To-day was without a cloud. New emigrants had come across the mountains,
adding welcome strength to the colony, and extending the limits of the
village. But danger had passed them by, they had heard once or twice
more of the great war in the far-away East, but it was so distant and
vague that most of them forgot it; the Indians across the Ohio had never
come this way, and so far Henry Ware was the only toll that they had
paid to the wilderness. There was cause for happiness, as human
happiness goes.
A slim girl bearing in her hand a wooden pail came through the gate of
the palisade. She was bare-headed, but her wonderful dark-brown hair
coiled in a shining mass was touched here and there with golden gleams
where the sunshine fell upon it. Her face, browned somewhat, was yet
very white on the forehead, and the cheeks had the crimson flush of
health. She wore a dress of homemade linsey dyed red, and its close fit
suggested the curves of her supple, splendid young figure. She walked
with strong elastic step toward the spring that gushed from a hillside,
and which after a short course fell into the little river.
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