"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."
The next time Dick went far from home was when the hired man, John
Campbell, took him past his grandfather's island, and thence on down the
Susquehanna and into Sherman's Valley, whither Campbell was bent on a
courting expedition. During his visit at the house of Campbell's
friends, Dick attended the burning out of a snake-nest, an occasion that
was participated in by settlers from all the country round. The nest was
in a pile of rocks in some woods that a farmer intended to transform
into a field for cultivation. Here rattlesnakes and copperheads throve
and multiplied. Men with axes and sickles cleared a circle around the
rock-pile, at some distance from it, and then set fire to the wood
within. When the flame reached the snakes, for which there was no
escape, their writhing was a novel sight. Dick, who at first enjoyed the
spectacle as only a young boy can enjoy scenes of wholesale slaughter,
at last came to being sorry for the victims, because they had no fair
fighting chance. The loathsome odor that soon arose drove him away, so
that he lost most of the rum-drinking and other jollification that
followed the snake-burning.
Snakes, though he could pity those attacked with fire and at a
disadvantage, were Dick's abomination. Their abundance was a chief
reason why he dared not gratify his taste for roaming far from the
house. As yet, when he came on one suddenly, he would act the
woman,--that is to say, he would run in great fright, or sometimes stand
still in greater, till help came or the snake fled of its own accord. It
was several years before he had the courage, on hearing the shriek of
some snake-affrighted harvesting woman in the fields, to vie with the
men in running to her rescue. For a long time he envied the readiness
with which his father, if confronted by a snake while reaping, would
club it to death and then, sticking the point of the sickle through its
head, hold it up for the other harvesters to see.
But there was a long season when the settlers need have no fear of
rattlers and copperheads, nor of Indians, either; that was the winter.
Dick was allowed to walk abroad a little more freely then, for the very
reason that the cold was sure to bring him soon back again to the vast
fireplace. There were other reasons than those of weather, why that
fireplace was a magnet to Dick. There, in the time of little work, when
the world outside was white and wind-swept, Dick's father would sit and
read to the household, or tell of his fights and dangers on both sides
of the ocean. There, when the cider went round, was great flow of joke
and story and song. For Dick's father, though a man of strict standards
of behavior, and outwardly stanch to his adopted sect, which in his
neighborhood stood for decency and education, was a man of lively wit
and of jocular turn of mind. Dick's mother, though of a severely
Presbyterian family, and humbly religious, was of too kindly and
cheerful a nature to be soured by piety, and too rich with the health of
this pleasant earth to be constantly thinking of another world. She had
sensibility and emotion, with the common sense and strength to control
them. Her younger sister partook of the prevalent lightness of heart.
Campbell, the hired man, whose raw stolidity was tempered by a certain
taciturn jocoseness, contributed to the household mirth by the stupid
wonder with which he listened to the others, the queer comments he
sometimes made, and the snores with which he often punctuated the
general conversation when he slumbered in his seat in the fireplace.
Dick's place was opposite Campbell's, and when he sat there in the
evening he could look up and see the stars through the top of the
chimney. Rover's spot was at Dick's feet, whence in his dreams he would
echo the snores of Campbell.
The father would tell of his share in Prince Charlie's defeat at
Culloden, of his own escape and Dr. Hugh Mercer's to the Scottish port
whence they had sailed; of that fatal march of Braddock's army towards
Fort Duquesne, and the fearful death that blazed out from the seemingly
empty woods around, and the conduct of the young Virginia colonel,
Washington, and the night burial of the mistaken English general by
torchlight in the dismal forest; of the march of resolute John
Armstrong, the Scottish Covenanter, of Carlisle, to Kittanning, in 1756;
the destruction of the Indian town, the slaughter of the Indian chiefs,
and the wounding of nearly all Armstrong's officers; how Wetheral's
friend, Mercer, a captain in the expedition, wounded and separated from
his men, wandering for weeks alone in the forest, living on roots and
berries, once repulsing starvation by eating a rattlesnake, at last came
upon waters that led to the Potomac, and so reached Fort Cumberland.
