Still another disagreeable thought came to him. It was so appalling that it turned him pale. "If we came here to live, my stone knife would be everybody's knife. I would have to bring my new dog here to be everybody's dog."
He took another peep at the bear. Then he gazed at the ideal town, perfect in its beauty of flower-hung artistic houses, perfect in its thrifty business arrangement, perfect in the justice of its laws.
He thought of happy-go-lucky old Vincennes, struggling to maintain herself under all sorts of faults and difficulties, of that promised foxhound who was already waiting for him, of the house that his father and mother had planned, and he tightened his galluses, jerked on his shoes, donned his cap, like a knight buckling on his armor, as he proclaimed aloud: "I shall let the town keep the pelt, because it is the polite thing to do. But I am glad that pa chose the other town to live in. I'm going to take my knife and get back home to old Vincennes!"
And so it happened, on account of this decision of the boy's and the more practical investigations of his father, that the stone knife found itself established on the farm which the Holmans bought near the old capital of the Northwest Territory.
There the flint entered upon an age of wood.
Out of the forest on the banks of the Wabash came the farm—by clearing.
Out of the forest rose a house and barn of logs.
Out of the forest were made the tools for the farm and the furniture for the house.
From the trees about them all the pioneers who settled in the Ohio Valley took most of their necessities and many of their luxuries.