It was a distraite maiden who greeted the visiting swain that night and
one so inattentive to his wooing that his silences became long, under
discouragement, and his temper sullen. Earlier than was his custom he
bade her good-night and took himself moodily away.
Then Dorothy Harper kindled a lamp and hastened to the attic where she
sat with her head bowed over the old diary while the house, save for
herself, slept and the moon rode down toward the west.
Often her eyes wandered away from the bone-yellow pages of the ancient
document and grew pensive in dreamy meditation. This record was opening,
for her, the door of intimately wrought history upon the past of her
family and her nation when both had been in their bravest youth.
She did not read it all nor even a substantial part of it because
between scraps of difficult perusal came long and alluring intervals of
easy revery. Had she followed its sequence more steadily many things
would have been made manifest to her which she only came to know later,
paying for the knowledge with a usury of experience and suffering.
Yet since that old diary not only set out essential matters in the lives
of her ancestors but also things integral and germane to her own life
and that of the stranger who had to-day laughed in the road, it may be
as well to take note of its contents.
The quaint phrasing of the writer may be discarded and only the
substance which concerned her narrative taken into account, for her
sheaf of yellow pages was a door upon the remote reaches of the past,
yet a past which this girl was not to find a thing ended and buried but
rather a ghost that still walked and held a continuing dominion.
In those far-off days when the Crown still governed us there had stood
in Virginia a manor house built of brick brought overseas from England.
In it Colonel John Parish lived as had his father, and in it he died in
those stirring times of a nation's painful birth. He had been old and
stubborn and his emotions were so mixed between conflicting loyalties
that the pain of his hard choice hastened his end. Tradition tells that,
on his deathbed, his emaciated hand clutched at a letter from Washington
himself, but that just at the final moment his eyes turned toward the
portrait of the King which still hung above his mantel shelf, and that
his lips shaped reverent sentiments as he died.
Later that same day his two sons met in the wainscoted room hallowed by
their father's books and filled with his lingering spirit--a library
noted in a land where books were still few enough to distinguish their
owner.
Between them, even in this hour of common bereavement, stood a coolness,
an embarrassment which must be faced when two men, bound by blood, yet
parted by an unconfessed feud, arrive at the parting of their ways.
Though he had been true to every requirement of honour and punctilio,
John the elder had never entirely recovered from the wound he had
suffered when Dorothy Calmer had chosen his younger brother Caleb
instead of himself. He had indeed never quite been able to forgive it.
"So soon as my father has been laid to rest, I purpose to repair to
Mount Vernon," came the thoughtful words of the younger brother as their
interview, which had been studiedly courteous but devoid of warmth
ended, and the elder halted, turning on the threshold to listen.
"There was, as you may recall, a message in General Washington's letter
to my father indicating that an enterprise of moment awaited my
undertaking," went on Caleb. "I should be remiss if I failed of prompt
response."
* * * * *
Kentucky! Until the fever of war with Great Britain had heated man's
blood to the exclusion of all else Virginia had rung with that name.
La Salle had ventured there in the century before, seeking a mythical
river running west to China. Boone and the Long Hunters had trod the
trails of mystery and brought back corroborative tales of wonder and
Ophir richness.
Of these things, General Washington and Captain Caleb Parish were
talking on a day when the summer afternoon held its breath in hot and
fragrant stillness over the house at Mount Vernon.
On a map the general indicated the southward running ranges of the
Alleghanies, and the hinterland of wilderness.
"Beyond that line," he said, gravely, "lies the future! Those who have
already dared the western trails and struck their roots into the soil
must not be deserted, sir. They are fiercely self-reliant and
liberty-loving, but if they be not sustained we risk their loyalty and
our back doors will be thrown open to defeat."
Parish bowed. "And I, sir," he questioned, "am to stand guard in these
forests?"
George Washington swept out his hand in a gesture of reluctant
affirmation.
"Behind the mountains our settlers face a long purgatory of peril and
privation, Captain Parish," came the sober response. "Without powder,
lead, and salt, they cannot live. The ways must be held open.
Communication must remain intact. Forts must be maintained--and the two
paths are here--and here."
His finger indicated the headwaters of the Ohio and the ink-marked spot
where the steep ridges broke at Cumberland Gap.