Wetheral told of George Croghan, the Indian trader, who had figured in
Braddock's campaign; and of Captain Jack, called also the Black Hunter,
the Black Rifle, and the Wild Hunter of Juniata, who with his band of
hunters scourged the Indians in revenge for his wife and children slain
and his cabin burnt while he was away hunting; and of other border
heroes, whose names have not lived as long.
In Wetheral's earlier reminiscences, the name that oftenest reached
Dick's ears, and most agreeably impressed them, was that of Tom
MacAlister, a former fellow Jacobite, whom Wetheral had thought killed
at Culloden, but who had turned up, to his great surprise and joy, a
sergeant in Braddock's army in America, in 1755. Surviving Braddock's
defeat, he had retreated with the remnant of the British army, and since
then Wetheral had neither seen nor heard of him. Of all the characters
that figured in his father's stories, Dick made MacAlister his favorite.
This was not only on account of the warlike deeds he had done, or the
jests he had perpetrated, or the comical scrapes he had figured in, or
the pithy sayings that Wetheral quoted from him, or the fact that he had
served as a soldier in many lands, but also for a circumstance connected
with Dick's early acquired love of song. When Dick would express a
liking for some particular one of the many tunes his father whistled or
sang, the father would say to the mother:
"You ought to hear Tom MacAlister play that on his fiddle or pipe,
Betty!"
And when the boy, pleased with the words of some ballad of which his
father had remembered but a part, would eagerly demand the rest, the
father would usually say:
"I don't know it, Dickie, lad. If Tom MacAlister were here, he could
sing it all for you."
Thus Dick came to think of this Tom MacAlister, whom he had never seen,
and could with little reason expect ever to see, as the source, of at
least the repository, of all the songs that ever were written, and all
the tunes that ever were composed. Dick dearly loved the sound of a
fiddle, and whenever there was a wedding anywhere in the sparsely
settled neighborhood he would beg his parents to take him behind one of
them on horseback, or to let him go with John Campbell, that he might
enjoy the scraping of the fiddles, while the rustic guests danced, and
made merry with rum, hard cider, and peach brandy.
If he could only hear Tom MacAlister play the pipe or fiddle! If he
could but once see that hero in the flesh, touch the hands that had
performed so many acts of valor, behold the face that had been turned
towards so many foes, hear the voice that had uttered so much wisdom,
sung so many ballads, and could tell so many true tales of marvellous
experience! To Dick, this much-talked-of Tom, who might no longer be
among the living, was as a hero of legend, a Jack the Giant Killer, a
Mr. Greatheart, a Robinson Crusoe.
Some of the songs sung by Dick's father, and by his mother, too, who had
picked up most of her tunes from her husband, were Jacobite ballads.
One snowy day, in Dick's fifth winter, his father, mending a bridle
beside the fire, was heard by Dick to sing in a low voice:
"'There was a wind, it cam to me,
Over the south, an' over the sea,
An' it has blawn my corn and hay,
Over the hills an' far away.'"
Dick looked up from where he was sitting, by the legs of a skillet under
which some brands were burning.
"Is that the tune it means when it says about Tom that was a piper's
son, all the tune that he could play was 'Over the hills and far away?'"
he asked.
"I don't know, son. There are a great many songs of 'Over the hills and
far away.' Tom MacAlister used to sing them all."
Dick studied a moment, then asked:
"Who was Tom MacAlister's father?"
"A Highland man, and I've heard Tom say he was a great player on the
bagpipe."
"Why, then," cried Dick, "maybe he was the Tom that was a piper's son!"
"I shouldn't doubt it in the least," replied Wetheral, with a wink and a
smile at his wife.
But Dick's face, after glowing for a moment with the exultation of so
great a literary discovery, soon fell.
"No," he said; "because Tom MacAlister could play hundreds and hundreds
of other tunes, and Tom that was a piper's son could play only 'Over the
hills and far away.'"
"Ay," said the father, "but then, you see, that song might have been
about Tom MacAlister before he had learned any other tune than the one.
