ll pioneer girls, so skilled with the rifle that she could bring down the bird on the wing, the squirrel from the tree.
Creeping out over the crusty February snow, every family in the settlement had its kettle in the sugar orchard boiling down the maple sap. Corn-meal and sap boiled down together formed for many the daily food.
But with all the bravado of their hearts, men and women passed sleepless vigils while the sentinel stood all night long in the lonely watchtower of the middle blockhouse. At any moment might arise the cry, "The Indians! The Indians are at the gates!" and with the long roll of the drum beating alarm every gun was ready at a porthole and every white face straining through the dark.
When screaming wild geese steering their northern flight gave token of returning spring, when the partridge drummed in the wood and the turkey gobbled, when the red bird made vocal the forest and the hawthorn and dogwood flung out their perfume, then too came the Indian from his winter lair.
"Ah," sighed many a mother, "I prefer the days of gloom and tempest, for then the red man hugs his winter fire."
Always among the first in pursuit of marauding Indians, William Clark as a cadet had already crossed the Ohio with General Scott, "a youth of solid and promising parts and as brave as Cæsar," said Dr. O'Fallon.
Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea, presented a memorial to Congress insisting upon the Ohio as the Indian boundary. His son came down to Marietta.
"Ah, yes," was the whispered rumour at Marietta, "young Brant, the educated son of the famous Mohawk leader, aspires to the hand of Louisa St. Clair." But the Revolutionary General spurned his daughter's dusky suitor.
The next day after New Year's, 1791, the Indians swept down on Marietta with the fiendish threat, "Before the trees put forth their leaves again no white man's cabin shall smoke beyond the Ohio."
"Capture St. Clair alive," bade the irate Mohawk chieftain. "Shoot his horse under him bu