Parish's eyes narrowed painfully as he stood looking over the stretches
of Washington's estate. The vista typified many well-beloved things that
he was being called upon to leave behind him--ordered acres, books, the
human contacts of kindred association. It was when he thought of his
young wife and his daughter that he flinched. 'Twould go hard with them,
who had been gently nurtured.
"Do women and children go, too?" inquired Parish, brusquely.
"There are women and children there," came the swift reply. "We seek to
lay foundations of permanence and without the family we build on
quicksand."
* * * * *
Endless barriers of wilderness peaks rose sheer and forbidding about a
valley through which a narrow river flashed its thin loop of water. Down
the steep slopes from a rain-darkened sky hung ragged fringes of
cloud-streamer and fog-wraith.
Toward a settlement, somewhere westward through the forest, a drenched
and travel-sore cortege was plodding outward. A handful of lean and
briar-infested cattle stumbled in advance, yet themselves preceded by a
vanguard of scouting riflemen, and back of the beef-animals came ponies,
galled of wither and lean of rib under long-borne pack saddles.
Behind lay memories of hard and seemingly endless journeying, of alarms,
of discouragement. Ahead lay a precarious future--and the wilderness.
The two Dorothys, Captain Caleb Parish's wife and daughter, were ending
their journey on foot, for upon them lay the duties of example and
_noblesse oblige_--but the prideful tilt of their chins was maintained
with an ache of effort, and when the cortege halted that the beasts
might blow, Caleb Parish hastened back from his place at the front to
his wife and daughter.
"It's not far now," he encouraged. "To-night, at least, we shall sleep
behind walls--even though they be only those of a block-house--and under
a roof tree."
Both of them smiled at him--yet in his self-accusing heart he wondered
whether the wife whose fortitude he was so severely taxing would not
have done better to choose his brother.
While the halted outfit stood relaxed, there sounded through the immense
voicelessness of the wilderness a long-drawn, far-carrying shout, at
which the more timid women started flutteringly, but which the vanguard
recognized and answered, and a moment later there appeared on the ledge
of an overhanging cliff the lithe, straight figure of a boy.
He stood statuesquely upright, waving his coonskin cap, and between his
long deerskin leggins and breech clout the flesh of his slim legs showed
bare, almost as bronze-dark as that of an Indian.
"That is our herald of welcome," smiled Caleb Parish. "It's young Peter
Doane--the youngest man we brought with us--and one of our staunchest as
well. You remember him, don't you, child?"
The younger Dorothy at first shook her head perplexedly and sought to
recall this youthful frontiersman; then a flash of recognition broke
over her face.
"He's the boy that lived on the woods farm, isn't he? His father was
Lige Doane of the forest, wasn't he?'
"And still is." Caleb repressed his smile and spoke gravely, for he
caught the unconscious note of condescension with which the girl used
the term of class distinction. "Only here in Kentucky, child, it is as
well to forget social grades and remember that we be all 'men of the
forest.' We are all freemen and we know no other scale."
* * * * *
That fall, when the mountains were painted giants, magnificently
glorified from the brush and palette of the frost; when the first crops
had been gathered, a spirit of festivity and cheer descended on the
block-houses of Fort Parish. Then into the outlying cabins emboldened
spirits began moving in escape from the cramp of stockade life.
Against the palisades of Wautaga besieging red men had struck and been
thrown back. Cheering tidings had come of Colonel William Christian's
expedition against the Indian towns.
The Otari, or hill warriors, had set their feet into the out-trail of
flight and acknowledged the chagrin of defeat, all except Dragging
Canoe, the ablest and most implacable of their chiefs who, sullenly
refusing to smoke the pipe, had drawn far away to the south, to sulk out
his wrath and await more promising auspices.
Then Caleb Parish's log house had risen by the river bank a half mile
distant from the stockade, and more and more he came to rely on the one
soul in his little garrison whose life seemed talisman-guarded and whose
woodcraft was a sublimation of instinct and acquired lore which even the
young braves of the Otari envied.
Young Peter Doane, son of "Lige Doane of the forest," and not yet a man
in years, came and went through the wilderness as surely and fleetly as
the wild things, and more than once he returned with a scalp at his
belt--for in those days the whites learned warfare from their foes and
accepted their rules. The little community nodded approving heads and
asked no questions. It learned valuable things because of Peter's
adventurings.