I think he told me once that for a very long time he couldn't play any
other."
Mrs. Wetheral smilingly shook her head in hopeless disapproval of the
jocular deceit practised by her husband on little Dick; but the boy was
too taken up with his discovery to observe her movement, and so from
that day, to him, Tom MacAlister and Tom who was a piper's son were one
and the same Tom.
But there came a time when neither singing nor fiddling was in season,
and when reminiscences of past dangers in foreign lands gave way to
fears of imminent dangers at home. This was in the spring of 1763, when
Dick was five years old, but possessed of such strength and endurance as
would be marvellous in a boy of that age nowadays. Almost as soon as the
woods and fields were green again, and the orchards white and pink with
fruit-blossoms, came news, from every side, of Indian surprises and
alarms. The Pennsylvania tribes, such as the Delawares and Shawnees,
once friendly to the English settlers, but rendered contemptuous of them
by Braddock's defeat, had not ceased ravages against them, even after
Wolfe's victory at Quebec in 1759 had made the English masters of the
continent. It seemed now, in 1763, as if the redskins had mustered their
strength for a decisive series of revengeful blows against the
colonists. In from the west and down from the north they came, unseen,
unheard, penetrating the whole frontier in small parties, striking
without warning, often where least expected, destroying by rifle-ball,
knife, tomahawk, and fire. No one knew when a painted band, armed for
slaughter, might not suddenly appear as if by magic from the apparently
solitary wilderness around. No settler's family could go to bed at night
with the assurance that they might not be aroused before dawn by smoke
and flames or by the unearthly shrieks of savages. Most of the settlers
in the valleys south of the Juniata fled across the mountains to
Carlisle. Some from the vicinity of the Wetherals took refuge in Fort
Hunter, which consisted of a rectangular stockade, with a log blockhouse
rising from the corner, and with cabins inside to serve indifferently as
barracks for the Provincial soldiers and as temporary lodgings for the
people of both sexes and every age who took refuge there.
Dick's grandfather, deciding to remain in his large and strong house on
his island in the Susquehanna, invited the Wetherals thither, actuated
in part, perhaps, by the consideration that his son-in-law would prove a
notable addition to the home garrison. Wetheral accepted, for the sake
of his family, although the reconciliation between himself and his
stiff-necked father-in-law had never been more than merely formal. The
Wetherals had no sooner joined the large family in the island mansion
than there came word, by terrified refugees, of killings and burnings on
the Juniata, quite near, as distances between neighbors then went, to
Wetheral's house. Later came similar tidings up from Sherman's Valley.
Houses of those who had fled were burnt, and, as summer advanced, a
great deal of their grain was destroyed. When harvest-time came, several
of the men who had fled returned in parties, well armed, to get in their
crops. A party, strong in numbers, would go from farm to farm, taking in
each harvest as rapidly, and bestowing it as securely, as possible.
At a certain time in July, one such party of reapers was working on the
farm of William White, who lived not far from Dick's grandfather. This
party had been reinforced by some of the men now at the latter's place,
one of whom was John Campbell. The nearness of White's house, the large
force of men there, and the fact that the Indians were thought to have
gone out of the neighborhood, had enabled Dick to get permission to go
with Campbell to this reaping, at which there was a famous fiddler from
Tuscarora, of whom the boy had often heard. On Saturday evening, after
the work was done, Dick revelled to his heart's content in the scraping
of this frontier virtuoso. The reapers made merry so late that night,
that they were quite willing to observe the ensuing Sabbath by resting
most vigorously.
All the warm sunny morning, they lay on the floor of the principal room.
Dick alone showed any disposition towards activity. While the men
slumbered, or turned heavily over on the floor, or stared drowsily at
the wooden ceiling, or stretched and yawned, Dick amused himself by
climbing up the ladder to the loft overhead.
