CHAPTER II.
"OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY."
The next time Dick went far from home was when the hired man, JohnCampbell, took him past his grandfather's island, and thence on down theSusquehanna and into Sherman's Valley, whither Campbell was bent on acourting expedition. During his visit at the house of Campbell'sfriends, Dick attended the burning out of a snake-nest, an occasion thatwas participated in by settlers from all the country round. The nest wasin a pile of rocks in some woods that a farmer intended to transforminto a field for cultivation. Here rattlesnakes and copperheads throveand multiplied. Men with axes and sickles cleared a circle around therock-pile, at some distance from it, and then set fire to the woodwithin. When the flame reached the snakes, for which there was noescape, their writhing was a novel sight. Dick, who at first enjoyed thespectacle as only a young boy can enjoy scenes of wholesale slaughter,at last came to being sorry for the victims, because they had no fairfighting chance. The loathsome odor that soon arose drove him away, sothat he lost most of the rum-drinking and other jollification thatfollowed the snake-burning.
Snakes, though he could pity those attacked with fire and at adisadvantage, were Dick's abomination. Their abundance was a chiefreason why he dared not gratify his taste for roaming far from thehouse. As yet, when he came on one suddenly, he would act thewoman,--that is to say, he would run in great fright, or sometimes standstill in greater, till help came or the snake fled of its own accord. Itwas several years before he had the courage, on hearing the shriek ofsome snake-affrighted harvesting woman in the fields, to vie with themen in running to her rescue. For a long time he envied the readinesswith which his father, if confronted by a snake while reaping, wouldclub it to death and then, sticking the point of the sickle through itshead, hold it up for the other harvesters to see.
But there was a long season when the settlers need have no fear ofrattlers and copperheads, nor of Indians, either; that was the winter.Dick was allowed to walk abroad a little more freely then, for the veryreason that the cold was sure to bring him soon back again to the vastfireplace. There were other reasons than those of weather, why thatfireplace was a magnet to Dick. There, in the time of little work, whenthe world outside was white and wind-swept, Dick's father would sit andread to the household, or tell of his fights and dangers on both sidesof the ocean. There, when the cider went round, was great flow of jokeand story and song. For Dick's father, though a man of strict standardsof behavior, and outwardly stanch to his adopted sect, which in hisneighborhood stood for decency and education, was a man of lively witand of jocular turn of mind. Dick's mother, though of a severelyPresbyterian family, and humbly religious, was of too kindly andcheerful a nature to be soured by piety, and too rich with the health ofthis pleasant earth to be constantly thinking of another world. She hadsensibility and emotion, with the common sense and strength to controlthem. Her younger sister partook of the prevalent lightness of heart.Campbell, the hired man, whose raw stolidity was tempered by a certaintaciturn jocoseness, contributed to the household mirth by the stupidwonder with which he listened to the others, the queer comments hesometimes made, and the snores with which he often punctuated thegeneral conversation when he slumbered in his seat in the fireplace.Dick's place was opposite Campbell's, and when he sat there in theevening he could look up and see the stars through the top of thechimney. Rover's spot was at Dick's feet, whence in his dreams he wouldecho the snores of Campbell.
The father would tell of his share in Prince Charlie's defeat atCulloden, of his own escape and Dr. Hugh Mercer's to the Scottish portwhence they had sailed; of that fatal march of Braddock's army towardsFort Duquesne, and the fearful death that blazed out from the seeminglyempty woods around, and the conduct of the young Virginia colonel,Washington, and the night burial of the mistaken English general bytorchlight in the dismal forest; of the march of resolute JohnArmstrong, the Scottish Covenanter, of Carlisle, to Kittanning, in 1756;the destruction of the Indian town, the slaughter of the Indian chiefs,and the wounding of nearly all Armstrong's officers; how Wetheral'sfriend, Mercer, a captain in the expedition, wounded and separated fromhis men, wandering for weeks alone in the forest, living on roots andberries, once repulsing starvation by eating a rattlesnake, at last cameupon waters that led to the Potomac, and so reached Fort Cumberland.Wetheral told of George Croghan, the Indian trader, who had figured inBraddock's campaign; and of Captain Jack, called also the Black Hunter,the Black Rifle, and the Wild Hunter of Juniata, who with his band ofhunters scourged the Indians in revenge for his wife and children slainand his cabin burnt while he was away hunting; and of other borderheroes, whose names have not lived as long.
