Altsheler, Joseph - [Novel 05]

by A Herald Of The West (lit)

  " Yes," she replied with true woman's courage; " but we will fight again and win."

  Lucky is a country when it has brave men, but luckier still when it has brave women too.

  We followed the President's party to the hovel, and with an eye to the next day I remembered Mr. Madison's permission and took with me one of the best horses that I could find in the orchard. I slept in a little stable near the hovel, and early the next morning the President gave me the letter, bidding me ride fast and well. Cyrus

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  Pendleton, clad for the journey, appeared, and with hhn came Marian, dressed too as if for a long ride.

  " You see that this is a party of three, and not of two, Philip/' she said.

  " I think that the lady can ride as well as the men," said the President with his usual tired little smile, " and perhaps she can do as much in Kentucky too as either of you."

  Then we mounted and rode away. I looked back once, and saw the President of the United States stand ing on the muddy ground in front of the miserable little hovel in which he had passed a night of hiding. But the sun of a brilliant day was rising, and its golden radiance clothed t he soaked earth and the dripping trees.

  19

  CHAPTEE XXV.

  OVEB THE MOUNTAINS.

  THE splendour of the sun grew as the day advanced, the earth became dry and firm, and the drops of rain dis appeared from the grass and trees. Though it was the time of year for foliage to be turning brown in those latitudes, plentiful rains had preserved the fresh greenness of early summer, and around us we saw the beauty of field and forest, as peaceful and quiet as if no war had been within a thousand miles.

  We rode at first almost due west and pressed our horses somewhat from the start, as there was yet danger from skirmishing parties of the British. At noon we stopped for a brief rest, ate of cold food which the provi dent fur trader had brought, and then turned to the southwest, in order that we might reach the wagon road which passes through Virginia and thence over the Cum berland Mountains to the west. The main road led to the Holston Eiver and Knoxville in Tennessee, but far to the westward a spur turned off from it toAvard the north, and passing through Cumberland Gap entered Kentucky. It had been the great emigrant trail, and it was now the high road of travel, and it was this northern spur that we three expected to take on our great journey to the West, a road of many hundred miles through the rolling Virginia country, with its red soil and sparse farm houses, then into the higher hills with the farm houses now many miles between, and then over the wilder mountains with no houses at all, save the lone hunter's cabin, beyond which lay the great valley of Kentucky, our destination. 282

  OVER TUB MOUNTAINS. 283

  It seemed that fate was with us after so many dis asters, for the weather remained dry and fine and the road presented a hard bed, over which we could travel at a swift pace. The scattered farm houses or an occa sional tavern furnished us food and shelter for the night, though often we rode late and twice exchanged tired horses for fresh ones, losing every time to the shrewd farmers, but willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of haste.

  On we galloped, before us the wilderness, behind us the war. Our knowledge of the latter stopped at the hovel in the forest, beside the door of which we had left the fugitive President. If there was any news since then it lingered behind us, for we travelled fast. What had become of either the President or the British army we knew not, and that part of the war, most likely, would remain unknown to us for many a day; we could only think about it and wonder what the end would be and do our best to suppress our anxiety and suspense.

  We had begun our journey in silence and depression, and for the first day no one of the three said much, but the sunshine, the fresh winds, the hope of a great rising beyond the mountains, and our rapid pace kindled anew our spirits and sent the blood in a stronger and swifter current through our veins. Not even the memory of Bidwell's death could prevent the return of buoyancy, though all three mourned him, but by some sort of un conscious substitution I seemed to take his place in the mind of Cyrus Pendleton. He spoke to me in the man ned that he had used formerly toward Bidwell, and I was content.

  The ground burned our feet and we hastened on. All three of us begrudged every minute wasted, and I recalled all the old stories that I had read in the histories of the fate of nations and how it had turned often on the faith and energy of one man, no more important than myself. Hope had taken the place of depression,

  284 A HERALD OF THE WEST.

  and hope now swelled into enthusiasm. I recalled that at the moment in the Eevolution when the fortunes of the patriots had sunk to the lowest the wild backwoods men suddenly appeared from beyond the Alleghanies and struck the stunning blow of King's Mountain; and I did not believe that the backwoodsmen, the sons of their fathers, would fail us now at an equal crisis. I knew that beyond the mountains the people were the most American of the Americans, as they are to this day, and as they will ever be, I think; and I knew, moreover, that however rough their manners, however strange they might appear in some things to the people of old coun tries, they were as sound of morals as they were of body, untouched by hidden sins and the vices of corrupted man ners. Against a foreign foe there could be no division of parties among them, and in this particular, as well as the others, they are the same now that they were then, and so they will remain.

