Darkness fell. In each tower a watcher kept his eyes strained toward the black, silent woods. The dying man was laid on a rude bed within one cabin, and old Joel lay on the floor of it close to the door. The stranger lad refused to sleep indoors and huddled himself in a blanket on the ground in one corner of the stockade. Men, women, and children fell to a deep and weary sleep. In the centre the fire burned and there was no sound on the air but the crackle of its blazing. An hour later the boy in the corner threw aside his blanket, and when, a moment later, Lydia Noe, feverish and thirsty, rose from her bed to get a drink of water outside her door, she stopped short on the threshold. The lad, stark naked but for his breech-clout and swinging his bloody scalp over his head, was stamping around the fire—dancing the scalp-dance of the savage to a low, fierce, guttural song. The boy saw her, saw her face in the blaze, stricken white with fright and horror, saw her too paralyzed to move and he stopped, staring at her a moment with savage rage, and went on again. Old Joel’s body filled the next doorway. He called out with a harsh oath, and again the boy stopped. With another oath and a threatening gesture Joel motioned to the corner of the stockade, and with a flare of defiance in his black eyes the lad stalked slowly and proudly away. From behind him the voice of the wounded man called, and old Joel turned. There was a ghastly smile on the Virginian’s pallid face. “I saw it,” he said painfully. “That’s—that’s my son!” III From the sun-dial on the edge of the high bank, straight above the brim of the majestic yellow James, a noble path of thick grass as broad as a modern highway ran hundreds of yards between hedges of roses straight to the open door of the great manor-house with its wide verandas and mighty pillars set deep back from the river in a grove of ancient oaks. Behind the house spread a little kingdom, divided into fields of grass, wheat, tobacco, and corn, and dotted with whitewashed cabins filled with slaves. Already the house had been built a hundred years of brick brought from England in the builder’s own ships, it was said, and the second son of the reigning generation, one Colonel Dale, sat in the veranda alone. He was a royalist officer, this second son, but his elder brother had the spirit of daring and adventure that should have been his, and he had been sitting there four years before when that elder brother came home from his first pioneering trip into the wilds, to tell that his wife was dead and their only son was a captive among the Indians. Two years later still, word came that the father, too, had met death from the savages, and the little kingdom passed into Colonel Dale’s hands.