In Wetheral's earlier reminiscences, the name that oftenest reachedDick's ears, and most agreeably impressed them, was that of TomMacAlister, a former fellow Jacobite, whom Wetheral had thought killedat Culloden, but who had turned up, to his great surprise and joy, asergeant in Braddock's army in America, in 1755. Surviving Braddock'sdefeat, he had retreated with the remnant of the British army, and sincethen Wetheral had neither seen nor heard of him. Of all the charactersthat figured in his father's stories, Dick made MacAlister his favorite.This was not only on account of the warlike deeds he had done, or thejests he had perpetrated, or the comical scrapes he had figured in, orthe pithy sayings that Wetheral quoted from him, or the fact that he hadserved as a soldier in many lands, but also for a circumstance connectedwith Dick's early acquired love of song. When Dick would express aliking for some particular one of the many tunes his father whistled orsang, the father would say to the mother:
"You ought to hear Tom MacAlister play that on his fiddle or pipe,Betty!"
And when the boy, pleased with the words of some ballad of which hisfather had remembered but a part, would eagerly demand the rest, thefather would usually say:
"I don't know it, Dickie, lad. If Tom MacAlister were here, he couldsing it all for you."
Thus Dick came to think of this Tom MacAlister, whom he had never seen,and could with little reason expect ever to see, as the source, of atleast the repository, of all the songs that ever were written, and allthe tunes that ever were composed. Dick dearly loved the sound of afiddle, and whenever there was a wedding anywhere in the sparselysettled neighborhood he would beg his parents to take him behind one ofthem on horseback, or to let him go with John Campbell, that he mightenjoy the scraping of the fiddles, while the rustic guests danced, andmade merry with rum, hard cider, and peach brandy.
If he could only hear Tom MacAlister play the pipe or fiddle! If hecould but once see that hero in the flesh, touch the hands that hadperformed so many acts of valor, behold the face that had been turnedtowards so many foes, hear the voice that had uttered so much wisdom,sung so many ballads, and could tell so many true tales of marvellousexperience! To Dick, this much-talked-of Tom, who might no longer beamong the living, was as a hero of legend, a Jack the Giant Killer, aMr. Greatheart, a Robinson Crusoe.
Some of the songs sung by Dick's father, and by his mother, too, who hadpicked up most of her tunes from her husband, were Jacobite ballads.One snowy day, in Dick's fifth winter, his father, mending a bridlebeside the fire, was heard by Dick to sing in a low voice:
"'There was a wind, it cam to me, Over the south, an' over the sea, An' it has blawn my corn and hay, Over the hills an' far away.'"
Dick looked up from where he was sitting, by the legs of a skillet underwhich some brands were burning.
"Is that the tune it means when it says about Tom that was a piper'sson, all the tune that he could play was 'Over the hills and far away?'"he asked.
"I don't know, son. There are a great many songs of 'Over the hills andfar away.' Tom MacAlister used to sing them all."
Dick studied a moment, then asked:
"Who was Tom MacAlister's father?"
"A Highland man, and I've heard Tom say he was a great player on thebagpipe."
"Why, then," cried Dick, "maybe he was the Tom that was a piper's son!"
"I shouldn't doubt it in the least," replied Wetheral, with a wink and asmile at his wife.
But Dick's face, after glowing for a moment with the exultation of sogreat a literary discovery, soon fell.
"No," he said; "because Tom MacAlister could play hundreds and hundredsof other tunes, and Tom that was a piper's son could play only 'Over thehills and far away.'"
"Ay," said the father, "but then, you see, that song might have beenabout Tom MacAlister before he had learned any other tune than the one.I think he told me once that for a very long time he couldn't play anyother."
