Returning home when his period of enlistment was up, he stopped at the large house of a prosperous English settler possessing part of a fine island in the Susquehanna, fell in love with one of the settler's daughters, prolonged his visit two weeks, proposed marriage to the daughter, was accepted, spoke to her father, was by him violently rejected and subsequently ejected, ran away with the girl, or rather paddled away, for the means of locomotion in this elopement was an Indian canoe, and was married in the settlement of Paxton, near John Harris's ferry, by the Reverend John Elder. As the young wife, who was kind of heart and wise of head, desired to be near the roof whence she had fled, that a reconciliation might be the more easily attempted, Wetheral traded off his field and cabin at Carlisle, returned northward across the Kitocktinning mountains to the neighborhood of his wife's former home, built a log house of two rooms and a loft, near the left bank of the Juniata, a few miles above that river's junction with the Susquehanna, and there, in the month of April, 1758, he became the father of Richard Wetheral, the hero of this book. The child's arrival was aided by his maternal grandmother, who had already melted towards the young couple, although her husband still held out against them. The surgeon whom Mr. Wetheral had summoned from Fort Hunter, which the settlers were garrisoning because of signs of an Indian outbreak, arrived too late to do more than pronounce the boy a healthy specimen and predict the speedy recovery of the mother, who was indeed of sturdy stock. The household whose different members the observant infant soon began to discriminate consisted of the father, whose dauntless and hearty character has already been slightly indicated; the mother, who was comely and strong in nature as in face and form; a younger sister of the mother's, and a raw but ready youth hired by the father to aid in working the little rude farm and in protecting the family from any of the now rampant Indians who might threaten it. For Mr. Wetheral's house was so near Fort Hunter that he chose to stay and occupy it rather than to take refuge within the stockade of the fort, which latter course was followed by many settlers of the near-by valleys when the Indian alarm came in the month of our hero's birth.