X THE GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS AND THE YORKERS
(Vermont, 1774)
I
A young fellow, raccoon skin cap on his head, with heavy homespun jacket, with breeches made of buckskin and tucked into the tops of light, supple doeskin boots, was running along the shore of a lake in the Green Mountain country on a winter afternoon in 1774. He went at a comfortable dog-trot, and every now and then he would slow up or stop and look about him with keen eyes. Some people would only have seen the lake, with thin, broken layers of ice floating out from the shore, the underbrush and woods to the other side, powdered with a light fall of snow, and heard only the crackling of frozen twigs and the occasional scrunch of loose ice against the bank. But this tall, slim boy saw and heard a great deal more. He caught the hoot of an owl way off through the forest, and listened intently to make certain that it was an owl and not a signal call of some Indian or trapper; he saw little footprints in the snow that told him a marten had gone hunting small game through the brush, and he spied the thatched roof of a beaver's house in a little scallop of the lake. Then he ran on up the shore of the lake, all his senses alert, his eyes constantly looking for other trails than the one he had made himself on his south-bound journey that morning.
The sun had been set a half-hour when he came to a place where the trail led inward a short distance from the shore. A few more yards brought him to a small log cabin. Other ears heard him coming and as he stopped a boy and a man looked out from the cabin doorway. "You made good time of it, Jack," said the boy at the door. "Did you really get to Dutton's?"
"Did I get there?" chuckled the runner. "I got there a good hour before noon."
"And what did they say there?" asked the man at the door.
"That the Yorkers mean to settle this land themselves. If they can," he added, with a grin. "That's what all the men said down at Dutton's, 'if they can,' and they shook their fists when they said it." Jack Sloan shook his fist in imitation of the men. "Not if the Green Mountain Boys can help it! Not by a jugful! No, sir!" he added.