Daniel Boone threw back his head and laughed silently.
For a hundred miles in the barrier ridge of the Alleghanies there is but a single depression, Cumberland Gap, where the Cumberland river breaks through, with just room enough for the stream and a bridle path. Through this Gap as through a door Boone passed into the beautiful Kentucky, and there, by the dark and rushing water of Dick's River, George Rogers Clark and John Floyd were encamped.
The young men leaped to their feet and strode toward the tall, gaunt woodsman, who, axe in hand, had been vigorously hewing right and left a path for the pioneers.
"They are coming,—Boone's trace must be ready. Can you help?" Boone removed his coonskin cap and wiped his perspiring face with a buckskin handkerchief. His forehead was high, fine-skinned, and white.
"That is our business,—to settle the country," answered the young surveyors, and through the timber, straight as the bird flies over rivers and hills, they helped Boone with the Wilderness Road.
It was in April of 1775. Kentucky gleamed with the dazzling dogwood as if snows had fallen on the forests. As their axes rang in the primeval stillness, another rover stepped out of the sycamore shadows. It was Simon Kenton, a fair-haired boy of nineteen, with laughing blue eyes that fascinated every beholder.
"Any more of ye?" inquired Boone, peering into the distance behind him.
"None. I am alone. I come from my corn-patch on the creek. Are you going to build?"
"Yes, when I reach a certain spring, and a bee-tree on the Kentucky River."
"Let us see," remarked Floyd. "We may meet Indians. I nominate Major Clark generalissimo of the frontier."