Erskine Dale—Pioneer

by Jr. John Fox

Colonel Dale, too, was greatly taken with the stranger, and he asked many questions of the new land beyond the mountains. There was dancing again that night, and the hunter, towering a head above them all, looked on with smiling interest. He even took part in a square dance with Miss Jane Willoughby, handling his great bulk with astonishing grace and lightness of foot. Then the elder gentlemen went into the drawing-room to their port and pipes, and the boy Erskine slipped after them and listened enthralled to the talk of the coming war.

Colonel Dale had been in Hanover ten years before, when one Patrick Henry voiced the first intimation of independence in Virginia; Henry, a country storekeeper—bankrupt; farmer—bankrupt; storekeeper again, and bankrupt again; an idler, hunter, fisher, and story-teller—even a “barkeeper,” as Mr. Jefferson once dubbed him, because Henry had once helped his father-in-law to keep tavern. That far back Colonel Dale had heard Henry denounce the clergy, stigmatize the king as a tyrant who had forfeited all claim to obedience, and had seen the orator caught up on the shoulders of the crowd and amidst shouts of applause borne around the court-house green. He had seen the same Henry ride into Richmond two years later on a lean horse: with papers in his saddle-pockets, his expression grim, his tall figure stooping, a peculiar twinkle in his small blue eyes, his brown wig without powder, his coat peach-blossom in color, his knee-breeches of leather, and his stockings of yarn. The speaker of the Burgesses was on a dais under a red canopy supported by gilded rods, and the clerk sat beneath with a mace on the table before him, but Henry cried for liberty or death, and the shouts of treason failed then and there to save Virginia for the king. The lad’s brain whirled. What did all this mean? Who was this king and what had he done? He had known but the one from whom he had run away. And this talk of taxes and Stamp Acts; and where was that strange land, New England, whose people had made tea of the salt water in Boston harbor? Until a few days before he had never known what tea was, and he didn’t like it. When he got Dave alone he would learn and learn and learn—everything. And then the young people came quietly in and sat down quietly, and Colonel Dale, divining what they wanted, got Dave started on stories of the wild wilderness that was his home—the first chapter in the Iliad of Kentucky—the land of dark forests and cane thickets that separated Catawbas, Creeks, and Cherokees on the south from Delawares, Wyandottes, and Shawnees on the north, who fought one another, and all of whom the whites must fight. How Boone came and stayed two years in the wilderness alone, and when found by his brother was lying on his back in the woods lustily singing hymns. How hunters and surveyors followed; how the first fort was built, and the first women stood on the banks of the Kentucky River. He told of the perils and hardships of the first journeys thither—fights with wild beasts and wild men, chases, hand-to-hand combats, escapes, and massacres—and only the breathing of his listeners could be heard, save the sound of his own voice. And he came finally to the story of the attack on the fort, the raising of a small hand above the cane, palm outward, and the swift dash of a slender brown body into the fort, and then, seeing the boy’s face turn scarlet, he did not tell how that same lad had slipped back into the woods even while the fight was going on, and slipped back with the bloody scalp of his enemy, but ended with the timely coming of the Virginians, led by the lad’s father, who got his death-wound at the very gate. The tense breathing of his listeners culminated now in one general deep breath.

Colonel Dale rose and turned to General Willoughby.

“And that’s where he wants to take our boys.”

“Oh, it’s much safer now,” said the hunter. “We have had no trouble for some time, and there’s no danger inside the fort.”

“I can imagine you keeping those boys inside the fort when there’s so much going on outside. Still—” Colonel Dale stopped and the two boys took heart again. The ladies rose to go to bed, and Mrs. Dale was shaking her head very doubtfully, but she smiled up at the tall hunter when she bade him good night.

“I shall not take back what I said.”

“Thank you, madam,” said Dave, and he bent his lips to her absurdly little white hand.

Colonel Dale escorted the boy and Dave to their room. Mr. Yandell must go with them to the fair at Williamsburg next morning, and Mr. Yandell would go gladly. They would spend the night there and go to the Governor’s Ball. The next day there was a county fair, and perhaps Mr. Henry would speak again. Then Mr. Yandell must come back with them to Red Oaks and pay them a visit—no, the colonel would accept no excuse whatever.

The boy plied Dave with questions about the people in the wilderness and passed to sleep. Dave lay awake a long time thinking that war was sure to come. They were Americans now, said Colonel Dale—not Virginians, just as nearly a century later the same people were to say: