PEACE COMES TO THE CLEARING
Early winter, and the wind was crisp and cold as I rode into Howard's
Creek. Smoke rose from the cabins. I limped toward the Davis cabin, a
strange shyness holding me back. Some one inside was singing:
"Ye daughters and sons of Virginia, incline
Your ears to a story of woe;
I sing of a time when your fathers and mine
Fought for us on the Ohio.
In seventeen hundred and seventy-four,
The month of October, we know,
An army of Indians, two thousand or more,
Encamped on the Ohio."
There was a whirl of linsey petticoats behind me, and two plump arms were
about my neck; and her dear voice was sobbing:
"They didn't know! I feared you were dead beyond the Ohio!"
"But I sent you a message!" I protested, patting her bowed head. "I sent
word by Moulton that it was only an arrow-wound in the leg, and that I
must wait."
"And he never came, nor brought your word! He stopped in Tygart's Valley
and sent his brother to bring Mrs. Moulton and the children. One man said
he heard you had been hurt. I wrote to Colonel Lewis but he was not at
Richfield. So I never knew!"
We walked aside, and I petted her and listened to her dear voice and
forgot the cold wind biting into my thin blood, forgot I would always walk
with a slight limp. When we did awake, because the early dusk was filling
the clearing, the singer was finishing his seventeen-stanza song:
"As Israel did mourn and her daughters did weep,
For Saul and his host on Gilbow,
We'll mourn Colonel Field and the heroes who sleep
On the banks of the Ohio."
And I thought of Shelby Cousin and the others, who gave their lives that
we might meet thus without the war-whoop interrupting our wooing. And I
wondered if our children's children would ever realize that the deaths
died at Point Pleasant made life and happiness possible for them. I prayed
it might be so, for lonely graves are not so lonely if they are not
forgotten.
THE END