical face fatigue drawn as he eased down a bulky pack from galled shoulders.
"Injins," he said, crisply. "Get your women inside the fort right speedily!"
The young man slipped again into the darkness, and Parish, lifting the half-conscious figure from the bed, wrapped it in a bear-skin rug and carried it out into the sleety bluster.
That night spent itself through a tensity of waiting until dawn.
When the east grew a bit pale, Caleb Parish returned from his varied duties and laid a hand on his wife's forehead to find it fever-hot. The woman opened her eyes and essayed a smile, but at the same moment there rode piercingly through the still air the long and hideous challenge of a war-whoop.
Dorothy Parish, the elder, flinched as though under a blow and a look of horror stamped itself on her face that remained when she had died.
* * *
Spring again—and a fitful period of peace—but peace with disquieting rumours.
Word came out of the North of mighty preparations among the Six Nations and up from the South sped the report that Dragging Canoe had laid aside his mantle of sullen mourning and painted his face for war.
Dorothy Parish, the wife, had been buried before the cabin built by the river bank, and Dorothy, the daughter, kept house for the father whom these months had aged out of all resemblance to the former self in knee breeches and powdered wig with lips that broke quickly into smiling.
And Peter, watching the bud of Dorothy's childhood swell to the slim charms of girlhood, held his own counsel and worshipped her dumbly. Perhaps he remembered the gulf that had separated his father's log cabin from her uncle's manor house in the old Virginia days, but of these things no one spoke in Kentucky.
Three years had passed, and along the wilderness road was swelling a fuller tide of emigration, hot with the fever of the west.
Meeting it in counter-current went the opposite flow of the faint-hearted who sought only to put behind them the memory of hardship and suffering—but that was a light and negligible back-wash from an onsweeping wave.
Caleb Parish smiled grimly. This spelled the beginning of success. The battle was not over—his own work was far from ended—but substantial victory had been won over wilderness and savage. The back doors of a young nation had suffered assault and had held secure.
Stories drifted in nowadays of the great future of the more fertile tablelands to the west, but Caleb Parish had been stationed here and had not been relieved.
The pack train upon which the little community depended for needed supplies had been long overdue, and at Caleb's side as he stood in front of his house looking anxiously east was his daughter Dorothy, grown tall and pliantly straight as a lifted lance.
Her dark eyes and heavy hair, the poise of her head, her gracious sweetness and gentle courage were, to her father, all powerful reminders of the woman whom he had loved first and last—this girl's mother. For a moment he turned away his head.
"Some day," he said, abruptly, "if Providence permits it, I purpose to set a fitting stone here at her head."
"Meanwhile—if we can't raise a stone," the girl's voice came soft and vibrant, "we can do something else. We can plant a tree."
"A tree!" exclaimed the man, almost irritably. "It sometimes seems to me that we are being strangled to death by trees! They conceal our enemies—they choke us under their blankets of wet and shadow."
But Dorothy shook her head in resolute dissent.
"Those are just trees of the forest," she said, whimsically reverting to the old class distinction. "This will be a manor-house tree planted and tended by loving hands. It will throw shade over a sacred spot." Her eyes began to glow with the growth of her conception.
"Don't you remember how dearly Mother loved the great walnut tree that shaded the veranda at home? She would sit gazing out over the river, then up into its branches—dreaming happy things. She used to tell me that she found my fairy stories there among its leaves—and there was always a smile on her lips then."
The spring was abundantly young and where the distances lengthened they lay in violet dreams.
"Don't you remember?" repeated the girl, but Caleb Parish looked suddenly away. His ear had caught a distant sound of tinkling pony bells drifting down wind and he said devoutly, "Thank God, the pack train is coming."
It was an hour later when the loaded horses came into view herded by fagged woodsmen and piloted by Peter Doane, who strode silently, tirelessly, at their head. But with Peter walked another young man of different stamp—a young man who had never been here before.
Like his fellows he wore the backwoodsman's garb, but unlike them his tan was of newer wind-burning. Unlike them, too, he bowed with a ceremony foreign to the wilderness and swept his coonskin cap clear of his head.
"This man," announced Peter, brusquely, "gives the name of Kenneth Thornton and hears a message for Captain Parish!"
The young stranger smiled, and his engaging face was quickened with the flash of white teeth. A dark lock of hair fell over his forehead and his firm chin was deeply cleft.
"I have the honour of bearing a letter from your brother, Sir," he said, "and one from General Washington himself."
Peter Doane looked on, and when he saw Dorothy's eyes encounter those of the stranger and her lashes droop and her cheeks flush pink, he turned on his heel and with the stiffness of an affronted Indian strode silently away.
"This letter from General Washington," said Caleb Parish, looking up from his reading, "informs me that you have already served creditably with our troops in the east and that you are now desirous to cast your lot with us here. I welcome you, Sir."
Kenneth Thornton was swift to learn and when he went abroad with hunting parties or to swing the axe in the clearings, his stern and exacting task-masters found no fault with his strength or spirit.
Their ardent and humourless democracy detected in him no taint of the patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid his arrears of knowledge with the ready coin of eagerness.
So Kenneth Thornton was speedily accepted into full brotherhood and became a favourite. The cheery peal of his laugh and his even cordiality opened an easy road to popularity and confidence.
Thornton had been schooled in England until the war clouds lowered, and as he talked of his boyish days there, and of the sights and festivities of London town, he found in Caleb Parish and his daughter receptive listeners, but in young Doane a stiff-necked monument of wordless resentment.
One summer night when the skies had spilt day-long torrents of rain and the sun had set red with the woods still sobbing and chill, a great fire roared on Caleb Parish's hearth. Before it sat the householder with his daughter and Kenneth Thornton; as usual, too, silent and morose yet stubbornly present, was Peter Doane.
Oddly
