When I turned out, the sun had burst through, and the leaden clouds were rolling away to the eastward. My first act was to sweep the Ohio shore with an anxious glance. The swiftly changing vistas of winding river and pleasant hills that undulated beneath their cloak of budding green, told me that we had entered upon the run of the Great Bend. By good fortune, I was just in time to sight the well-remembered hills of my childhood home. Another twist of the channel brought us in view of the Little Miami. Cap in hand, I stepped to the side of the flat, and stood quiet and apart, gazing at the rough, white stone that rose clear against the sky-line on the first crest below the stream's mouth. What memories of childhood rushed in upon me! what bitterness and grief! At last the envious river swept us around a masking hill. I turned slowly about, with all my heaviness plainly written in my look. Less than three paces behind me stood the senorita, her dark eyes fixed upon me with a soft pity far different from their usual mockery. "You grieve!" she murmured. "It is the grave of my mother." Don Pedro dropped the handle of the steer-oar and turned to me with a courtesy that went far deeper than outer form. "Your mother? May the Virgin bless her!" Alisanda made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved in quick prayer: "_Ave Maria purisima_--" After a little the don ventured a word of consolation: "It is a beautiful place for a tomb,--serene and grand on its solitary hillcrest. When my own time comes, may I rest as well!" Serene!--beautiful! The words roused me from my unmanly weakness. "You do not know!" I cried. "Her grave was dug among the ashes of our home. She was murdered by the Shawnees." "You speak of the Indian savages?" murmured Alisanda. "Is it so long ago as that?" "In my boyhood--in ninety-one--the Spring before St. Clair's terrible defeat. The northern tribes raided the settlements from above Pittsburg to the lower Kentucky, with a fury before unknown. The ferocious braves crept by night through the very streets of Cincinnati and under the walls of Fort Washington. Our home, outlying yonder on the Little Miami, was one of the first struck. The memory of that morning is burned deep into my brain. My father had gone into town to barter some skins for flour, and my mother was part way down the hillside, ploughing for corn. I had gone up to the cabin to fetch a jug of cider, and was half-way back, when a score of Shawnees in their black war paint leaped from the ravine and set upon my mother.