[pg 184] The first of December two young men with a pack horse, delayed by a severe snow storm, were employed by the Colonel to help with the work of clearing and plowing the meadow and remained until the following April. One of them carried off as his bride the girl, who first only had eyes for John; but when he did not respond to her advances, named him the “Moon Calf,” saying: “His mind is in the moon or some other planet.”
By the first of June the Campbells had more than forty acres planted to corn and Richard about fifteen acres. Twenty acres of the meadow had been fenced for a hay field and the balance with some open woodland had been made into a pasture. The summer was a fine one for their crops, rain and sun as needed; and when the corn was shocked in the fall the station had much the appearance of an old plantation.
After a year in Yellow Creek valley, Richard Cameron sold his place and moved to the blue grass. There he bought a large boundary of land, became a successful planter, having given up the ministry. In his old age he was sent to congress from his district. He died a rich man.
[pg 185]
CHAPTER XII.—Raise Us Up, Oh Lord.
The work of tending the corn fell to John and a single servant. As it was done with a bull-tongue plow and with hoes it was no easy job; but it was well done, as its green thriftiness and fresh, healthy night odor bore witness. After it was laid by the workers passed into the meadow, and with their blades in the slow, olden way, mowed the twenty acres of grassland. Under a sultry mid-summer sun they moved forward, step and stroke in unison, sometimes humming in concert. At the end of each cross section, they rested and whetted their blades and the noise was in key with the rasping song of the harvest fly.
After the hay was stacked in four great ricks near the barn, they worked a week getting in the winter wood; and then ten days in repairing the fences, which in places a deer or straying buffalo had tossed aside with his horns and in splitting walnut and chestnut rails to extend the woodland pasture, which had to be enlarged as the flocks grew. If the cattle and sheep ran at large they strayed into the mountains and were eaten by timber wolves and bears. By the time this was done it was the first of October; the corn was ripe; the heavy ears had dropped over to protect the hardening grain from the fall rains; and the ripening blades rustled in the wind, which bore a message of coming frost. For three weeks John was busy pulling fodder and shocking and husking the corn, which work lacerated and hardened his hands.
He was working on the last row of shocks, when Michael Stoner, a one-time companion scout with Kenton, but now trader, traveling to Virginia to return in [pg 186] the spring with a pack train of goods, handed him a letter from Dorothy. Scarcely waiting for John to thank him, much less answer questions as to friends in the cane-brake country, he hastened on to join his companions, yet in sight, near the foot of the Gap.
The evening of the day they finished shucking and housing the corn, the fall rains set in. They were ready for winter; and John should have been enjoying the sleepy quietude that follows hard physical labor; but never before had his parents seen him so restless and disquieted. The poise of the sober, dreamy John was disturbed.
Dorothy’s letter had done it. He had carried it for several days and read it many times. Ashamed to let his mother see him do so again, he walked to the creek and would have climbed out upon the great boulder where they sat the night before she left but the swift, swollen stream intervened. Then he read the letter again; and stamping his foot with vexation, tore it into fragments and cast them forth upon the yellow stream.