I thought of Stevie Watts, of Polly, of the DeLancys, Crugers, and other King's people who had made me welcome, doubtless for the sake of my Lord Stormont. And how I finally came to know Sir William Johnson, and his great kindness to me. All these things I thought of in the golden afternoon, seated by Hans Creek, my eyes on duty, my thoughts a-gypsying far afield, where I saw, in my mind's eye, my log house in Fonda's Bush, my new-cleared land, my neighbors' houses, the dark walls of the forest. Yet, drifting between each separate memory, glided ever a slender shape with yellow hair, and young, unfathomed eyes as dark as the velvet on the wings of that earliest of all our butterflies, which we call the Beauty of Camberwell. Think of whom I might, or of what scenes, always this slim phantom drifted in between the sequences of thought, and vaguely I seemed to see her yellow hair, and that glimmer which sometimes came into her eyes, and which was the lovely dawning of her smile. War seemed very far away, death but a fireside story half forgotten. For my thoughts were growing faintly fragrant with the scent of apple blossoms--white and pink bloom--sweet as her breath when she had whispered to me. A strange young thing to haunt me with her fragrance--this girl Penelope--her smooth hands and snowy skin--and her little naked feet, like whitest silver there in the dew at Bowman's---- Suddenly, thought froze; from the foliage across the creek, scarce twenty feet from where I sat, and without the slightest sound, stepped an Indian in his paint. Like a shot squirrel I dropped behind my bowlder and lay flat among the shore ferns, my heart so wild that my levelled rifle shook with the shock of palsy. The roar of the waters was loud in my ears, but his calm voice came through it distinctly: "Peace, brother!" he said in the soft, Oneida dialect, and lifted his right hand high in the sunshine, the open palm turned toward me. "Don't move!" I called across the stream. "Lay your blanket on the ground and place your gun across it!" Calmly he obeyed, then straightened up and stood there empty handed, naked in his paint, except for the beaded breadth of deer-skin that fell from belt to knee. "Nick!" I called cautiously. "I am awake and I have laid him over my rifle-sight," came Nick's voice from the woods behind me. "Look sharp, John, that there be not others ambuscaded along the bank." "He could have killed me," said I, "without showing himself. By his paint I take him for an Oneida." "That's Oneida paint," replied Nick, cautiously, "but it's war paint, all the same. Shall I let him have it?" "Not yet. The Oneidas, so far, have been friendly. For God's sake, be careful what you do." "Best parley quick then," returned Nick, "for I trust no Iroquois. You know his lingo. Speak to him."