Mrs. Wetheral smilingly shook her head in hopeless disapproval of thejocular deceit practised by her husband on little Dick; but the boy wastoo taken up with his discovery to observe her movement, and so fromthat day, to him, Tom MacAlister and Tom who was a piper's son were oneand the same Tom.
But there came a time when neither singing nor fiddling was in season,and when reminiscences of past dangers in foreign lands gave way tofears of imminent dangers at home. This was in the spring of 1763, whenDick was five years old, but possessed of such strength and endurance aswould be marvellous in a boy of that age nowadays. Almost as soon as thewoods and fields were green again, and the orchards white and pink withfruit-blossoms, came news, from every side, of Indian surprises andalarms. The Pennsylvania tribes, such as the Delawares and Shawnees,once friendly to the English settlers, but rendered contemptuous of themby Braddock's defeat, had not ceased ravages against them, even afterWolfe's victory at Quebec in 1759 had made the English masters of thecontinent. It seemed now, in 1763, as if the redskins had mustered theirstrength for a decisive series of revengeful blows against thecolonists. In from the west and down from the north they came, unseen,unheard, penetrating the whole frontier in small parties, strikingwithout warning, often where least expected, destroying by rifle-ball,knife, tomahawk, and fire. No one knew when a painted band, armed forslaughter, might not suddenly appear as if by magic from the apparentlysolitary wilderness around. No settler's family could go to bed at nightwith the assurance that they might not be aroused before dawn by smokeand flames or by the unearthly shrieks of savages. Most of the settlersin the valleys south of the Juniata fled across the mountains toCarlisle. Some from the vicinity of the Wetherals took refuge in FortHunter, which consisted of a rectangular stockade, with a log blockhouserising from the corner, and with cabins inside to serve indifferently asbarracks for the Provincial soldiers and as temporary lodgings for thepeople of both sexes and every age who took refuge there.
Dick's grandfather, deciding to remain in his large and strong house onhis island in the Susquehanna, invited the Wetherals thither, actuatedin part, perhaps, by the consideration that his son-in-law would prove anotable addition to the home garrison. Wetheral accepted, for the sakeof his family, although the reconciliation between himself and hisstiff-necked father-in-law had never been more than merely formal. TheWetherals had no sooner joined the large family in the island mansionthan there came word, by terrified refugees, of killings and burnings onthe Juniata, quite near, as distances between neighbors then went, toWetheral's house. Later came similar tidings up from Sherman's Valley.Houses of those who had fled were burnt, and, as summer advanced, agreat deal of their grain was destroyed. When harvest-time came, severalof the men who had fled returned in parties, well armed, to get in theircrops. A party, strong in numbers, would go from farm to farm, taking ineach harvest as rapidly, and bestowing it as securely, as possible.
At a certain time in July, one such party of reapers was working on thefarm of William White, who lived not far from Dick's grandfather. Thisparty had been reinforced by some of the men now at the latter's place,one of whom was John Campbell. The nearness of White's house, the largeforce of men there, and the fact that the Indians were thought to havegone out of the neighborhood, had enabled Dick to get permission to gowith Campbell to this reaping, at which there was a famous fiddler fromTuscarora, of whom the boy had often heard. On Saturday evening, afterthe work was done, Dick revelled to his heart's content in the scrapingof this frontier virtuoso. The reapers made merry so late that night,that they were quite willing to observe the ensuing Sabbath by restingmost vigorously.
All the warm sunny morning, they lay on the floor of the principal room.Dick alone showed any disposition towards activity. While the menslumbered, or turned heavily over on the floor, or stared drowsily atthe wooden ceiling, or stretched and yawned, Dick amused himself byclimbing up the ladder to the loft overhead.
