could not guess. Since the Cherokee War, and the obliteration of all
previous marks of white settlements in this remote region, Emsden was
unfamiliar with the more recent location of "cow-pens," as the ranches
were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of
the settlers' stations. Nothing so alters the face of a country as the
moral and physical convulsion of war. Even many of the Indian towns were
deserted and half charred,--burned by the orders of the British
commanders. One such stood in a valley through which he passed on his
homeward way; the tender vernal aspect of this green cove, held in the
solemn quiet of the encircling mountains, might typify peace itself. Yet
here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of
the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in
the absolute solitude,--the great ribs of dead chargers, together with
broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a
burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at
the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this
sequestered bosky nook.

Something of a job this transit was, for with the spring freshets the
water was high and the current strong, and he was compelled to use only
one hand for swimming, the other holding high out of the water's reach
his powder horn. For, despite any treaties of peace, this was no country
for a man to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical
wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades' curiosity
concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it,
a perpetual conundrum.

He had never, however, made so lonely a journey. Not one human being did
he meet--neither red man nor white--in all the long miles of the endless
wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding