I had no sooner ridden out of the forest shade when I saw that the place was in an uproar, men and women gathering in groups and running here and there between the cabins. Urging on the mare, I cantered across the fields, and the first person I met was James Ray.
“What's the matter?” I asked.
“Matter enough! An army of redskins has crossed the Ohio, and not a man to take command. My God,” cried Ray, pointing angrily at the swarms about the land office, “what trash we have got this last year! Kentucky can go to the devil, half the stations be wiped out, and not a thrip do they care.”
“Have you sent word to the Colonel?” I asked.
“If he was here,” said Ray, bitterly, “he'd have half of 'em swinging inside of an hour. I'll warrant he'd send 'em to the right-about.”
I rode on into the town, Potts gone out of my mind. Apart from the land-office crowds, and looking on in silent rage, stood a group of the old settlers,—tall, lean, powerful, yet impotent for lack of a leader. A contrast they were, these buckskin-clad pioneers, to the ill-assorted humanity they watched, absorbed in struggles for the very lands they had won.
“By the eternal!” said Jack Terrell, “if the yea'th was ter swaller 'em up, they'd keep on a-dickerin' in hell.”
“Something's got to be done,” Captain Harrod put in gloomily; “the red varmints 'll be on us in another day. In God's name, whar is Clark?”
“Hold!” cried Fletcher Blount, “what's that?”
The broiling about the land court, too, was suddenly hushed. Men stopped in their tracks, staring fixedly at three forms which had come out of the woods into the clearing.