He had reached the round next to the top one, and was about to thrust
his head up through the opening into the loft, when he heard a slight
creak from the door of the room below. He looked in time to see it swing
open, and three painted, naked, feather-crowned bodies appear in the
doorway, each one behind a rifle whose muzzle was instantly turned
towards some sleeper on the floor. Terrified into dumbness, Dick's gaze
involuntarily turned towards the window opposite the door. The oiled
paper that had served instead of glass had been swiftly and silently
cut away with a knife, and three savage heads appeared above the window
base, each shining eye directed along a different rifle-barrel towards
one of the prostrate reapers.
Dick opened his mouth to cry out, but he could emit no sound. Before he
could form a thought, the six rifles blazed forth in concert, and an
instant later the room below was filled with smoke, shouts of pain, and
furious curses. A terrible chorus of piercing war-screams from outside
the house showed that the redskins who had crept up so silently were in
large number. Dick tarried no longer, but sprang up into the loft and
ran wildly to a little window at the end of it. He supposed that he had
been seen and would be followed up the ladder.
He thrust out his head and looked down. This little window was over the
one through which three of the savages had fired into the room
down-stairs. He saw three other Indians aiming in through the lower
window, while the first three were reloading their rifles. Others were
shrieking their war-whoop and brandishing the knives and tomahawks with
which they were to complete the work begun with the rifles. Up from the
ladder hatchway, amidst the noise of heavy bodies falling and of the men
rushing to their arms and yelling and swearing, came the sound of
another volley, fired probably through the doorway. Dick drew his head
in and waited with wildly beating heart, wondering what to do, and
fearing to look back towards the hatchway lest he might see savages
rushing up after him, with gleaming knives and upraised tomahawks. But
none came. The noise from the room below indicated that knives,
tomahawks, and guns had business enough down there.
After what seemed a space of several minutes, Dick cautiously looked
again out of the window. He saw now but one savage, and that one soon
disappeared through the lower window, into the room where his fellows
were completing the slaughter of the unprepared reapers. The hideous
shrieks of triumph that came up through the hatchway told clearly enough
that victory was with the attacking party, and that the scalping-knife
was already in use.
Suddenly Dick's blood turned cold. A sound of sharp, eager grunting,
detached from the general hubbub below, arose immediately beneath the
hatchway. A red hand appeared through the opening, grasping the loft
floor against which the ladder rested.
The little window at which Dick stood was neither glazed nor papered. He
went out through it, feet first; hung for a moment by his fingers to the
ledge, then dropped to the ground below, fell on his side, scrambled to
his feet, turned his back to the house of shrieking slaughter, and ran
across the field towards the nearest woods. Though the direction in
which he went took him farther from his grandfather's, he nevertheless
did not stop or turn, on reaching the woods, but ran straight on, as
fast as the irregularities of the ground would let him, and for once
with reckless disregard of possible snakes, his only thought being to
put the greatest distance between himself and the yelling murderers
behind him.
After a long run, he stopped for lack of breath, and began to consider
his situation, as well as the rapid beating of his heart would allow him
to do. He regretted that he had not taken Rover with him to White's,--if
he had done so, he might now have at least the comfort of the dog's
society. At last he decided to make for his grandfather's, by a detour
which would take him far from the house where the savages were now
holding their carnival of blood. This detour required several hours, as
his bare feet suffered from contact with stones, thorns roots, and the
rough bark of fallen branches. Finally, on hearing a sound as of a
horse's foot crunching into stony soil, a little to the left and ahead,
he stopped and stood still. The sound continued. Could it be that he was
near a bridle-path and that this sound indicated some solitary
traveller? As yet he could see nothing moving through the thick forest.
While he waited, a slighter sound close at hand, that of an instant's
movement among bushes, suddenly drew his glance. From a mass of laurel
near the ground, gleamed a pair of eyes directly at him, on a level with
his own. He started back, thinking they might belong to a wildcat or
some other crouching animal.
Instantly the owner of the eyes swiftly rose, and stood erect from the
bush,--a naked Shawnee, daubed yellow, and carrying knife and tomahawk.
