“Abbie . . . Abbie . . . where are you?” Quite suddenly, the gorgeous trappings fell away. She was back in the everyday world, hearing loud voices calling her.

“Abbie!. . .” The voices were raised high in fright. She scrambled out backward from under the bed.

“Abbie . . . Abbie . . .” Dennis and Mary were running toward her, their faces white with fear. “The Indians are coming. A man here on horseback says the Indians are coming down the river.”

Abbie scrambled back under the bed and brought out the hairy chest in her arms. Not to any wild and heathenish Indian was Abbie Mackenzie intending to relinquish the only tangible tie that bound her to the lovely lady.

CHAPTER III

In the midst of the hurry and confusion and fright, Abbie gathered that they were all to get back into the wagons and “go down to Grandpa Deal’s,” wherever that was.

Everything that could be handled easily was thrown into the wagons. Janet rolled a fresh batch of bread and raised doughnuts into a homespun tablecloth. Tom tied old Whitey to the back of his wagon and put her new calf in the end of the box so she could see her offspring and not bellow for it. Abbie clutched the hairy chest in protecting arms. The cavalcade started lumberingly down the river road. Through the dark timber they drove, over spongy moist leaves, past thickets of sumac and hazel-brush, their hearts pounding in alarm, their bodies tense with fear, every tree the potential hiding place of an Indian.

Out of the cool river road and onto the hot, flat prairie they came as suddenly as one opens a door upon a bright, heated room. For two miles they drove over the faintly marked prairie trail, coming then to another wooded section and to the largest house in the community,—a big log structure which looked palatial to Abbie’s eyes after Tom Graves’ one-roomed cabin and the sheep shed.

Other horse and ox teams were hitched to the straw-roofed log stable. Other families were scurrying into the house with smoked hams and batches of bread and valued possessions in their arms. Not far from the back door of the big log house, Abbie, still grasping the hairy chest, stopped to watch a boy of twelve or thirteen caressing the sleek, quivering head of a young deer, tied to a tree by a strap around its neck.

A small, severe-looking woman in a black calico dress, with a black netting cap tied under her sharply pointed chin, was scolding nervously. “No, Willie, you can’t. I won’t have it. It’s bad enough to have the whole kit ’n’ bilin’ in the country comin’ ’n’ trackin’ up,—all the rag-shag ’n’ bob-tails bringin’ their stuff.”

“But, Mother,” the boy plead, “I’ll keep her by herself. I’ll get her up the loft stairs.”

“No,—you sha’n’t, Willie Deal.”

And then a big, powerful man came out,—a man with only one arm, his left sleeve pinned to the side of his coat. He had a shock of wiry black hair, and an equally wiry beard which gave him an unkempt look. But his eyes were blue and twinkling and kind,—they held the calmness of blue ice, but not its coldness.