Inside Dorothy bent over the bed and saw the eyes of her lover open slowly and painfully. His lips parted in a ghost of his old, flashing smile.
"Is the tree safe?" he whispered.
The girl stooped and slipped an arm under the man's shoulders. The masses of her night-dark hair fell brushing his face in a fragrant cascade and her deep eyes were wide, unmasking to his gaze all the candid fears and intensities of her love. Then as her lips met his in the first kiss she had ever given him, unasked, it seemed to him that a current of exaltation and vitality swept into him that death could not overcome.
"I'm going to get well," he told her. "Life is too full—and without you, heaven would be empty."
The next pack train did not arrive. But several weeks later a single, half-famished survivor stumbled into the fort. His hands were bound, his tongue swollen from thirst, and about his shoulders dangled a hideous necklace of white scalps. When he had been restored to speech he delivered the message for which his life had been spared.
"This is what's left of your pack train," was the insolent word that Peter Doane—now calling himself Chief Mad-dog, had sent back to his former comrades. "The balance has gone on to Yellow Jacket, but some day I will come back for Thornton's scalp—and my squaw."
As the summer waned the young walnut tree sent down its roots to vigour and imperceptibly lifted its crest. Its leaves did not wither but gained in greenness and lustre, and as it prospered so Kenneth Thornton also prospered, until when the season of corn shucking came again, he and Dorothy stood beside it, and Caleb, who had received his credentials as a justice of the peace, read for them the ritual of marriage.
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."