The Indian rose gravely. “Some time we see. Crow Wing come back here. Harding go with him to deer-lick. Look, look–find out, mebbe.”

“But after three years how can anything be found?” demanded Enoch, in despair.

“Will see,” returned Crow Wing, and, without further word, entered the canoe and pushed out into the river. Nor did he turn about to look at the white youth once while the canoe was in sight. But he left Enoch Harding stirred to his depths by the brief and significant conversation. The youth did not understand how Simon Halpen could have compassed his father’s death; yet Crow Wing evidently suspected something which he had not seen fit to divulge.

CHAPTER XV
THE STORM CLOUD GATHERS

Enoch scarce knew Bryce after his winter’s absence. The younger boy had felt the responsibility of his position as head of the family pro tem and although he had lost none of his cheeriness and love of action, he had gained some cautiousness. His care for little Henry and the girls was delightful and Mrs. Harding was undoubtedly proud of him. Although kept at home almost continually by his duties, Bryce had been able to trap enough beavers to buy the rifle which he had long wanted and on the first training day after the roads dried up in the spring, he went with Enoch to Bennington and was enrolled in Captain Baker’s company.

And during this year of ’74 the train bands became of more importance than ever before. While in Boston and in other cities of the colonies, meetings were held in secret and companies of minute men were drilled by stealth, here in the Grants the Whigs trained openly, and the reason for it was known, too. The course of the foolish King and his ministers was widening the breach between the mother country and the American colonies until, when the Continental Congress met on September 5th of this year, royal authority was suspended almost everywhere but in the New York Colony. Within its confines were the strongest and most influential Tories, while the Dutch, who made up a goodly share of the population, although becoming good patriots in the end and warmly supporting the struggling nation which was born of that Congress, were phlegmatic of nature and slow to rouse.

During these months so pregnant with coming trouble, the controversy between the land jobbers and the Grants waned but little. The Yorkers had received so many sharp lessons, however, that they were careful to attack no settlers who were within reach of assistance from any body of Green Mountain Boys. And as Allen, Warner, and Cochran had many “hide-outs” in the hills, where they kept munitions of war and to which they summoned their followers by means which actually seemed to savor of the Black Art to their enemies, it was difficult for the Yorkers to know where it was really safe to carry on their attacks against the peaceful grantees. Being “viewed” became a most serious matter indeed, and many a luckless surveyor or other underling of the sheriff of Albany, carried the blue-seal of the Green Mountain Boys upon his person for months after an unexpected meeting with those rangers of the forest.

But the Yorkers kept away from Benningford and the surrounding district. More farms had been taken up there by Hampshire grantees than in other parts of the disputed ground and the reign of the Green Mountain Boys was supreme. The Hardings had been very happy since the building of the new house, and, as there had been a school established in the vicinity, the girls and Harry attended for six months in the year. Kate had grown to be a tall girl and looked like her mother, while Mary and Harry were becoming of considerable use outside of, as well as in, the house.

Enoch and Bryce cleared a piece of woodland that year and late in the fall there was another stump-burning. ’Siah Bolderwood came down from his “farm” near Old Ti to join in the festivities; but several of the young people who had attended the stump-burning three years before were not present. Robbie Baker was up north with his father, and Lot Breckenridge had moved away from the vicinity of Bennington; Crow Wing did not come to try his skill at wrestling with Enoch, so the latter sat by with ’Siah as one of the judges, for he was older than the other contestants. Lot’s mother had married a man named Lewis who owned and worked a farm much nearer the Connecticut River, in the town of Westminster, and after his return from their winter’s trapping the spring before, Lot had gone across the mountains to work for his stepfather.