He had reached the round next to the top one, and was about to thrusthis head up through the opening into the loft, when he heard a slightcreak from the door of the room below. He looked in time to see it swingopen, and three painted, naked, feather-crowned bodies appear in thedoorway, each one behind a rifle whose muzzle was instantly turnedtowards some sleeper on the floor. Terrified into dumbness, Dick's gazeinvoluntarily turned towards the window opposite the door. The oiledpaper that had served instead of glass had been swiftly and silentlycut away with a knife, and three savage heads appeared above the windowbase, each shining eye directed along a different rifle-barrel towardsone of the prostrate reapers.
Dick opened his mouth to cry out, but he could emit no sound. Before hecould form a thought, the six rifles blazed forth in concert, and aninstant later the room below was filled with smoke, shouts of pain, andfurious curses. A terrible chorus of piercing war-screams from outsidethe house showed that the redskins who had crept up so silently were inlarge number. Dick tarried no longer, but sprang up into the loft andran wildly to a little window at the end of it. He supposed that he hadbeen seen and would be followed up the ladder.
He thrust out his head and looked down. This little window was over theone through which three of the savages had fired into the roomdown-stairs. He saw three other Indians aiming in through the lowerwindow, while the first three were reloading their rifles. Others wereshrieking their war-whoop and brandishing the knives and tomahawks withwhich they were to complete the work begun with the rifles. Up from theladder hatchway, amidst the noise of heavy bodies falling and of the menrushing to their arms and yelling and swearing, came the sound ofanother volley, fired probably through the doorway. Dick drew his headin and waited with wildly beating heart, wondering what to do, andfearing to look back towards the hatchway lest he might see savagesrushing up after him, with gleaming knives and upraised tomahawks. Butnone came. The noise from the room below indicated that knives,tomahawks, and guns had business enough down there.
After what seemed a space of several minutes, Dick cautiously lookedagain out of the window. He saw now but one savage, and that one soondisappeared through the lower window, into the room where his fellowswere completing the slaughter of the unprepared reapers. The hideousshrieks of triumph that came up through the hatchway told clearly enoughthat victory was with the attacking party, and that the scalping-knifewas already in use.
Suddenly Dick's blood turned cold. A sound of sharp, eager grunting,detached from the general hubbub below, arose immediately beneath thehatchway. A red hand appeared through the opening, grasping the loftfloor against which the ladder rested.
The little window at which Dick stood was neither glazed nor papered. Hewent out through it, feet first; hung for a moment by his fingers to theledge, then dropped to the ground below, fell on his side, scrambled tohis feet, turned his back to the house of shrieking slaughter, and ranacross the field towards the nearest woods. Though the direction inwhich he went took him farther from his grandfather's, he neverthelessdid not stop or turn, on reaching the woods, but ran straight on, asfast as the irregularities of the ground would let him, and for oncewith reckless disregard of possible snakes, his only thought being toput the greatest distance between himself and the yelling murderersbehind him.
After a long run, he stopped for lack of breath, and began to considerhis situation, as well as the rapid beating of his heart would allow himto do. He regretted that he had not taken Rover with him to White's,--ifhe had
done so, he might now have at least the comfort of the dog'ssociety. At last he decided to make for his grandfather's, by a detourwhich would take him far from the house where the savages were nowholding their carnival of blood. This detour required several hours, ashis bare feet suffered from contact with stones, thorns roots, and therough bark of fallen branches. Finally, on hearing a sound as of ahorse's foot crunching into stony soil, a little to the left and ahead,he stopped and stood still. The sound continued. Could it be that he wasnear a bridle-path and that this sound indicated some solitarytraveller? As yet he could see nothing moving through the thick forest.While he waited, a slighter sound close at hand, that of an instant'smovement among bushes, suddenly drew his glance. From a mass of laurelnear the ground, gleamed a pair of eyes directly at him, on a level withhis own. He started back, thinking they might belong to a wildcat orsome other crouching animal.
