The Wolf Queen: The Giant Hermit of the Scioto

The sun was sinking, a great fiery ball, in the leaden west, at the close of an autumn day, in the year 1804, when a solitary canoe descended the Scioto, then vastly swollen by recent rains. The single occupant of the tiny bark was a youth of two and twenty summers, clad in buck-skin. His beardless face gave him an extremely womanish expression. Its smooth surface was yet untanned by the rays of the sun, which fairness of skin proclaimed him a novice in backwoods life. He plied the oars deftly and noiselessly, and kept in the middle of the stream. Ever and anon he glanced upward at the ragged cliffs that hung over the murky and turbulent waters like the hand of doom. But, at last, he passed beyond the precipitous banks, and gained the mouth of the Scioto's nosiest tributary. Here he rested upon his oars a moment, as if to decide a mental debate, then ran his canoe up the new stream, toward the left bank of which he presently steered. "So far without accident," he murmured in an audible tone, not before glancing furtively around. "Simon Kenton may be a great hunter; but he is a sorry prophet. What! did he think I would wait until he returned from the hazardous expedition he is about to undertake, and leave Eudora the while in Jim Girty's hands? And when, in the ebullition of anger, as I will admitI called him a lunatic, and told him that I would rescue the girl without the aid of his potent arm, he said, with a sneer I shall never forget: 'Go, rash boy, and meet the reward for spurning the counsels of your elders. Go to the death prepared for you by the Wolf-Queen.'" "The Wolf-Queen!" the young man continued, after a sneer for the prophecy of the king of backwoodsmen. "If such a creature exists, I want to meet her; and I have no reason for doubting her existence, for Simon Kenton says he once trembled in her presence. And Simon Kenton never lies. I will pit my strength against the Amazon, and her wolfish guard. Though rash and young in the ways of the woods, Mayne Fairfax is not a coward, else why came he from cultivated Virginia to the dark death-paths of Ohio? No; IMy God!"

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