Page 159 (1/1)

He bustled out to fetch us a dish of pink clingstone peaches, grown in the gardens planted by the great Sir William Truly, Sir John had lost host drawn back to fareat father had made to bloom like a rose in the wilderness He was out there now, in the sunshine andhaze, somewhere, beyond the blue auturaced, disinherited, shelterless, sullenly brooding, and plotting ades

Colonel Willett rose and we all stood up, but he signaled those who had not finished eating to resu a familiar hand on my arm led me to the sunny bench outside the door where, at his nod, I seated myself beside him He drew a map from his breast-pocket and studied in silence; I waited his pleasure

The veteran seerown no older since I had last seen hied little as I re his toddy athis shrewd, kindly, whimsical smile while I teased him to tell me of the French war, and how he had captured Frontenac

I was but seventeen years old when he headed that revolt in New York City, and, single-handed, halted the British troops on Broad Street and took away their baggage I was nineteen when he led the sortie from Stanwix I had already takenwith his Excellency in the Jerseys and with Sullivan in the west

Of all the officers who served on the frontier, Marinus Willett was the only man who had ever held the ene from his annihilation of Indian civilization, was followed by a cloud of ades that settled in his tracks, enveloping the very frontier which, by his fan, he had properly expected to leave unharassed

And now Marinus Willett was in coer resources, indeed, yet his personal presence on the Tryon frontier restored so to the devastated region, sowing, growing, garnering, and grinding the grain that the half-starved araunt rank and file West Point, Albany, Saratoga called for bread; and thetheir dead in every furroung their scythes under the Iroquois bullets, cut their blood-wet hay in the face of ambush after ambush, stacked their scorched corn and defended it froade and Iroquois decimated them; their houses kindled into flame; their wo over fences like dead game; twelve thousand farathered at the blockhouses, naked, bewildered, penniless There reht hundred ht hundred desperate rist-mill for their rifles at the dread call to ar fro out between Stanwix Fort and Schenectady; these, except for a few forts, formed the outer line of the United States' bulwarks in the north; and this line Willett was here to hold with the scattered handful of farers