noon
Gray was glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks . Thirteen years before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken place ; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons , many widows who still dreamed of their young husbands , fallen that beautiful , fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars , or floating down the red-dyed river . All the morning he could see the expectation of this story in their faces : a pair of distant , clearest eyes would be furtively lifted to his , then quickly dropped ; or another pair more steadily directed at him through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers . At noon , then , having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess , he was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others -- bareheaded under the brilliant sky of May . He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork , where it crossed the common , as a place in which he should be freest from interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well understood . This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel ; but then it flashed broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and cornfields and patches of cane . It was a hazardous experiment with the rough jewels of those little minds .