Dick turned and ran, casting back one look, in which he saw the Indian
hurl the tomahawk after him. The boy fell forward on his face just in
time to feel the wind of the hatchet instead of the hatchet itself,
which cleft the air directly over his head and lodged in a tree-trunk in
front of him. The Indian, abandoning his intention of remaining in the
bush, for which he had doubtless had his own reason, now glided after
Dick, who had not half risen when he felt the Shawnee's fingers grasp
his long hair, and saw the knife describe a rapid circle in the air in
preparation for its descent upon his scalp. The boy cast one despairing
look up towards the Indian's implacable face.
The stillness of the woods was suddenly broken by a loud detonation.
Something dug into the Indian's breast, a horrible grimace distorted his
face, a fearful cry came from his throat, his knife-blow went wide, and
he leaped clear over Dick, retaining some of the boy's hair in his
clutch as he went. The next moment he lay sprawling, face downward,
some feet away. He stiffened convulsively, and never moved again.
Dick looked towards the direction whence the shot had come. In a little
opening among the trees he saw a horse standing; on its back a tall,
gaunt, brown-faced stranger, from whose rifle-muzzle a little smoke was
still curling. The newcomer was apparently about forty years old; wore
an old cocked hat, a time-worn blue coat, whose long skirts spread out
over the horse's rump, a red waistcoat, patched green breeches, and
great jack-boots that had known much service. His long brown hair was
tied in a queue, and, besides his rifle, he carried before him an
immense pistol. A long, projecting chin gave a grotesque turn to his
features, whose grimness was otherwise modified by amiable gray eyes.
"Sure, sonny," he called out to the astonished and staring Dick, "it's
the part of Providence I played towards ye that time; in return for
whilk favor, tell me now the way to one Alexander Wetheral's house, if
ye ken it."
Not sufficiently learned in dialects to note the stranger's mixture of
Scotch and Irish with the King's English, Dick eagerly proffered his
services and said that Alexander Wetheral was his father.
"What, lad! Gie's your hand, then, and it's in front of me ye shall ride
hame this day. It's a glad man your father 'ull be, when he sees ye
bringing in Tom MacAlister as a recruit, and no such raw one, neither!"
[Illustration: "THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY YEARS OLD."]
Dick almost fell off the horse, to whose shoulders the stranger had
lifted him.
Such was his first meeting with Tom that was a piper's son.
The two reached Dick's grandfather's without molestation, and the
newcomer was duly welcomed. Lack of occupation in Europe, and the desire
to be always enlarging his experiences, had brought him again to the New
World, and in search of his early friend.
He had immediate opportunity to employ his courage and prowess. A few
days after Dick's adventure, there came to his grandfather's house a
settler named Dodds, with an account of how the same Indians who had
shot the reapers at White's had thereupon gone to Robert Campbell's on
the Tuscarora Creek, found Dodds and other reapers there resting
themselves, and first made their presence known by a sudden deadly
volley of rifle-balls. In the smoke and confusion, Dodds had made,
unseen, for the chimney, which he had ascended by great muscular
exertion while the massacre was proceeding in the room below. He had
dropped from the roof and fled to Sherman's Valley, where he had given
the alarm, which he was now engaged in spreading.
Dick's father and grandfather, with all the aroused settlers who could
be summoned, speedily organized a party to make war on the savage
invaders. In the expedition this force made, MacAlister was in his
element. He was one of the detachment of twelve who overtook twenty-five
Indians at Nicholson's house and killed several, at the cost of five of
the white men. The chasing of Indians, and the fleeing from them,
continued all summer. William Anderson was killed at his own house,
depredations were committed at Collins's, Graham's house was burnt, and
in September five white men were killed in a battle at Buffalo Creek.
Finally a hundred volunteers, including Wetheral and MacAlister, went up
the Susquehanna to Muncy, encountered two companies of Indians that were
coming down the river, killed their chief, Snake, and drove the others
back from the frontier. In the fall, the Wetherals, with their guest,
went back to their own house, but not at the first waning of summer. Too
many settlers, deceived by the earliest signs of winter, had in times
past returned to their houses, thinking themselves safe from further
Indian ravage; but, with the brief later season of warm weather, the
Indians had reappeared for final strokes, and hence that fatal season
received the name of Indian summer.
