"He's back yonder, gathering in the hair-crop, I reckon. Never you mind
about him, Cap'n. He'll turn up when he smells the meat a-cooking,
immejitly, _if_ not sooner."

Here, as I imagine, I looked all the questions that lacked answers; for
Captain Forney took it in hand to fit them out with explications.

"'Tis Uncanoola, the Catawba," he said; "one of the friendlies. He was
out a-scouting last night and came in an hour before daybreak with the
news that Colonel Tarleton was set upon hanging a spy of ours. From that
to our little ambushment--"

"I see," said I, wanting space to turn the memory leaves. "This Catawba:
is he a man about my age?" Captain Forney laughed. "God He only knows an
Indian's age. But Uncanoola has been a man grown these fifteen years or
more. I can recall his coming to my father's house when I was but a
little cadger."

At that, I remembered, too; remembered a tall, straight young savage,
as handsome as a figure done in bronze, who used sometimes to meet me in
the lonelier forest wilds when I was out a-hunting; remembered how at
first I was afraid of him; how once I would have shot him in a fit of
boyish race antipathy and sudden fright had he not flung away his
firelock and stood before me defenseless.

Also, I recalled a little incident of the terrible scourge in '60 when
the black pox bade fair to blot out this tribe of the Catawbas; how when
my father had found this young savage lying in the forest,
plague-stricken and deserted by all his tribesmen, he had saved his life
and earned an Indian friendship.