“Huzza!  Bloody Nathan for ever!” shouted the delighted villagers.

“He has killed the man,” said Forrester; “but bear witness, all, the fellow provoked his fate.”

“Thanks to you, strannger! but not so dead as you reckon,” said Ralph, rising to his feet, and scratching his poll, with a stare of comical confusion.  “I say, strannger, here’s my shoulders,—­but whar’s my head?—­Do you reckon I had the worst of it?”

“Huzza for Nathan Slaughter!  He has whipped the ramping tiger of Salt River!” cried the young men of the Station.

“Well, I reckon he has,” said the magnanimous Captain Ralph, picking up his hat:  then walking up to Nathan, who had taken his dog into his arms, to examine into the little animal’s hurts, he cried, with much good-humoured energy,—­“Thar’s my fo’paw, in token I’ve had enough of you and want no mo’.  But I say, Nathan Slaughter,” he added, as he grasped the victor’s hand, “it’s no thing you can boast of, to be the strongest man in Kentucky, and the most sevagarous at a tussel,—­h’yar among murdering Injuns and scalping runnegades,—­and keep your fists off their top-knots.  Thar’s my idear:  for I go for the doctrine that every able-bodied man should sarve his country and his neighbours, and fight their foes; and them that does is men and gentlemen, and them that don’t is cowards and rascals, that’s my idear.  And so, fawwell.”

Then, executing another demivolte or two, but with much less spirit than he had previously displayed, he returned to Colonel Bruce, saying, “Whar’s that horse you promised me, cunnel?  I’m a licked man, and I can’t stay here no longer, no way no how.  Lend me a hoss, cunnel, and trust to my honour.”

“You shall have a beast,” said Bruce, coolly; “but as to trusting your honour, I shall do no such thing, having something much better to rely on.  Tom will show you a horse; and, remember, you are to leave him at Logan’s.  If you carry him a step further, captain, you’ll never carry another.  Judge Lynch is looking at you; and so bewar’.”

Having uttered this hint, he left the captian of horse-thieves to digest it as he might, and stepped up to Nathan, who had seated himself on a stump, where, with his skins at his side, his little dog and his rifle betwixt his legs, he sat enduring a thousand sarcastic encomiums on his strength and spirit, with as many sharp denunciations of the peaceful principles that robbed the community of the services he had shown himself so well able to render.  The doctrine, so eloquently avowed by Captain Ralph, that it was incumbent upon every able-bodied man to fight the enemies of their little state, the murderers of their wives and children, was a canon of belief imprinted on the heart of every man in the district; and Nathan’s failure to do so, however caused by his conscientious aversion to bloodshed, no more excused him from contempt and persecution in the wilderness, than it did others of his persuasion in the Eastern republics, during the