Instantly the owner of the eyes swiftly rose, and stood erect from thebush,--a naked Shawnee, daubed yellow, and carrying knife and tomahawk.Dick turned and ran, casting back one look, in which he saw the Indianhurl the tomahawk after him. The boy fell forward on his face just intime to feel the wind of the hatchet instead of the hatchet itself,which cleft the air directly over his head and lodged in a tree-trunk infront of him. The Indian, abandoning his intention of remaining in thebush, for which he had doubtless had his own reason, now glided afterDick, who had not half risen when he felt the Shawnee's fingers grasphis long hair, and saw the knife describe a rapid circle in the air inpreparation for its descent upon his scalp. The boy cast one despairinglook up towards the Indian's implacable face.
The stillness of the woods was suddenly broken by a loud detonation.Something dug into the Indian's breast, a horrible grimace distorted hisface, a fearful cry came from his throat, his knife-blow went wide, andhe leaped clear over Dick, retaining some of the boy's hair in hisclutch as he went. The next moment he lay sprawling, face downward,some feet away. He stiffened convulsively, and never moved again.
Dick looked towards the direction whence the shot had come. In a littleopening among the trees he saw a horse standing; on its back a tall,gaunt, brown-faced stranger, from whose rifle-muzzle a little smoke wasstill curling. The newcomer was apparently about forty years old; worean old cocked hat, a time-worn blue coat, whose long skirts spread outover the horse's rump, a red waistcoat, patched green breeches, andgreat jack-boots that had known much service. His long brown hair wastied in a queue, and, besides his rifle, he carried before him animmense pistol. A long, projecting chin gave a grotesque turn to hisfeatures, whose grimness was otherwise modified by amiable gray eyes.
"Sure, sonny," he called out to the astonished and staring Dick, "it'sthe part of Providence I played towards ye that time; in return forwhilk favor, tell me now the way to one Alexander Wetheral's house, ifye ken it."
Not sufficiently learned in dialects to note the stranger's mixture ofScotch and Irish with the King's English, Dick eagerly proffered hisservices and said that Alexander Wetheral was his father.
"What, lad! Gie's your hand, then, and it's in front of me ye shall ridehame this day. It's a glad man your father 'ull be, when he sees yebringing in Tom MacAlister as a recruit, and no such raw one, neither!"
"THE NEWCOMER WAS APPARENTLY ABOUT FORTY YEARS OLD."]
Dick almost fell off the horse, to whose shoulders the stranger hadlifted him.
Such was his first meeting with Tom that was a piper's son.
The two reached Dick's grandfather's without molestation, and thenewcomer was duly welcomed. Lack of occupation in Europe, and the desireto be always enlarging his experiences, had brought him again to the NewWorld, and in search of his early friend.
He had immediate opportunity to employ his courage and prowess. A fewdays after Dick's adventure, there came to his grandfather's house asettler named Dodds, with an account of how the same Indians who hadshot the reapers at White's had thereupon gone to Robert Campbell's onthe Tuscarora Creek, found Dodds and other reapers there restingthemselves, and first made their presence known by a sudden deadlyvolley of rifle-balls. In the smoke and confusion, Dodds had made,unseen, for the chimney, which he had ascended by great muscularexertion while the massacre was proceeding in the room below. He haddropped from the roof and fled to Sherman's Valley, where he had giventhe alarm, which he was now engaged in spreading.
Dick's father and grandfather, with all the aroused settlers who couldbe summoned, speedily organized a party to make war on the savageinvaders. In the expedition this force made, MacAlister was in hiselement. He was one of the detachment of twelve who overtook twenty-fiveIndians at Nicholson's house and killed several, at the cost of five ofthe white men. The chasing of Indians, and the fleeing from them,continued all summer. William Anderson was killed at his own house,depredations were committed at Collins's, Graham's house was burnt, andin September five white men were killed in a battle at Buffalo Creek.Finally a hundred volunteers, including Wetheral and MacAlister, went upthe Susquehanna to Muncy, encountered two companies of Indians that werecoming down the river, killed their chief, Snake, and drove the othersback from the frontier. In the fall, the Wetherals, with their guest,went back to their own house, but not at the first waning of summer. Toomany settlers, deceived by the earliest signs of winter, had in timespast returned to their houses, thinking themselves safe from furtherIndian ravage; but, with the brief later season of warm weather, theIndians had reappeared for final strokes, and hence that fatal seasonreceived the name of Indian summer.
