IT WAS three months later and winter had given I place to spring when Lachlan McDonald returned to Charles Town from the little settlement of Willtown, some thirty miles distant, where for a time he had been idling.
A message had reached him there; and now he had come back to Charles Town, which had been his home for seven years, to bid certain friends good-bye before setting out on a long journey.
The thought of those farewells displeased him. His old life was ending, a new life was about to begin. Eager and yet depressed, he postponed the business; and on the second day after his arrival, having nothing better to do, he rode out alone along the main road leading northward, and was an hour's ride beyond the northern boundary when sounds ahead of him roused him from his reverie.
A pack train was coming—a trader's caravan from the inner country, from some remote trading post in the vast wilderness that stretched to the Blue Mountains and beyond. At the bend of the road the head of the column was in sight, two bearded buckskin-clad hunters riding in front, their long rifles held aloft like lances. Other riders followed, eagle feathers toss-
