A little garden patch, that showed plainly the traces of careful tending, was on the further side of the cabin and extended down near to the bank of the Kanawha.
This lonely cabin, far off in the wild woods, remote from civilization, was the home of the strange, wayward girl whom the settlers at Point Pleasant called Kanawha Kate, and whom the red chiefs, in their fanciful way, termed the “Queen of the Kanawha.”
In the interior of the lonely cabin a strange scene presented itself to view.
On a rude couch of deer-skins lay a man. He was moaning, helplessly, as if in great pain.
The shirt that covered his manly breast was stained with blood.
From the position in which the wounded man lay—on his side, with his face buried in the folds of the deer-skin—his features were concealed from view, yet from the pallor of the little part of his face that was visible, it was evident that the man had been stricken nigh to death.
By the side of the suffering man knelt the brown-cheeked beauty, Kanawha Kate.
Anxiously she bent over the stricken man. A little cup of the muddy water from the Kanawha was by her side, and with her hands, wet with the discolored drops, she bathed the feverish temples of the wounded man.
Tender as a mother nursing her first-born, the girl laved the hot flesh.
As the cooling touch of the wet, brown hand passed softly over his temples, it seemed to ease the pain that racked the muscular limbs.