Fortunately I perched a turkey within two hundred feet of the cabin. I hung the kettle in the fireplace and built a good fire under it and then dressed the turkey. For some reason the girl preferred the open to the cabin and remained outside the door. As I finished my task she called to me excitedly. Grabbing my rifle, I ran out. She was pointing dramatically at a big blaze on a mulberry-tree. The scar was fresh, and on it some one had written with a charred stick:
Found some people killed here. We are gone down this way. Douglass.
“What does it mean?” she whispered, her eyes very big as she stared at the dusky forest wall.
“That would be James Douglass,” I mused. “He came down here with Floyd’s surveying-party last spring. I wonder who was killed.”
“Enough to know the Indians have been here,” she said, drawing closer to me. “Can’t we go the way they did and be safe?”
“We might make it. But ’gone down this way’ means they started for New Orleans. A long, roundabout journey to Williamsburg.”
“Oh, never that! I didn’t understand,” she cried. “I will be braver. But if the nearest way home was by the Ohio I would go by land. Anything but the river! Remember your promise that we are not to be taken alive. Now let’s push on.”
“And leave this excellent shelter?” I protested.
“Men have been killed here. I can’t abide it. A few miles more—please.”
Of course she had her own way, but I made her wait until we had cooked some corn to a mush and I had broiled the turkey. I could have told her it would be difficult for us to select any spot along the river which had not been the scene of a killing. So we took the kettle and left a stout, snug cabin and pushed on through the darkness to the top of a low ridge, where I insisted we must camp. We made no fire.