The girl started when the tones fell upon her ear.
“Can it be he?” she muttered, and wonder was in her voice.
“Why don’t you answer, gal?” exclaimed the voice of the stranger. “Don’t you know me, or have you forgotten your own flesh and blood?”
“It is my father,” she murmured, but there was little love in the tones.
Then, without further parley, she unbarred the door. It swung back slowly on its rusty hinges and a tall, powerfully built man, clad in a deer-skin garb fashioned after the Indian style, entered the room.
The stranger was the same man whom we have seen in the Shawnee village, Girty’s companion, by name David Kendrick.
He, too, like Girty was execrated by the settlers. An adopted son of the great Shawnee nation, with his red brothers he had stained his hands in the blood of the men whose skins were white like his own.
There was little love expressed in the face of Kate as she looked upon her father, for the renegade Kendrick bore that relation to her, though by the inhabitants of Point Pleasant it was generally supposed that she was some relation to Girty; but that was not the truth.
“Well, gal, how are you?” questioned the new-comer, roughly. But before the girl could reply, the eyes of Kendrick fell upon the figure of the wounded man stretched upon the couch of skins.
“Hullo! who’s this, eh? Hain’t been getting a husband since I’ve been up in the Shawnee country, have you?”