“That sort of medicine won’t do for me. No, siree! Injuns are a pest, just like wolves and painters, only worse. They must be wiped out. That’s my belief and I make it my business to wipe them out. Few men that’s got more’n me.”
It’s a waste of time to talk with a bloody-minded man. Hughes’ brother was killed by the Indians. As for that, there was hardly a settler in Virginia who had not lost some dear friend or relative. When the history of the country is written, it will surprise the coming generations to read the many names having opposite them, “Killed by the Indians.”
I was sorry I had met Hughes. His company grated on me. It was impossible to think of Patsy Dale with the fellow’s cruel babble ringing in my ears. I remained silent and he garrulously recounted some of his many exploits, and with gusto described how he had trapped various victims. It was his one ambition of life. He cared nothing for land.
Offer him all of Colonel Washington’s thirty-odd thousand acres on the Ohio and Great Kanawha as a gift, and he would have none of them unless they contained red men to slaughter. He had laid down a red path and it was his destiny to follow it. I had no love for Shawnee or Mingo, but my mind held room for something besides schemes for bloodletting.
And yet it was well for me that I had met Hughes the Indian-hater, and doubly well that I had brought powder and lead so that he had turned back with me. We were riding down the western slope and about clear of the mountains, I trying to think my own thoughts and he talking, talking, his words dripping blood, when ahead in the trace I spied something on the ground that caused me to exclaim aloud.
It was a brightly beaded moccasin, very small, and strangely familiar even at a distance. Hughes saw it and stared at it through half-closed lids. I leaped from my horse and started forward to pick it up.
“Don’t touch it;” yelled Hughes. “Come back! Come back!”
I heard him and understood his words, and yet I continued advancing while I mechanically endeavored to guess his reason for stopping me.
“Jump, you fool!” he yelled as I stretched out my hand to pick up the moccasin. And his horse was almost upon me and covering me with dirt as he pivoted and slid into the bushes, his hindquarters hitting me and hurling me over, half a dozen feet beyond the little moccasin. I landed on my head and shoulders with the crack of a rifle echoing in my dazed ears.
Instinct sent me rolling out of the trace and into the bushes. By the time I gained my knees and had cleared the dirt from my eyes Hughes was working rapidly up the right-hand slope. His horse stood at the edge of the bushes, rubbing noses with my animal. I kept under cover of the growth and halted abreast of the moccasin.