"You grieve!" she murmured.
"It is the grave of my mother."
Don Pedro dropped the handle of the steer-oar and turned to me with a courtesy that went far deeper than outer form. "Your mother? May the Virgin bless her!"
Alisanda made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved in quick prayer: "Ave Maria purisima—"
After a little the don ventured a word of consolation: "It is a beautiful place for a tomb,—serene and grand on its solitary hillcrest. When my own time comes, may I rest as well!"
Serene!—beautiful! The words roused me from my unmanly weakness.
"You do not know!" I cried. "Her grave was dug among the ashes of our home. She was murdered by the Shawnees."
"You speak of the Indian savages?" murmured Alisanda. "Is it so long ago as that?"
"In my boyhood—in ninety-one—the Spring before St. Clair's terrible defeat. The northern tribes raided the settlements from above Pittsburg to the lower Kentucky, with a fury before unknown. The ferocious braves crept by night through the very streets of Cincinnati and under the walls of Fort Washington. Our home, outlying yonder on the Little Miami, was one of the first struck. The memory of that morning is burned deep into my brain. My father had gone into town to barter some skins for flour, and my mother was part way down the hillside, ploughing for corn. I had gone up to the cabin to fetch a jug of cider, and was half-way back, when a score of Shawnees in their black war paint leaped from the ravine and set upon my mother.
"I ran to help her, but she, striking bravely at the treacherous savages with the ox-goad, screamed to me to fly for the guns. I turned as she fell under the stroke of a tomahawk. The murderers leaped after me, yelling and firing. Rifle balls and arrows whistled about me, some piercing my shirt. But I gained the cabin unhurt. On the pegs beside the door lay my father's rifle and his old Queen Anne musket of the Revolution, which I had that morning charged half to the muzzle with swanshot in preparation for a bear which had been stealing our porkers.