Mounted on his pony, with a wallet of corn and a rifle on his back, Boone rode straight on westward thirty days without meeting a single human being. Pausing on the river bank opposite St. Louis he hallooed for an hour before any one heard him.
"Dat some person on de oder shore," presently said old René Kiercereaux, the chorister at the village church.
A canoe was sent over and brought back Boone. As if a man had dropped from the moon, French, Spanish, and Indian traders gathered. He spoke not a word of French, but Auguste Chouteau's slave Petrie could talk English.
"Son of Boone, de great hunter? Come to my house!"
"Come to my house!"
The hospitable Creoles strove with one another for the honour of entertaining the son of Daniel Boone. For twelve years he spent his summers in St. Louis and his winters in western Missouri, hunting and trapping.
"The best beaver country on earth," he wrote to his father. "You had better come out."
"Eef your father, ze great Colonel Boone, will remove to Louisiana," said Señor Zenon Trudeau, the Lieutenant-Governor, "eef he will become a citizen of Spain, de King will appreciate de act and reward him handsomely."
XXIV
ST. CLAIR
"Kentucky! Kentucky! I hear nothing else," exclaimed the Fighting Parson of the Revolution, who had thrown aside his prayer-book and gown to follow the armies of Washington. "If this western exodus continues Virginia bids fair to be depopulated." Even Jack Jouett, who had ridden to warn Jefferson of Tarleton's raid, had gone to become an honoured member of Kentucky's first legislature.