Tom MacAlister, impelled by his friendship for Wetheral, and by the
charm that he found in the still wilderness, took the place formerly
occupied in the household by John Campbell, who had been killed at
White's. If not in the field, at least at the fireside and in the
dooryard, he was a vast improvement upon his heavy-witted predecessor.
With a fiddle, bought from a settler, Tom soon verified all the
assertions Wetheral had made about his musical ability.
As 1763 was the last year of general Indian outbreaks in the
neighborhood, the arts of peace thereafter had full opportunity to
thrive in the Wetheral household. From childhood to pronounced boyhood,
and then to sturdy youth, Dick Wetheral grew, to the constant
accompaniment of Tom MacAlister's fiddle. Dick became, in time, a fairly
capable tiller of the soil, an excellent horseman, a good hunter, a
comparatively lucky fisherman. He was a straight shot at a distant wild
turkey, a quick one at a running deer, and a cool one at a threatening
bear. He was a great reader, not for improvement, but for amusement and
because books gave him other worlds to contemplate. When he had read and
re-read all the volumes of his father's little stock, he took means to
learn who else owned books in the neighborhood. The owners were few and
far between, and fewer still were the books possessed by any one of
them. But what books there were, Dick hunted down, taking many a long
ride in the quest, buying a volume when he could, or trading for it, or
borrowing it.
Thus he made the acquaintance of Fielding's novels, and one or two of
Smollett's, and of Shakespeare's plays, and from all these he acquired
standards of gentlemanly conduct and manners, and ideals of feminine
beauty and charm, which standards and ideals kept him alike from close
association with the raw youths of the neighborhood, and from succumbing
to the primitive attractions of any of the farmers' daughters. Slowly
and imperceptibly, by his reading and his thoughts, he was, if not
fitting himself for a vastly different world from the one about him, at
least unfitting himself for the latter. One cause of his strong
attachment to Tom MacAlister, after he had come to regard that worthy in
a more accurate light, and no longer idealized him as the half mythical
hero of his childhood, was that Tom represented the great world of
cities and courts.
Tom was the son of a Scotch father and an Irish mother, and one of the
two had a sufficient streak of English blood to account for Tom's length
of chin. To his mixed ancestry was due his unique intermingling of
brogues and accents. It was a question which was the greater, the
severity of his visage or the drollery of his disposition. It was looked
upon as a caprice of nature that a man of so sanctimonious an aspect
should on occasion swear so hard, and that he who could drink so
enormously of liquor should retain such meagreness of body. He advocated
strict morality, though he admitted having himself been a sad lapser
from virtue. He testified frankly to having broken "all the ten
commandments and half a dozen more." He had been a great patron of the
playhouses, could perform conjuring tricks, and was able to oppose a
card-cheat with the latter's own weapons. As for religion, wherever he
was, he took that, as he took the staple drink, "of the country," a
practice which, he said, gave him in turn the benefit of all faiths, and
saved him from a deal of inconvenience where piety ran strong. He had
fought in 1743 with George II. against the French at Dettingen; "been
out" with the Young Chevalier in 1745; followed Braddock to defeat in
1755; served under Frederick of Prussia, at Prague, Rossbach, and
elsewhere; and had been under Prince Ferdinand, at Minden, in 1759. The
disbandment of his regiment at the end of the Seven Years' War had put
his services out of demand.
In winter evenings, before the flaming logs in the great chimney-place,
when Tom was not recounting adventures he had experienced, or some he
had imagined, or playing the fiddle, or taking huge gulps of hard cider
or hot "kill-devil," he was singing songs; and of these the favorite in
his list was one or other of the versions of "Over the hills and far
away." First, there was the song with which Dick had been familiar since
his infancy, and which for a long time he thought alluded to MacAlister
himself, beginning thus:
"Tom he was a piper's son,
He learnt to play when he was young,
And all the tune that he could play
Was 'Over the hills and far away,'
Over the hills and a great way off,
And the wind will blow my top-knot off."
