She welcomed him as one back from the land of the dead. News was slow, in those days. Nevertheless—
"I knew you'd come—I knew you'd come," she sobbed, gladly, as he held her in his arms. For she was a widow and he was her only boy.
It was different with Mrs. Crawford and many another wife and mother. Mrs. Crawford waited day after day, for word from her husband, the gallant colonel. At last it arrived, with Doctor Knight, and all the border heard.
The brave and courtly Colonel William Crawford had been tortured and burned. So had his gallant young son, John—and others.
Mrs. Crawford never got over that loss. She loved her husband devotedly. Long years afterward, when she was old and wrinkled, she placed a little grandson behind her on her horse and took him far into the forest. She set him down beside a moss-covered log.
"Here is where I parted with your grandfather, when he rode against the Indians," she said. And she cried and cried.