This grandfather, Abraham or Mordecai, having removed to Kentucky, “the dark and bloody ground,” settled in Mercer County. Their house was a rough log-cabin, their farm a little clearing in the midst of the forest. One morning, not long after their settlement, the father took Thomas, his youngest son, and went to build a fence a short distance from the house, while the other brothers, Mordecai and Josiah, were sent to a field not far away. They were all intent upon their work, when a shot from a party of Indians in ambush was heard. The father fell dead. Josiah ran to a stockade, or settlement, two or three miles off; Mordecai, the eldest boy, made his way to the house, and, looking out from a loop-hole, saw an Indian in the act of raising his little brother from the ground. He took deliberate aim at a silver ornament on the breast of the Indian, and brought him down. Thomas sprang towards the cabin, and was admitted by his mother, while Mordecai renewed his fire at several other Indians who rose from the covert of the fence, or thicket. It was not long before Josiah returned from the stockade with a party of settlers; but the Indians had fled, and none were found but the dead one, and another who was wounded, and had crept into the top of a fallen tree. Mordecai, it is said, hated the Indians ever after with an intensity which was unusual even in those times. As Allan Macaulay, in “Waverley,” is said to have hunted down the Children of the Mist, or as the Quaker Nathan, in Bird’s romance of “Nick of the Woods,” is described as hunting the Shawnese, so we are told this other avenger of blood pursued his foes with unrelenting, unscrupulous hatred. For days together he would follow peaceable Indians as they passed through the settlements, in order to get secret shots at them.[3]