Then there was the one which, when it was sung by Tom, Dick took to be a
bit of veritable autobiography:
"When I was young and had no sense,
I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence,
And the only tune that it would play
Was 'Over the hills and far away.'"
But what was the song itself to which these verses alluded? Tom knew and
sang several, but was cloudy as to which was the particular one. That
mattered little, however, as all went to the same tune. There was one
artfully contrived to lure recruits to the king's service, thus:
"Hark how the drums beat up again
For all true soldiers, gentlemen;
Then let us 'list and march away
Over the hills and far away."
Then there was one that Tom had heard at the play, sung by a gay captain
and a dare-devil recruiting sergeant, and of which the latter half would
fill Dick's head with longings and visions:
"Our 'prentice Tom may now refuse
To wipe his scoundrel master's shoes,
For now he's free to sing and play,
Over the hills and far away.
"We shall lead more happy lives
By getting rid of brats and wives
That scold and brawl both night and day,
Over the hills and far away.
"Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.
"Courage, boys, it is one to ten,
But we return all gentlemen;
While conq'ring colors we display,
Over the hills and far away."
And there was a duet, which Tom had heard at the opera in London, and
which he sang, imitating the respective voices of the highwayman and the
adoring Polly.
The tune took a lasting possession of Dick, and the sweet-sounding
recurrent line exercised upon him a witchery that increased as he grew.
He chose for his bedroom the rear apartment of the loft over the
kitchen, because its window looked towards the east, and his first
glance at dawn, his latest at night, was towards the farthest hill-tops.
There were hills to the west, too, a great many more of them; mountain
ranges, from the straight ridge of the Tuscaroras, to the farthest
Alleghanies; but Dick's heart looked not in that direction, where he
knew there was but savage wilderness all the thousands of miles to the
Pacific Ocean. Towards the east, where the live world was, he longed to
wing. Strangely enough, so had circumstance directed, he never, till he
was seventeen years old, travelled as far as to the farthest mountains
in sight southward or eastward. His father had turned his back on the
Old World, thrown his interests heart and soul with those of the new
land, built up a well-provided home on the outer verge of civilization,
joined irrevocably the advance guard of the westward march of men. What
little business he had with towns could be done through the pack-horse
men and wagoners. So Dick had only his imagination on which to call for
an idea of the level country towards the sea. What was behind the hills?
How he envied the birds he saw flying towards that distant azure band
that backed the green hills nearer! Should it ever be his lot to follow
them?
At seventeen Dick was a strong, lithe youth, five feet eleven inches
tall, and destined to grow no taller; with a thoughtful, somewhat eager
face, whose sharpness of feature and alertness of expression had some
suggestion of the fox, but with no indication of that animal's vices;
brown hair that fell back to its queue from a wide and open brow; and
blue eyes both steady and keen. Such was his appearance one sunny spring
morning when he started from the house to join the men in the field,
from which the sound of his father's "whoa," and of Tom MacAlister's
chirping to the plow-horses, could be heard through the blossoming
fruit-trees in which the birds were twittering. He returned his mother's
smile through the open kitchen window, at which she stood kneading the
dough for the week's baking. As he went towards the lane which ran up in
front of the house from the so-called road, he could hear her voice
while she half unconsciously sang at her work:
"'Over the hills, and over the main,
To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain;
The king commands, and we'll obey,
Over the hills and far away.'"
He took up the tune and hummed it, and, though the cheerful solitude
around him seemed ineffably sweet, he sighed as he followed with his
eyes the course of a tiny white cloud towards the high blue eastern
horizon. It was Saturday, next to the last day of April, 1775.
As he leaped over the rail fence, from the houseyard to the lane, he saw
a horse turn into the latter from the road. He recognized the rider, a
good-looking young man, one of the few in the neighborhood with whom
Dick was intimate.
"Good morning, M'Cleland," said Dick, heartily. "Where from?"