But when he dropped back after a moon of absence, it was always to Caleb
Parish's hearth-stone that Peter carried his report. It was over Caleb
Parish's fire that he smoked his silent pipe, and it was upon Caleb
Parish's little daughter that he bent his silently adoring glances.
Dorothy would sit silent with lowered lashes while she dutifully sought
to banish aloofness and the condescension which still lingered in her
heart--and the months rounded into seasons.
The time of famine long known as the "hard winter" came. The salt gave
out, the powder and lead were perilously low.
The "traces" to and through the Wilderness road were snow-blocked or
slimy with intermittent thaws, and the elder Dorothy Parish fell ill.
Learned physicians might have found and reached the cause of her
malady--but there were no such physicians. Perhaps the longings that she
repressed and the loneliness that she hid under her smile were costing
her too dearly in their levies upon strength and vitality. She, who had
been always fearless, became prey to a hundred unconfessed dreads. She
feared for her husband, and with a frenzy of terror for her daughter.
She woke trembling out of atrocious nightmares. She was wasting to a
shadow, and always pretending that the life was what she would have
chosen.
It was on a bitter night after a day of blizzard and sleet. Caleb Parish
sat before his fire, and his eyes went constantly to the bed where his
wife lay half-conscious and to the seated figure of the tirelessly
watchful daughter.
Softly against the window sounded a guarded rap. The man looked quickly
up and inclined his ear. Again it came with the four successive taps to
which every pioneer had trained himself to waken, wide-eyed, out of his
most exhausted sleep.
Caleb Parish strode to the door and opened it cautiously. Out of the
night, shaking the snow from his buckskin hunting shirt, stepped Peter
Doane with his stoical face fatigue drawn as he eased down a bulky pack
from galled shoulders.
"Injins," he said, crisply. "Get your women inside the fort right
speedily!"
The young man slipped again into the darkness, and Parish, lifting the
half-conscious figure from the bed, wrapped it in a bear-skin rug and
carried it out into the sleety bluster.
That night spent itself through a tensity of waiting until dawn.
When the east grew a bit pale, Caleb Parish returned from his varied
duties and laid a hand on his wife's forehead to find it fever-hot. The
woman opened her eyes and essayed a smile, but at the same moment there
rode piercingly through the still air the long and hideous challenge of
a war-whoop.
Dorothy Parish, the elder, flinched as though under a blow and a look of
horror stamped itself on her face that remained when she had died.
* * * * *
Spring again--and a fitful period of peace--but peace with disquieting
rumours.
Word came out of the North of mighty preparations among the Six Nations
and up from the South sped the report that Dragging Canoe had laid aside
his mantle of sullen mourning and painted his face for war.
Dorothy Parish, the wife, had been buried before the cabin built by the
river bank, and Dorothy, the daughter, kept house for the father whom
these months had aged out of all resemblance to the former self in knee
breeches and powdered wig with lips that broke quickly into smiling.
And Peter, watching the bud of Dorothy's childhood swell to the slim
charms of girlhood, held his own counsel and worshipped her dumbly.
Perhaps he remembered the gulf that had separated his father's log cabin
from her uncle's manor house in the old Virginia days, but of these
things no one spoke in Kentucky.
Three years had passed, and along the wilderness road was swelling a
fuller tide of emigration, hot with the fever of the west.
Meeting it in counter-current went the opposite flow of the
faint-hearted who sought only to put behind them the memory of hardship
and suffering--but that was a light and negligible back-wash from an
onsweeping wave.
Caleb Parish smiled grimly. This spelled the beginning of success. The
battle was not over--his own work was far from ended--but substantial
victory had been won over wilderness and savage. The back doors of a
young nation had suffered assault and had held secure.
Stories drifted in nowadays of the great future of the more fertile
tablelands to the west, but Caleb Parish had been stationed here and had
not been relieved.
The pack train upon which the little community depended for needed
supplies had been long overdue, and at Caleb's side as he stood in front
of his house looking anxiously east was his daughter Dorothy, grown tall
and pliantly straight as a lifted lance.
