“But things are not as they were in your waiting days, Granny,” he said gently. “The wilderness has shrunk away from us, back to beyond the Ohio water. There are cabins and farms and settlements now, all along the road to Harrodsburg; and one or two houses as fine as any in Virginia.”
“You do not pass at all through Indian country?” she questioned.
“There is no Indian country,” he answered, with pride, “not in all Kentucky! ’Tis ours at last, thanks to you and my own parents and others who paid the price.”
“Ay, paid the price for something they never got,” muttered the old woman, bitterly. “No matter, if only their children get it! But ’tis time indeed the law came into Kentucky. Many a stranger lays claim to his acres here who neither earned nor bought them.”
“And that’s why I’m reading law by firelight, me and many others. No smug liar with a warrant in his hand is going to take from me the land that is mine by right of conquest. Ours is the prior claim here, Granny Estill!”
“Ay, ours is the prior claim. Unless,” she murmured, “’twere the red men’s, maybe—do ’e think?”
“Stuff and nonsense! What put that thought into your head? The Cherokees and the Iroquois have no real rights here. They’ve used the land merely, enjoyed it—free of cost. And for long enough. They’ve not earned it as we have, bought it with their blood and their sweat, watered it with their women’s tears, enriched it with the blood of their children, such little precious bodies as this of ours—” He stopped by the cradle, gazing down, his natural orator’s voice sinking to an abrupt pause.
“Eh, have they not?” asked Granny, innocently. “It seems that the red folk may have suffered somewhat, too.”
Ezra glanced at her uncomfortably. “You’re old, and the old get queer notions. The savages have suffered no more than they deserve to suffer; as none should know better, surely, than Mistress Estill!”
The old woman’s head drooped over her knitting. “I have no love for the Indians, God knows! Daily I pray that they may all be damned. But”—her voice altered admiringly—“’tis you will make the grand lawyer, Ezra, and I’m not one to be holding up mere facts to argufy against you. I expect you’ll be making a speech before them all at the Court meeting?”