"We couldn't find a better place," said Ross loud enough for all to hear. "It looks like a fort just made for us."
"But there is no line of retreat," objected the schoolmaster.
"We had a line of a retreat last night and all this mornin' an' we've been followin' it all the time," rejoined the leader. "Now we don't need it no more, but what we do need to do is to make a stan'-up fight, an' lick them fellers."
"And save our salt," added the master.
"Of course," said Ross emphatically. "We didn't come all these miles an' work all these days just to lose what we went so far after an' worked so hard for."
They retreated rapidly upon the great jutting peninsula of rocky soil, which fortunately was covered with a good growth of trees, and tethered the horses in a thick grove near the end.
"Now, we'll just unload our salt an' make a wall," said Ross with a trace of a smile. "They can shoot our salt as much as they please, just so they don't touch us."
The bags of salt were laid in the most exposed place across the narrowest neck of the peninsula and they also dragged up all the fallen tree trunks and boughs that they could find to help out their primitive fortification. Then they sat down to wait, a hard task for men, but hardest of all for two boys like Henry and Paul.
Two of the men went back with the horses to watch over them and also to guard against any possible attempt to scale the cliff in their rear, but the others lay close behind the wall of salt and brushwood. The sun swung up toward the zenith and shone down upon a beautiful world. All the wilderness was touched with the tender young green of spring and nothing stirred but the gentle wind. The silky blue sky smiled over a scene so often enacted in early Kentucky, that great border battle ground of the white man and the red, the one driven by the desire for new and fertile acres that he might plow and call his own, the other by an equally fierce desire to retain the same acres, not to plow nor even to call his own, but that he might roam and hunt big game over them at will.
The great red eye of the sun, poised now in the center of the heavens, looked down at the white men crouched close to the earth behind their low and primitive wall, and then it looked into the forest at the red men creeping silently from tree to tree, all the eager ferocity of the man hunt on the face of everyone.