"From Hunter's Mill, and I can stay only a moment to give you the news,
if you haven't heard it." He stopped his horse.
"What news?" queried Dick, wondering whether it might be of another
Indian war, like that of Lord Dunmore's in Western Virginia the
preceding year; or whether there had been a renewal of the old feud
between the Pennsylvanians and the Connecticut settlers up in the
Wyoming Valley; or whether the English government had repealed or
reinforced the Boston Port Bill. These were matters in which Dick and
M'Cleland had both taken interest,--especially the last one, for nowhere
had the difference between King and colonies, which quarrel had been
growing ever since the passage of the Stamp Act ten years before, been
more thoroughly discussed than in the Wetheral household, and nowhere
was the feeling for resistance to the King more ardent.
"Great news," said M'Cleland, controlling his voice with difficulty,
while his eyes sparkled with excitement. "On the nineteenth the King's
troops marched out from Boston to take some ammunition the people had
stored at Concord. At Lexington they met a company of minutemen, and
there were shots and bloodshed. The whole country around rose and killed
God knows how many of the regulars on their way back to Boston. When the
messengers left Cambridge, there was an army of Massachusetts men
besieging the King's soldiers in Boston. There's no doubt about it. At
Hunter's Mill I saw the man who met at Paxton the rider that talked in
Philadelphia with the messenger from Cambridge, who had affidavits from
Massachusetts citizens. Tell your people. I'm off up the river. Get up!"
Dick never went any farther towards the field. He called in his father
and Tom, and there was a long discussion of the situation. Wetheral said
that Pennsylvania would be organizing troops, in due time, to back up
Massachusetts, and that the only course was to wait and join such a
force. But Dick would not hear of waiting. "Now is the time men are
needed!" was his answer to every counsel. First make for the scene of
war; it would be time to join the Pennsylvania forces when these should
arrive there. The father gave in, at last, and the mother had nothing to
oppose to the inevitable but the protest of silent tears. To her, the
whole matter was as lightning from a clear sky. It was settled; the boy
should go, the father should stay. The mother had a day in which to get
Dick's things ready. As for Tom MacAlister, who was subject to no man's
will but his own, his first hearing of the news had set him preparing
for departure. As he tied his own horse to the fence rail the next day,
to wait for Dick, he bethought him how of old his motto had been always
"up and away again," and he marvelled that he had remained twelve years
contented in one place.
It was not yet Sunday noon when Dick, who it was decided should share
with Tom the use of the latter's horse on the journey to Cambridge,
according to the custom known as "riding and tying," mounted for the
first stage. He wore a cocked hat, a blue cloth coat altered from one
his father had brought from England, a linsey shirt, an old figured
waistcoat, gray breeches, worsted stockings, home-made shoes, and
buckskin leggings; carried a rifle, a blanket, and a change of shirts;
and had two gold pieces, long saved by his mother against the time of
his setting up for himself. Tom MacAlister was dressed and armed exactly
as at Dick's first meeting with him, his clothes having been temporarily
supplanted by homespun during his years of farm service.
There was a lump in Dick's throat when he put his arms around his
mother's neck, and felt against his cheek the tear she had striven to
hold back. The last embrace taken, he gave his horse the word rather
huskily, and followed Tom MacAlister, who was already striding down the
lane. Turning into the road, Dick looked back, and saw his father, his
mother, his aunt, and Rover, the last-named now feeble and far beyond
the age ordinarily attained by dogkind, standing together by the fence.
His father waved an awkward military salute, his mother forced a smile
into her face, and the old dog made two or three steps to follow, as in
the past, then stopped and looked somewhat surprised and hurt that Dick
did not call him. One swift glance from the puzzled dog to his mother's
wistful face, and Dick's home in the Pennsylvania valley passed from his
sight forever. He cleared his throat, swallowed down the lump in it, and
turned his eyes forward towards the east. Tom MacAlister's grim face
wore a look of quiet elation, and he could be heard softly whistling, as
he trudged on, the tune of "Over the hills and far away."