She
was quite the home-bird of the family, and liked nothing better
than taking her work and sitting by the hour, quietly talking to
her mother.
The time was now again approaching when the Indian forays were to
be expected. It was still a month earlier than the attack of the
year before, and Mr. Hardy, with the increased number of his men,
had not the least fear of any successful assault upon Mount
Pleasant; but he resolved, when the time came, to take every
possible precaution against attacks upon the animals. He ordered
that the iron gates of the enclosures should be padlocked at night,
and that some of the native dogs should be chained there as
sentinels. He looked forward with some little anxiety to the Indian
moon, as it is called, because, when he had ridden out with Lopez
and two of their Canterbury friends to the scene of the encounter a
few days after it had taken place, they found that the Indians had
fled so precipitately upon the loss of their horses that they had
not even buried the bodies of their friends, and that, short as the
time had been, the foxes had left nothing but a few bones remaining
of these. From the moccasins, however, and from other relics of the
Indians strewn about, Lopez had pronounced at once that two tribes
had been engaged in the fray: the one, inhabitants of the pampas--a
people which, although ready to murder any solitary whites, seldom
attack a prepared foe; and the other, of Indians from the west, of
a far more warlike and courageous character.
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