This was touching Billie’s heart in the right spot. He knew every acre of land for miles around Elmhurst and was especially interested in its historic lore. The girls did not know it then, but life was quite dull over at the Judge’s place. There were only the Judge; Mrs. Gorham, his housekeeper; Farley Riggs, his general business man; and Ben Brooks, the hired man. They were an unsympathetic household for a boy of fifteen, especially one who had been unwelcome; but he had made friends with Ben and had found him a treasure house of information.
There might be other sections of importance in the United States besides Elmhurst, Connecticut, but Ben held them in slight esteem. He had been born and brought up there and had never even wanted to go away. He was about forty when Billie first came, genial, optimistic, rather good-looking, and an insatiable reader.
Next to roaming over the country, Billie liked best to sit up in Ben’s room, looking at his books and magazines and listening to him talk on current topics and historic events. No subject was too intricate for Ben to tackle. No government ever evaded him when it came to diplomatic tricks or ways. He was on to them all, he told Billie.
It had been Ben who had first told Billie about the mysterious stranger who had come to Elmhurst back in the pioneer days. The colonists had suffered much from Indian raids until there came into their midst a man whom they called the Cavalier. With his Negro servant, he had lived among them and taught them defense against their savage enemies, taught them the best way to win over the soil and reclaim the wilderness. Yet when he died they knew no more of him than on the first day when he rode into their village. His grave lay over on the south side of Mount Ponchas where he had wished it to be, near a rock where he had often held council with the Indians.
“Be sure to see it when you get there,” Billie advised. “I wish I was going along with you.”
“Come over to our place, won’t you, Billie?” Doris asked in her most neighborly way. “I’d like to ask you about some arrowheads we found. Will you?”
Billie nodded his head nonchalantly. It was like giving a bird an invitation to call on you, or handing your card to a rabbit. But he watched them as they went up the hill road from the river, and when Doris turned and waved, he waved back. At least he was interested in his trespassers, even though he could not quite forgive them for having discovered his pet hiding place.
18. Kit and Buzzy Devise
a Scheme
It was noon before they reached Ponchas, although they might have gone ever so much faster if every new flower by the way had not coaxed them to linger. They camped at the base to eat their lunch and then Kit and Ingeborg went hunting the Cavalier’s grave. It was Hedda who found it when she brought water from the spring house that had been built over a live spring gushing out at the base of the rock. Near by was a heap of gray moss-covered rock piled into a cairn, with a rugged rock cross at the head. On it were cut out the words:
He succored us
The Cavalier
1679