All the wilderness was touched with the tender young green of spring and nothing stirred but the gentle wind.

The silky blue sky smiled over a scene so often enacted in early Kentucky, that great border battle ground of the white man and the red, the one driven by the desire for new and fertile acres that he might plow and call his own, the other by an equally fierce desire to retain the same acres, not to plow nor even to call his own, but that he might roam and hunt big game over them at will.
The great red eye of the sun, poised now in the center of the heavens, looked down at the white men crouched close to the earth behind their low and primitive wall, and then it looked into the forest at the red men creeping silently from tree to tree, all the eager ferocity of the man hunt on the face of everyone.
But Paul and Henry, behind their wall, saw nothing and heard nothing but the breathing of those near them.

They fingered their rifles and through the crevices between the bags studied intently the woods in front of them, where they beheld no human being nor any trace of a foe.

Henry looked from tree to tree, but he could see no flitting shadow.

Where the patches of grass grew it moved only with the regular sweep of the breeze.