A few moments later the farmer, equipped for chase and battle, dashed away at headlong pace to alarm the neighborhood.  The news sped from house to house and hamlet to hamlet like fire in prairie grass.  The sun had scarcely risen before a dozen bronzed and stern-browed men were riding into John Reynolds’s farm-yard under the lead of young Hal June—­the best shot that the wars had left in the region.  The surgeon had already arrived, and before he ceased from his labors he had dressed thirty wounds.

The story told by Phebe had been as brief as it was terrible—­for she was eager to return to her father and sick mother.  She had not dreamed of herself as the heroine of the affair, and had not given any such impression, although more than one had remarked that she was “a plucky little chick to give the alarm before it was light.”  But when the proud mother faintly and tearfully related the particulars of the tragedy, and told how Phebe had saved her father’s life and probably her mother’s—­for, “I was too sick to climb out of a window,” she said; when she told how the child after a merciless whipping had again cut her father down from the trammel-hook, had extinguished the fire, and had been nursing her father back to life, while all the time in almost agony herself from the cruel blows that had been rained upon her—­Phebe was dazed and bewildered at the storm of applause that greeted her.  And when the surgeon, in order to intensify the general desire for vengeance, showed the great welts and scars on her arms and neck, gray-bearded fathers who had known her from infancy took her into their arms and blessed and kissed her.  For once in his life young Hal June wished he was a gray-beard, but his course was much more to the mind of Phebe than any number of caresses would have been.  Springing on his great black horse, and with his dark eyes burning with a fire that only blood could quench, he shouted: 

“Come, neighbors, it’s time for deeds.  That brave little woman ought to make a man of every mother’s son of us;” and he dashed away so furiously that Phebe thought with a strange little tremor at her heart that he might in his speed face the robbers all alone.  The stout yeomen clattered after him; the sound of their pursuit soon died away; and Phebe returned to woman’s work of nursing, watching, and praying.

The bandits of the hills, not expecting such prompt retaliation, were overtaken, and then followed a headlong race over the rough mountain roads—­guilty wretches flying for life, and stern men almost reckless in the burning desire to avenge a terrible wrong.  Although the horses of the marauders were tired, their riders were so well acquainted with the fastnesses of the wilderness that they led the pursuers through exceedingly difficult and dangerous paths.  At last, June ever in the van, caught sight of a man’s form, and almost instantly his rifle awoke a hundred echoes among the hills.  When they reached the place, stains of blood marked the ground, proving