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