Several melodious baritones took up the air and a superb bass joined in. To this happy narcotic the boy gave himself up and went to sleep again.
Doby's place in the train was with Simon Kenton's group of mounted scouts. Many of them had belonged to Col. Richard Johnson's Kentucky regiment of rangers. From Boonesboro, they had accompanied this wagon party of Quaker emigrants northward on the road to Lexington.
The Quakers were a religious sect who did not believe in slavery. They had left the Carolinas, where it was practised, and were going north across the Ohio, where it was not allowed. They were opposed to war in any form and continually preached the gospel of peace.
Through the dangerous State of Kentucky, which was ever the battle-ground between the southern Creek and Cherokee, and the northern Shawnee and Delaware Indians, the rangers traveled with the Quakers to so intimidate the Indians that no fighting would be necessary.
The other wagon-train was from Virginia. It was made up of groups who had the greatest pride in family honor, worldly estates, and ceremonial government. They expected to found in the center of this fertile Kentucky new farms, and homes, where lavish hospitality and dignified elegance should imitate the easy life of the Old Dominion.
They were bringing their household goods, their slaves, and their domestic animals with them. All were armed and ready to defend their possessions and their views with vigor.
The Quakers, in serene self-denial, stood for the moral doctrine of freedom in body and mind and spirit. They wore plain clothes and used plain speech and practised plain living.
The common cause of keeping their scalps intact had linked these different peoples together for protection on the trip, just as the prospect of making a better living had driven them both northward through Cumberland Gap.
Oh, Cumberland Gap! That "high-swung gateway of the mountains!" What boy has not in fancy joined Daniel Boone when he held in his hand the key to this wondrous portal? When that famous frontiersman opened the gates and started on its course the most tremendous tide of emigration this continent had ever seen, and when as scout he went before his countrymen, he had more adventures than ever before fell to the lot of any one pioneer as he blazed for them the trail through the Middle West.