With a nod toward Mrs. Wilson who was seated at the further end of the rude apartment, quietly knitting, Dusky Dick took a seat at the table and helped himself liberally to the plain though palatable viands that Annie hastened to replace upon the table. The girl then ignited a rude lamp, and retreated to the side of her mother.
We do not intend describing the building; most of our readers have seen these cabins, either in reality or through the medium of print. It was a regular frontier cabin, made of logs roughly hewn, "chinked" with billets of wood, daubed over with stiffened clay. The walls were unpapered, and the furniture of the rudest description, the majority being "home made;" the ax and auger being the principal tools used.
But one of the inmates at least deserves more than a passing notice as she will figure quite prominently before the reader in this tale of border life and trials. That one is Annie Wilson.
Barely five feet in hight, she was a model of feminine grace and beauty, tempered and strengthened by the life of freedom and health-giving exercise of the past two years. Her form had filled and rounded to superb symmetry, her cheek glowed with the hue of health and spirits; at eighteen, she was a woman, in the truest sense of the word.
Her hair was of a rich golden brown, her eyes, large and lustrous, were deeply blue; her nose, of a faintly Roman type, gave a decisive expression to her countenance, that was softened by the small, ruby-lipped mouth, from which gleamed twin rows of pearly teeth whenever she smiled, and caused a cunning dimple to play upon the softly-rounded chin.
Dusky Dick ate voraciously, but yet found time to cast more than one admiring glance toward the border beauty, which were by no means welcome, judging from the scornful turn of the bright red lips, and the flashing of her blue eyes as the maiden bent over some rough mending. Then Morgan arose and approached the settler, who was still smoking.
"You don't ask me the news," he uttered, in a disagreeable tone as he squatted down upon the doorstep.
"I knew you'd tell it without," was the quiet reply.
"Yes, that's what I stopped fer. The Sioux are goin' to raise partic'lar Cain 'fore long."
"Are you sure?"