“Hurrah for Kentucky!” roared Colonel Bruce, as he sprang from his horse, and seized the hand of Roland, wringing and twisting it with a fury of friendship and gratulation, which, at another moment, would have caused the soldier to grin with pain.  “H’yar we are, captain!” he cried:  “picked you out of the yambers!—­Swore to follow you and young madam to the end of creation,—­beat up for recruits, sung out ‘Blue Lick’ to the people, roused the General from the Falls,—­whole army, a thousand men; double quick step; found Tiger Nathan in the woods—­whar’s the creatur’? told of your fixin’; beat to arms, flew ahead, licked the enemy,—­and ha’n’t we extarminated ’em?”

With these hurried, half-incoherent expressions, the gallant Kentuckian explained, or endeavoured to explain, the mystery of his timely and most happy appearance; an explanation, however, of which the soldier, bewildered by the whirl of events, the tumult of his own feelings, and not less by the uproarious congratulations of his friends, of whom the captain of horse-thieves, released from his post of danger, was not the least noisy or affectionate, heard, or understood not a word.  To these causes of confusion were to be added the din and tumult of conflict, the screams of the flying Indians, and the shouts of pursuing and opposing white-men, rising from every point of the compass; for from every point they seemed rushing in upon the foe, whom they appeared to have completely environed.  Was there no other cause for the distraction of mind which left the young soldier, while thus beset by friendly hands and voices, incapable of giving them his whole attention?  His thoughts were upon his kinswoman, of whose fate he was still in ignorance.  But before he could ask the question prompted by his anxieties, it was answered by a cheery hurrah from Bruce’s youngest son, Richard, who came galloping into the square and up to the place of torture, whirling his cap into the air, in a frenzy of boyish triumph and rapture.  At his heels, and mounted upon the steed so lately bestridden by Braxley, the very animal, which, notwithstanding its uncommon swimming virtues, had left its master, Pardon Dodge, at the bottom of Salt River, was—­could Roland believe his eyes?—­the identical Pardon Dodge himself, looking a hero, he was so begrimed with blood and gunpowder, and whooping and hurrahing, as he came, with as much spirit as if he had been born on the border, and accustomed all his life to fighting Indians.  But Roland did not admire long at the unlooked-for resurrection of his old ally of the ruin.  In his arms, sustained with an air of infinite pride and exultation, was an apparition that blinded the Virginian’s eyes to every other object;—­it was Edith Forrester; who, extending her own arms, as the soldier sprang to meet her, leaped to his embrace with such wild cries of delight, such abandonment of spirit to love and happiness, as stirred up many a womanish emotion in the breast of the surrounding Kentuckians.