Tom MacAlister, impelled by his friendship for Wetheral, and by thecharm that he found in the still wilderness, took the place formerlyoccupied in the household by John Campbell, who had been killed atWhite's. If not in the field, at least at the fireside and in thedooryard, he was a vast improvement upon his heavy-witted predecessor.With a fiddle, bought from a settler, Tom soon verified all theassertions Wetheral had made about his musical ability.
As 1763 was the last year of general Indian outbreaks in theneighborhood, the arts of peace thereafter had full opportunity tothrive in the Wetheral household. From childhood to pronounced boyhood,and then to sturdy youth, Dick Wetheral grew, to the constantaccompaniment of Tom MacAlister's fiddle. Dick became, in time, a fairlycapable tiller of the soil, an excellent horseman, a good hunter, acomparatively lucky fisherman. He was a straight shot at a distant wildturkey, a quick one at a running deer, and a cool one at a threateningbear. He was a great reader, not for improvement, but for amusement andbecause books gave him other worlds to contemplate. When he had read andre-read all the volumes of his father's little stock, he took means tolearn who else owned books in the neighborhood. The owners were few andfar between, and fewer still were the books possessed by any one ofthem. But what books there were, Dick hunted down, taking many a longride in the quest, buying a volume when he could, or trading for it, orborrowing it.
Thus he made the acquaintance of Fielding's novels, and one or two ofSmollett's, and of Shakespeare's plays, and from all these he acquiredstandards of gentlemanly conduct and manners, and ideals of femininebeauty and charm, which standards and ideals kept him alike from closeassociation with the raw youths of the neighborhood, and from succumbingto the primitive attractions of any of the farmers' daughters. Slowlyand imperceptibly, by his reading and his thoughts, he was, if notfitting himself for a vastly different world from the one about him, atleast unfitting himself for the latter. One cause of his strongattachment to Tom MacAlister, after he had come to regard that worthy ina more accurate light, and no longer idealized him as the half mythicalhero of his childhood, was that Tom represented the great world ofcities and courts.
Tom was the son of a Scotch father and an Irish mother, and one of thetwo had a sufficient streak of English blood to account for Tom's lengthof chin. To his mixed ancestry was due his unique intermingling ofbrogues and accents. It was a question which was the greater, theseverity of his visage or the drollery of his disposition. It was lookedupon as a caprice of nature that
a man of so sanctimonious an aspectshould on occasion swear so hard, and that he who could drink soenormously of liquor should retain such meagreness of body. He advocatedstrict morality, though he admitted having himself been a sad lapserfrom virtue. He testified frankly to having broken "all the tencommandments and half a dozen more." He had been a great patron of theplayhouses, could perform conjuring tricks, and was able to oppose acard-cheat with the latter's own weapons. As for religion, wherever hewas, he took that, as he took the staple drink, "of the country," apractice which, he said, gave him in turn the benefit of all faiths, andsaved him from a deal of inconvenience where piety ran strong. He hadfought in 1743 with George II. against the French at Dettingen; "beenout" with the Young Chevalier in 1745; followed Braddock to defeat in1755; served under Frederick of Prussia, at Prague, Rossbach, andelsewhere; and had been under Prince Ferdinand, at Minden, in 1759. Thedisbandment of his regiment at the end of the Seven Years' War had puthis services out of demand.
In winter evenings, before the flaming logs in the great chimney-place,when Tom was not recounting adventures he had experienced, or some hehad imagined, or playing the fiddle, or taking huge gulps of hard cideror hot "kill-devil," he was singing songs; and of these the favorite inhis list was one or other of the versions of "Over the hills and faraway." First, there was the song with which Dick had been familiar sincehis infancy, and which for a long time he thought alluded to MacAlisterhimself, beginning thus:
"Tom he was a piper's son, He learnt to play when he was young, And all the tune that he could play Was 'Over the hills and far away,' Over the hills and a great way off, And the wind will blow my top-knot off."
