The slim and scarcely perceptible tunnel, among trees, piled with fallen logs and newly sprung growths, let us into a wide clearing as suddenly as a stream finds its lake. We could not see even the usual cow tracks. A cabin shedding light from its hearth surprised us in the midst of stumps.
The door stood wide. A woman walked back and forth over a puncheon floor, tending supper. Dogs rushed to meet us, and the playing of children could be heard. A man, gun in hand, stepped to his door, a sentinel. He lowered its muzzle, and made us welcome, and helped us put our horses under shelter with his own.
It was not often we had a woman's handiwork in corn bread and game to feed ourselves upon, or a bed covered with homespun sheets.
I slept as the children slept, until a voice rang in the clearing:
"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and He hath anointed me to blow the trumpet in the wilderness, and sound an alarm in the forest; for behold the tribes of the heathen are round about your doors, and a devouring flame followeth after them!"
Every sleeper in the cabin sat upright or stirred. We said in whispered chorus:
"Johnny Appleseed!"
A tapping, light and regular, on the window, followed. The man was on the floor in a breath. I heard the mother groping among the children, and whispering:
"Don't wake the baby!"
The fire had died upon the hearth, and they lighted no candle. When Johnny Appleseed gave his warning cry in the clearing, and his cautious tap on the window, and was instantly gone to other clearings and other windows, it meant that the Indians were near.