“What!” cried the father, in sudden alarm; “Look to the horses, Tom!”

“I will,” said the youth, laughing:  “it war no sooner known that Captain Ralph war among us than it was resolved to have six Regulators in the range all night!  Thar’s some of these new colts (not to speak of our own creaturs), and especially that blooded brown beast of the captain’s, which the nigger calls Brown Briery, or some such name, would set a better man than Roaring Ralph Stackpole’s mouth watering.”

“And who,” said Roland, “is Roaring Ralph Stackpole? and what has he to do with Brown Briarens?”

“A proper fellow as ever you saw,” replied Tom, approvingly;—­“killed two Injuns once, single-handed, on Bear-Grass, and has stolen more horses from them than ar’ another man in Kentucky.  A prime creatur’! but he has his fault, poor fellow, and sometimes mistakes a Christian’s horse for an Injun’s, thar’s the truth of it!”

“And such scoundrels you make officers of?” demanded the soldier, indignantly.

“Oh,” said the elder Bruce, “thar’s no reggelar commission in the case.  But whar thar’s a knot of our poor folks out of horses, and inclined to steal a lot from the Shawnees (which is all fa’r plundering, you see, for thar’s not a horse among them, the brutes, that they did not steal from Kentucky), they send for Roaring Ralph and make him their captain; and a capital one he is, too, being all fight from top to bottom; and as for the stealing part, thar’s no one can equal him.  But, as Tom says, he sometimes does make mistakes, having stolen horses so often from the Injuns, he can scarce keep his hands off a Christian’s, and that makes us wrathy.”

By this time the speakers had reached the gate of the fort, and passed among the cabins outside, where they found a throng of the villagers, surrounding the captain of horse-thieves, and listening with great edification to, and deriving no little amusement from, his account of the last achievement of the Jibbenainosay.  Of this, as it related no more than the young Bruce had already repeated,—­namely, that, while riding that morning from the north side, he had stumbled upon the corse of an Indian, which bore all the marks of having been a late victim to the wandering demon of the woods,—­we shall say nothing; but the appearance and conduct of the narrator, one of the first, and perhaps the parent, of the race of men who have made Salt River so renowned in story, were such as to demand a less summary notice.  He was stout, bandy-legged, broad-shouldered, and bull-headed, ugly, and villanous of look; yet with an impudent, swaggering, joyous self-esteem traced in every feature and expressed in every action of body, that rather disposed the beholder to laugh than to be displeased at his appearance.  An old blanket-coat, or wrap-rascal, once white, but now of the same muddy brown hue that stained his visage—­and once also of sufficient length to defend his legs, though