Then there was the one which, when it was sung by Tom, Dick took to be abit of veritable autobiography:
"When I was young and had no sense, I bought a fiddle for eighteen pence, And the only tune that it would play Was 'Over the hills and far away.'"
But what was the song itself to which these verses alluded? Tom knew andsang several, but was cloudy as to which was the particular one. Thatmattered little, however, as all went to the same tune. There was oneartfully contrived to lure recruits to the king's service, thus:
"Hark how the drums beat up again For all true soldiers, gentlemen; Then let us 'list and march away Over the hills and far away."
Then there was one that Tom had heard at the play, sung by a gay captainand a dare-devil recruiting sergeant, and of which the latter half wouldfill Dick's head with longings and visions:
"Our 'prentice Tom may now refuse To wipe his scoundrel master's shoes, For now he's free to sing and play, Over the hills and far away.
"We shall lead more happy lives By getting rid of brats and wives That scold and brawl both night and day, Over the hills and far away.
"Over the hills, and over the main, To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain; The king commands, and we'll obey, Over the hills and far away.
"Courage, boys, it is one to ten, But we return all gentlemen; While conq'ring colors we display, Over the hills and far away."
And there was a duet, which Tom had heard at the opera in London, andwhich he sang, imitating the respective voices of the highwayman and theadoring Polly.
The tune took a lasting possession of Dick, and the sweet-soundingrecurrent line exercised upon him a witchery that increased as he grew.He chose for his bedroom the rear apartment of the loft over thekitchen, because its window looked towards the east, and his firstglance at dawn, his latest at night, was towards the farthest hill-tops.There were hills to the west, too, a great many more of them; mountainranges, from the straight ridge of the Tuscaroras, to the farthestAlleghanies; but Dick's heart looked not in that direction, where heknew there was but savage wilderness all the thousands of miles to thePacific Ocean. Towards the east, where the live world was, he longed towing. Strangely enough, so had circumstance directed, he never, till hewas seventeen years old, travelled as far as to the farthest mountainsin sight southward or eastward. His father had turned his back on theOld World, thrown his interests heart and soul with those of the newland, built up a well-provided home on the outer verge of civilization,joined irrevocably the advance guard of the westward march of men. Whatlittle business he had with towns could be done through the pack-horsemen and wagoners. So Dick had only his imagination on which to call foran idea of the level country towards the sea. What was behind the hills?How he envied the birds he saw flying towards that distant azure bandthat backed the green hills nearer! Should it ever be his lot to followthem?
At seventeen Dick was a strong, lithe youth, five feet eleven inchestall, and destined to grow no taller; with a thoughtful, somewhat eagerface, whose sharpness of feature and alertness of expression had somesuggestion of the fox, but with no indication of that animal's vices;brown hair that fell back to its queue from a wide and open brow; andblue eyes both steady and keen. Such was his appearance one sunny springmorning when he started from the house to join the men in the field,from which the sound of his father's "whoa," and of Tom MacAlister'schirping to the plow-horses, could be heard through the blossomingfruit-trees in which the birds were twittering. He returned his mother'ssmile through the open kitchen window, at which she stood kneading thedough for the week's baking. As he went towards the lane which ran up infront of the house from the so-called road, he could hear her voicewhile she half unconsciously sang at her work:
"'Over the hills, and over the main, To Flanders, Portugal, or Spain; The king commands, and we'll obey, Over the hills and far away.'"
He took up the tune and hummed it, and, though the cheerful solitudearound him seemed ineffably sweet, he sighed as he followed with hiseyes the course of a tiny white cloud towards the high blue easternhorizon. It was Saturday, next to the last day of April, 1775.
As he leaped over the rail fence, from the houseyard to the lane, he sawa horse turn into the latter from the road. He recognized the rider, agood-looking young man, one of the few in the neighborhood with whomDick was intimate.
"Good morning, M'Cleland," said Dick, heartily. "Where from?"
