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None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne. She felt safe the moment that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather’s chair, her soft clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk. He struggled futilely once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.

“Oh, don’t let him go! Oh, don’t let him go!” she cried.

“The wolf that we were talking about? By no means! Lovely creature that he is! We’ll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants! I remember a gentleman’s estate in Northumberland–a little beyond the river”–

“Oh, grandfather, don’t let him go!” she sobbingly interrupted. “It was he who shot the wolf and stampeded the herds, and the cow-drivers will quarrel with him when they would not have angry words with another ambassador. They will kill him! They will kill him!”

“What for? Poaching?–shooting their wolf?”

“Any one else would be safe, grandfather–except poor Ralph!”

“Go yourself then. May-day!”

“I would, grandfather! I would not be afraid!” She put her soft little hand on his cheek to turn his head to look into her confident eyes.

“An able and worshipful ambassador!” he said banteringly.

“Oh, grandfather, this is no time to risk quarrels among the settlers, and bloodshed. Oh, the herders would kill him! And the Injuns all so unfriendly–they might take the chance to get on the war-path again when the settlers are busy killing each other–and oh, the cow-drivers will kill Ralph Emsden!”

All this persuasion was of necessity in a distinct loud voice; unnoticed, however, for a crisis had supervened in the play of the children by the chimney-place settle, and the sanguinary struggles and scalping in the storming of the fort were blood-curdling to behold to any one with enough imagination to discern a full-armed and fierce savage in a kernel of corn, and a stanch and patriotic Carolinian in a pebble. But when Peninnah Penelope Anne, all attuned to this high key, burst out weeping with commensurate resonance, all the vocations of the household came to a standstill, and her mother appeared, surprised and reproving, in the doorway.

“Peninnah Penelope Anne,” she said with her peculiar exact deliberation and gift of circumlocution, “it is better to go and sew your sampler than to tease your grandfather.”

“She does not tease me–I have not shed a tear! That was not the sound of my weeping!” he declared facetiously, one arm protectingly about the little sobbing figure.

“He does not like his grandchildren to climb about him like squirrels and wild cattle,” the lady continued. Then irrelevantly, “Long stitches were always avoided in our family. The work you last did in your sampler has been taken out, child, and you can sew it again and to better advantage.”

“And earn your name of Penelope,” said Richard Mivane.

But he was putting on his hat and evidently had some effort in prospect, for how could he resist,–she looked so childish and appealing as she sat before the fire, weeping those large tears, and absently preparing to sew her sampler anew.

While Richard Mivane, by virtue of his early culture, the scanty remains of his property, his fine-gentleman habits and traditions, and the anomaly of his situation, was the figure of most mark at the station, its ruling spirit was of far alien character. This was John Ronackstone, a stanch Indian fighter; a far-seeing frontier politician; a man of excellent native faculties, all sharpened by active use and frequent emergencies; skilled and experienced in devious pioneer craft; and withal infinitely stubborn, glorying in the fact of the unchangeableness of his opinions and his immutable abiding by his first statements. After one glance at his square countenance, his steady noncommittal black eyes, the upward bulldog cant of a somewhat massive nose, the firm compression of his long thin lips, one would no more expect him to depart from the conditions of a conclusion than that a signpost would enter into argument and in view of the fatigue of a traveler mitigate and recant its announcement.