Her dark eyes and heavy hair, the poise of her head, her gracious
sweetness and gentle courage were, to her father, all powerful reminders
of the woman whom he had loved first and last--this girl's mother. For a
moment he turned away his head.
"Some day," he said, abruptly, "if Providence permits it, I purpose to
set a fitting stone here at her head."
"Meanwhile--if we can't raise a stone," the girl's voice came soft and
vibrant, "we can do something else. We can plant a tree."
"A tree!" exclaimed the man, almost irritably. "It sometimes seems to me
that we are being strangled to death by trees! They conceal our
enemies--they choke us under their blankets of wet and shadow."
But Dorothy shook her head in resolute dissent.
"Those are just trees of the forest," she said, whimsically reverting to
the old class distinction. "This will be a manor-house tree planted and
tended by loving hands. It will throw shade over a sacred spot." Her
eyes began to glow with the growth of her conception.
"Don't you remember how dearly Mother loved the great walnut tree that
shaded the veranda at home? She would sit gazing out over the river,
then up into its branches--dreaming happy things. She used to tell me
that she found my fairy stories there among its leaves--and there was
always a smile on her lips then."
The spring was abundantly young and where the distances lengthened they
lay in violet dreams.
"Don't you remember?" repeated the girl, but Caleb Parish looked
suddenly away. His ear had caught a distant sound of tinkling pony bells
drifting down wind and he said devoutly, "Thank God, the pack train is
coming."
It was an hour later when the loaded horses came into view herded by
fagged woodsmen and piloted by Peter Doane, who strode silently,
tirelessly, at their head. But with Peter walked another young man of
different stamp--a young man who had never been here before.
Like his fellows he wore the backwoodsman's garb, but unlike them his
tan was of newer wind-burning. Unlike them, too, he bowed with a
ceremony foreign to the wilderness and swept his coonskin cap clear of
his head.
"This man," announced Peter, brusquely, "gives the name of Kenneth
Thornton and hears a message for Captain Parish!"
The young stranger smiled, and his engaging face was quickened with the
flash of white teeth. A dark lock of hair fell over his forehead and his
firm chin was deeply cleft.
"I have the honour of bearing a letter from your brother, Sir," he said,
"and one from General Washington himself."
Peter Doane looked on, and when he saw Dorothy's eyes encounter those of
the stranger and her lashes droop and her cheeks flush pink, he turned
on his heel and with the stiffness of an affronted Indian strode
silently away.
"This letter from General Washington," said Caleb Parish, looking up
from his reading, "informs me that you have already served creditably
with our troops in the east and that you are now desirous to cast your
lot with us here. I welcome you, Sir."
Kenneth Thornton was swift to learn and when he went abroad with hunting
parties or to swing the axe in the clearings, his stern and exacting
task-masters found no fault with his strength or spirit.
Their ardent and humourless democracy detected in him no taint of the
patronizing or supercilious, and if he was new to the backwoods, he paid
his arrears of knowledge with the ready coin of eagerness.
So Kenneth Thornton was speedily accepted into full brotherhood and
became a favourite. The cheery peal of his laugh and his even cordiality
opened an easy road to popularity and confidence.
Thornton had been schooled in England until the war clouds lowered, and
as he talked of his boyish days there, and of the sights and festivities
of London town, he found in Caleb Parish and his daughter receptive
listeners, but in young Doane a stiff-necked monument of wordless
resentment.
One summer night when the skies had spilt day-long torrents of rain and
the sun had set red with the woods still sobbing and chill, a great fire
roared on Caleb Parish's hearth. Before it sat the householder with his
daughter and Kenneth Thornton; as usual, too, silent and morose yet
stubbornly present, was Peter Doane.
Oddly enough they were talking of the minuet, and Kenneth rose to
illustrate a step and bow that he had seen used in England.
Suddenly the girl came to her feet and faced him with a curtsey.
Kenneth Thornton bent low from the waist, and, with a stately gesture,
carried her fingers to his lips.
"Now, my lord," she commanded, "show the newest steps that they dance at
court."
"Your humble servant, Mistress Dorothy," he replied, gravely.
Then they both laughed, and Caleb Parish was divided between smile and
tears--but Peter Doane glowered and sat rigid, thinking of freshly
reared barriers that democracy should have levelled.