The Ward of Tecumseh

WHEN the beautiful Sally Habersham accepted Dick Ogilvie her girl associates rejoiced quite as much as she did, foreseeing the return to their orbits of sundry temporarily diverted masculine satellites. Her mother’s friends did not exactly rejoice, for Dick Ogilvie had been a great “catch” and his capture was a sad loss, but they certainly sighed with relief; for they had always felt that Sally Habersham was altogether too charming to be left at large. About the only mourners were a score or so of young men, whose hearts sank like lead when they heard the news.

The young men took the blow variedly, each according to his nature. One or two made such a vehement pretense of not caring that everybody decided that they cared a great deal; two or three laughed at themselves in the vain hope of preventing other people from laughing at them; several got very drunk, as a gentleman might do without disgrace in that year of 1812; others hurriedly set off to join the army of thirty-five thousand men that Congress had just authorized in preparation for the coming war with Great Britain; the rest stayed home and moped, unable to tear themselves away from the scene of their discomfiture.

Of them all none took the blow harder than Jaqueline Telfair, commonly known as Jack. Jack was just twenty-one, and the fact that he was a full year younger than Miss Habersham, had lain like a blight over the whole course of his wooing. In any other part of the land he might have concealed his lack of years, for he was unusually tall and broad and strong, but he could not do so at his home in Alabama, where everybody had known everything about everybody for two hundred years and more. Still, Jack hoped against hope and refused to believe the news until he received it from Miss Habersham’s own lips.

Miss Habersham, by the way, was not quite so composed as she tried to be when she told him. Jack was so big and fine and looked at her so straight and, altogether, was such a lovable boy that her heart throbbed most unaccountably and before she quite knew what she was doing she had leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. “Good-by, Jack, dear,” she said softly. Then, while Jack stood petrified, she turned and fled. She did not love Jack in the least and she did love Dick Ogilvie, but—Oh! well! Jack was a gentleman; he would understand.

Jack did understand. For a few seconds he stood quite still; then he too walked away, white faced and silent.

The next morning he went out to hunt; that is, he took a light shot-gun and tramped away into the half dozen square miles of tangled woodland that lay at the back of the Telfair barony along the Tallapoosa River. But as he left his dog and his negro body-servant, Cato, at home, he probably went to be alone rather than to kill.

Spring was just merging into summer, and the sun spots were dancing in the perfumed air across the tops of the grasses. Great butterflies were flitting over the painted buttercups and ox-eyed daisies, skimming the shiny gossamers beneath which huge spiders lay in wait. From every bush came the twitter of nestlings or the wing flash of busy bird parents. Squirrels, red and gray, flattening themselves against the bark, peered round the trunks of great trees with bright, suspicious eyes. Molly cottontails crouched beneath the growing brambles. Round about lay the beautiful woodland, range after range of cobweb-sheeted glades splashed with yellow light. Crisp oaks and naked beeches, mingled with dark green hemlocks and burnished quivering pines, towered above bushes of sumach and dogwood, twined and intertwined with swift-growing dewberry vines. From somewhere on the right came the sound of water rippling over a pebbly bed.

Abruptly Jack halted, stiffening like a pointer pup, and leaned forward, gun half raised, trying to peer through the sun-soaked bushes of the moist glade. He had heard no sound, seen nothing move, yet his skin had roughened just as that of a wildcat roughens at the approach of danger. Instinct—the instinct of one born and brought up almost within sight of the frontier—told him that something dangerous was watching him from the jungly undergrowth before him. It might be a bear or a wolf or a panther, for none of these were rare in Alabama in the year 1812. But Jack thought it was something else.