CHAPTER IV
FOR nearly a month Jack Telfair, with black Cato at his heels, had been riding northward through a country recently reclaimed from the wilderness and reduced to civilization. Day after day he passed over broad well-beaten roads from village to village and from farmstead to farmstead, where clucking hens and lowing cattle had taken the place of Indian, bear, and wildcat. Between, he rode through long stretches of wilderness, where the settlements lay farther and farther apart and the ill-kept way grew more and more rugged and silver-frosted boulders glistened underfoot in the dawn.
The route lay wholly west of the Alleghenies and the travellers had to climb no such mighty barrier as that which stretched between the Atlantic and the west. But the land steadily rose, and day by day the sunset burned across increasing hills. The two passed Nashville—a thriving town growing like a weed—and came at last to the Kentucky border and the crest of the watershed between the Cumberland and the Green river. Here, cutting across the headwaters of a deep, narrow creek, ice cold and crystal clear, filled with the dusky shadows of darting trout, they stumbled into the deep-cut trail travelled for centuries by Indian warriors bound south from beyond the Ohio to wage war on tribes living along the Atlantic and the Gulf. This trail was nearly a thousand miles long; one branch started from the mouth of the Mississippi and the other from the Virginia seaboard, and the two met in southern Kentucky, crossed the Ohio, and followed the Miami toward the western end of Lake Erie. Jack had only to follow it to reach his destination.
Like all Indian pathways, the trail clung to the highest ground, following the route that was driest in rain, clearest of snow in winter and of brush and leaves in summer, and least subject to forest fires. Much of it was originally lined out by buffalo, which found the way of least resistance as instinctively as the red men, but long stretches of it had been made by the Indians alone. The buffalo trail was broad and deep and was worn five or six feet into the soil; the Indian trail was in few places more than a foot deep and was so narrow that it was impossible to see more than a rod along it. No one could traverse it without breaking the twigs and branches of the dense bushes that overhung it on either side, leaving a record that to the keen eye of the savage and of the woodsman was eloquent to the number who had passed and the time of their passage. No one who once travelled its vistaless stretches could fail to understand the ease with which ambushes and surprises could be effected.
Though the trail clung to high ground the exigencies of destination compelled it in places to go down into the valleys. It had to descend to cross the Kentucky river and to descend again into the valley of the Licking as it approached the Ohio at Cincinnati. In such places it had often been overflowed and obliterated and its route was far less definite. However, this no longer mattered, for in all such parts it had long been incorporated into the white man’s road. Much of it, however, still endured and was to endure for more than a hundred years. Beyond the Ohio it climbed once more and followed the crest of the divide between Great and Little Miami rivers to Dayton, Piqua, and Wapakoneta.
Thirty years before men had fought their way over every inch of that trail, dying by scores along it from the arrow, the tomahawk, and the bullet. But that had been thirty years before. For twenty years the trail had been safe as far as the Ohio; for ten it had been measurably safe halfway up the state, to the edge of the Indian country.
Throughout the journey Jack tried hard to be mournful. Every dawn as he opened his eyes on a world new created, vivid, baptized with the consecration of the dew, he reminded himself that life could hold no happiness for him—since Sally Habersham had given her hand to another. Every noontide as he saw the fields swelling with the growing grain, the apples shaping themselves out of the air, the vagrant butterflies seeking their painted mates above the deep, moist, clover-carpeted meadows, he told himself that for him alone all the vast processes of nature had ceased. Every evening, when the landscape smouldered in the setting sun, when the red lights burned across the tips of the waving grasses, when the burnished pines pointed aspiringly higher, when the rushing rapids on the chance streams glittered in sparkling points of multi-colored fire, he assured himself that to himself there remained only the hard, straight path of duty.
Yet, in spite of himself, the edge of his grief grew slowly but surely dull. The bourgeoning forests, the swelling mountains, the vast stretches of solitude were all so many veils stretched between him and the past. His love for Sally Habersham did not lessen, perhaps, but it became unreal, like the memory of a dear, dead dream that held no bitterness. It was hard to brood on the life of gallant and lady, of silver and damask, of polished floors and stately minuets, when his every waking minute had to be spent in meeting the intensely practical problems that beset the pioneers. It was hard to assure himself that he would live and die virgin and that his house should die with him, when, as often as not, he dropped off to sleep in the same house, if not the same room, with a dozen or more sturdy boys and girls that were being raised by one of those same pioneers and his no less vigorous wife.
Besides, Cato would not let him brood. Cato had feminine problems of his own which he insisted on submitting to his master’s judgment. When rebuffed, he preserved an injured silence till he judged that Jack’s mood had softened and then returned blandly to the charge. Very early on the trip Jack gave up in despair all attempts to check his menial’s tongue; he realized that nothing short of death would do this, and he could not afford to murder his only companion, though he often felt as if he would like to do it.
“There ain’t no use a-talkin’, Marse Jack,” Cato observed one day. “The onliest way to git along with a woman is to keep her a-guessin’. Jes’ so long as she don’ know whar you is or what you’s a-thinkin’, you’s all right. But the minute she finds out whar you is, then whar is you? Dat’s what I ax you, Marse Jack?”