"From Hunter's Mill, and I can stay only a moment to give you the news,if you haven't heard it." He stopped his horse.
"What news?" queried Dick, wondering whether it might be of anotherIndian war, like that of Lord Dunmore's in Western Virginia thepreceding year; or whether there had been a renewal of the old feudbetween the Pennsylvanians and the Connecticut settlers up in theWyoming Valley; or whether the English government had repealed orreinforced the Boston Port Bill. These were matters in which Dick andM'Cleland had both taken interest,--especially the last one, for nowherehad the difference between King and colonies, which quarrel had beengrowing ever since the passage of the Stamp Act ten years before, beenmore thoroughly discussed than in the Wetheral household, and nowherewas the feeling for resistance to the King more ardent.
"Great news," said M'Cleland, controlling his voice with difficulty,while his eyes sparkled with excitement. "On the nineteenth the King'stroops marched out from Boston to take some ammunition the people hadstored at Concord. At Lexington they met a company of minutemen, andthere were shots and bloodshed. The whole country around rose and killedGod knows how many of the regulars on their way back to Boston. When themessengers left Cambridge, there was an army of Massachusetts menbesieging the King's soldiers in Boston. There's no doubt about it. AtHunter's Mill I saw the man who met at Paxton the rider that talked inPhiladelphia with the messenger from Cambridge, who had affidavits fromMassachusetts citizens. Tell your people. I'm off up the river. Get up!"
Dick never went any farther towards the field. He called in his fatherand Tom, and there was a long discussion of the situation. Wetheral saidthat Pennsylvania would be organizing troops, in due time, to back upMassachusetts, and that the only course was to wait and join such aforce. But Dick would not hear of waiting. "Now is the time men areneeded!" was his answer to every counsel. First make for the scene ofwar; it would be ti
me to join the Pennsylvania forces when these shouldarrive there. The father gave in, at last, and the mother had nothing tooppose to the inevitable but the protest of silent tears. To her, thewhole matter was as lightning from a clear sky. It was settled; the boyshould go, the father should stay. The mother had a day in which to getDick's things ready. As for Tom MacAlister, who was subject to no man'swill but his own, his first hearing of the news had set him preparingfor departure. As he tied his own horse to the fence rail the next day,to wait for Dick, he bethought him how of old his motto had been always"up and away again," and he marvelled that he had remained twelve yearscontented in one place.
It was not yet Sunday noon when Dick, who it was decided should sharewith Tom the use of the latter's horse on the journey to Cambridge,according to the custom known as "riding and tying," mounted for thefirst stage. He wore a cocked hat, a blue cloth coat altered from onehis father had brought from England, a linsey shirt, an old figuredwaistcoat, gray breeches, worsted stockings, home-made shoes, andbuckskin leggings; carried a rifle, a blanket, and a change of shirts;and had two gold pieces, long saved by his mother against the time ofhis setting up for himself. Tom MacAlister was dressed and armed exactlyas at Dick's first meeting with him, his clothes having been temporarilysupplanted by homespun during his years of farm service.
There was a lump in Dick's throat when he put his arms around hismother's neck, and felt against his cheek the tear she had striven tohold back. The last embrace taken, he gave his horse the word ratherhuskily, and followed Tom MacAlister, who was already striding down thelane. Turning into the road, Dick looked back, and saw his father, hismother, his aunt, and Rover, the last-named now feeble and far beyondthe age ordinarily attained by dogkind, standing together by the fence.His father waved an awkward military salute, his mother forced a smileinto her face, and the old dog made two or three steps to follow, as inthe past, then stopped and looked somewhat surprised and hurt that Dickdid not call him. One swift glance from the puzzled dog to his mother'swistful face, and Dick's home in the Pennsylvania valley passed from hissight forever. He cleared his throat, swallowed down the lump in it, andturned his eyes forward towards the east. Tom MacAlister's grim facewore a look of quiet elation, and he could be heard softly whistling, ashe trudged on, the tune of "Over the hills and far away."
The Road to Paris: A Story of Adventure Page 5