me."

She bent over and took him by the arm and lifted him to her. She got
on her pony and put him on before her and soothed his fright, as they
rode slowly through the wood to the road, where they came to a great
band of Indians, all riding ponies.

It seemed to the boy that he had never imagined there were so many
people in the whole world; there was some parley among them, and the
band set out on the road again, with the squaw in advance. They were
but a few yards from the forks of the road, and as they came to it she
said:--

"Boy--which way to town?"

He pointed the way and she turned into it, and the band followed. They
crossed the ford, climbed the steep red clay bank of the creek, and
filed up the hill into the unpainted group of cabins and shanties
cluttered around a well that men, in 1857, knew as Sycamore Ridge. The
Indians filled the dusty area between the two rows of gray houses on
either side of the street, and the town flocked from its ten front
doors before half the train had arrived. The last door of them all to
open was in a slab house, nearly half a mile from the street. A
washing fluttered on the clothes-line, and the woman who came out of
the door carried a round-bottomed hickory-bark basket, such as might
hold clothes-pins. Seeing the invasion, she hurried across the
prairie, toward the town. She was a tall thin woman, not yet thirty,
brown and tanned, with a strong masculine face, and as she came nearer
one could see that she had a square firm jaw, and great kind gray eyes
that lighted her countenance from a serene soul. Her sleeves rolled