one deed of cruelty and blood.

The howling fiends were expeditious in their work. The father and
mother were pierced by arrows, mangled with the tomahawk, and
scalped. One son, severely wounded, escaped into the forest. Another
little boy, who was deaf and dumb, was taken captive and carried by
the Indians to their distant tribe, where he remained, adopted into
the tribe, for about eighteen years. He was then discovered by some
of his relatives, and was purchased back at a considerable ransom.
The torch was applied to the cabin, and the bodies of the dead were
consumed in the crackling flames.

What became of the remainder of the children, if there were any
others present in this midnight scene of conflagration and blood, we
know not. There was no reporter to give us the details. We simply
know that in some way John Crockett, who subsequently became the
father of that David whose history we now write, was not involved in
the general massacre. It is probable that he was not then with the
family, but that he was a hired boy of all work in some farmer's
family in Pennsylvania.

As a day-laborer he grew up to manhood, and married a woman in his
own sphere of life, by the name of Mary Hawkins. He enlisted as a
common soldier in the Revolutionary War, and took part in the battle
of King's Mountain. At the close of the war he reared a humble cabin
in the frontier wilds of North Carolina. There he lived for a few
years, at but one remove, in point of civilization, from the savages
around him. It is not probable that either he or his wife could read
or write. It is not probable that they had any religious thoughts;
that their minds ever wandered into the regions of that mysterious