When his frightened orderly, leading the recaptured charger, rode up, followed by a number of excited officers and men, and drew near to the thicket, they were just in time to see Colonel Claypoole emerging from it, red-faced but calm, carrying a long rifle.

“I see you have put a notch in it already,” said one of his companions, as he eagerly wrung his hand.

“So I perceive,” replied the Colonel, “but it was hardly necessary, for I have only killed a snake.”

There are some who say that Colonel Claypoole’s victim was not Simon Girty at all, but merely a drunken settler who was coming out of the bushes after a mid-day nap, and a coincidence that the fellow was armed with a rifle on which there was a single nick. Yet for all intents and purposes Colonel Claypoole had killed a good enough Simon Girty, and had his rifle to prove it.

Other reports have it that Simon Girty survived the Revolution, where he played such a reprehensive part, to marry Catharine Malott, a former captive among the Indians, in 1784, and was killed in the Battle of the Thames, in the War of 1812.

C. W. Butterworth in his biography of the Girty family, says that Simon, in later life, became totally blind, dying near Amlerstburg, Canada, February 18, 1818, was buried on his farm, and a troop of British soldiers from Fort Malden fired a volley at his grave.

XIII
Poplar George

“I have been reading your legends of the old days in the ‘North American,’”[American,’”] said the delegate to the Grange Convention, stroking his long silky mustache, “and they remind me of many stories that my mother used to tell me when I was a little shaver, while we were living on the Pucketa, in Westmoreland County. There was one story that I used to like best of all. It was not the one about old Pucketa the Indian warrior for whom the run was named, but about a less notable Indian, but more esteemed locally, known as ‘Poplar George.’

“It isn’t nearly as interesting an Indian story as the one that Emerson Collins tells, of the time when his mother, as a little girl on the Quinneshockeny, went to the spring for a jug of water, finding a lone Indian sitting there all by himself, looking as if he was in deep thought. As he made no move to molest her, she filled her jug, and then scampered back to the house as fast as she could tote the jug there.

“She was a little shy about telling of her strange experience, but finally, when she mentioned the subject, her mother said, ‘maybe the poor fellow was hungry.’ Quickly spreading a ‘piece,’ she hurried back to the spring, but no Indian was to be found, only a few prints of his mocassined feet in the soft earth by the water course. If it hadn’t been for those footprints she would have always felt that she had not seen a real live Indian, but a ghost.