"Boone?" Norton stopped abruptly, a puzzled wonder in his eyes. "You're not Colonel Boone, by any chance? Colonel Daniel Boone?"
"That's me. About them mocc——"
"Well, by thunder!" Norton gasped, then laughed aloud as he seized Boone's hand in a hearty clasp and looked deep into the keen blue eyes. "Why, Colonel, I spent two days looking you up in Missouri, over on the Femme Osage! Your wife said you had gone east, either to Virginia or Tennessee. I was mighty anxious to see you—in fact, that's why I threw up my army commission."
"Huh! To see me?" Boone looked at him, then jerked his head. "Well, come along to Dick's. Find the wife well, did ye? Now tell me 'bout where ye got them moccasins——"
John Norton was lost in amazement at the manner in which he had chanced on the one man in the country he most desired to meet. Daniel Boone was not greatly honoured in that day. He had been out of the public view for twenty years and was not of the self-assertive type; his fame seemed to be dying out with the older generation of frontiersmen. Driven into the South-west, he still made long, lonely forays through the South and East, hunting and trapping and seeking the solitude he loved.
At Femme Osage, Norton had missed him by a month. Then the young ex-officer had come on by flatboat to Fort Massac, and from there overland to Louisville. He said no more of his journey than this, but Boone looked at the delicate yet decisive profile, the brown eyes which could twinkle like a star or leap out hard and cold like a sword—and nodded to himself.
"Ye knew Zach down to N'Orleens, mebbe? He's in the Seventh, ain't he?"
"Yes," nodded Norton. "We were great friends, till he came North with fever. How is he? All right?"
Boone chuckled. "The cuss has got married, Norton."
"What? He has?" Norton whistled, then broke into a laugh. "Someone here?"