  As our spirits rose, Marian and I talked much and frequently rode on ahead, Cyrus Pendleton taking no notice, for nearly all the time he was deep in thought, planning, I knew, how to raise troops for the defence of the South, and I never doubted for a moment that he him self would go too, though he had not yet said so in words.

  I told again the story of poor Bidwell's death and how gallantly he had fallen, and Marian shed some tears at the story, which I did not begrudge, for it was Bid- well, the playmate, she had known nearly all her life whom she lamented, and not Bidwell the man she loved, for the latter he had never been and I knew could never have been.

  The fields meantime passed behind us and the un broken woods appeared; the houses were a day apart, and the ring of the settler's axe was an unaccustomed sound. Seldom did the smoke from a cabin float over the trees, and one day a deer galloped across the road in front of us. We had begun to ascend the slopes of the Allegha-

  OVER THE MOUNTAINS. 285

  nics and were in the wilderness. So vast is our country and so widely scattered are we, lost in its forests and on its prairies, that this now was real, and the scratch of civilization we had left behind but a dream. We sat on our horses at the crest of a peak one evening and looked at the valleys and other peaks beyond, clothed in all the red and gold splendours of the dying sun. We could see many miles, but valley and mountain alike were covered with the unbroken forest. Nature was everywhere, man nowhere; it was the wilderness of old, genuine and true, and I felt a certain awe while Marian repeated the famous lines of our poet:

  By midnight moons o'er forest glades, In vestments for the chase arrayed, The hunter still pursues the deer, The hunter and the deer a shade.

  Truly the men and women who crossed those vast mountains and entered the dark and limitless forests, with savage and implacable enemies everywhere around them, are the greatest of our heroes, greater than those of any battle. We win our land with our blood; inch by inch we have come from the Atlantic, and inch by inch we go on to the Pacific, watering the soil red as we go and leaving the unbroken trail of our bones. What other nation has won so much and paid so much? Our march goes on now, and it was going on then behind the mountains even while the new nation on the Atlantic was fighting for life against the odds of Europe.

  Twice we overtook emigrant trains, people to whom the war was nothing, seeking fresh and rich lands in the West, but after we passed them we were again alone in the wilderness, save that now and then we met the East ern stagecoach or some solitary horseman. Often at night from the little tavern or farm house in which we slept we heard the cry of the p
anther in the moun tains, like the shriek of a woman, and by day we saw

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  the deer crashing through the woods. On the higher mountains the foliage was browning already before the breath of late summer, and here and there bits of red and yellow, portending the colours of Indian summer, gleamed on the loftiest peaks like the signal lights of armies.

  Day after day we rode on through the wilderness, whose vastness we felt when we knew that the peopled country behind us, the old Thirteen Colonies, was but a narrow strip on its eastern shore. The war was shut out from us, for there could be no war where there was nobody to make it. But as we advanced and passed the backbone of the mountains a double anxiety began to grow upon me fear that we would not arrive first, and, even should that be done, a fear lest the Western men would reach New Orleans too late.

  We passed through Cumberland Gap and thence to the northwest over more mountains clothed in birch and beech and larch and laurel, and approached the great plain of central Kentucky, sinking down now from the mountains like a vast green bowl or basin resting firmly on its limestone base.

  Here the dividing line between mountain and plain is abrupt, the former rising up from the latter like a Avail, and it was full noonday when we reached the last slope and saw stretched before us the garden of Ken tucky, rolling gently away mile after mile, until it was lost under the horizon, a swelling sea, green in the sum mer but now golden brown, with a touch of autumn; the ripe wheat standing in the fields in rows of little stacks, the colour of gold in the sunshine; the tiny brooks with the fat cattle resting on their banks, flowing in coils of silver; the solid red brick houses, the neat stone fences, the abundance everywhere, the signs of thrift, so unlike the lazy Virginia we had left behind.

  This was the land of my birth, the first American outpost beyond the mountains, to the valour and endur-

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  ance of whose people the country owes all the great Northwest, and to whom, next to the Tennesseeans, it owes, too, the saving of the Southwest at New Orleans.

  We left the mountains behind us and pressed on with increasing h aste as the road grew smoother before us. The Pendletons were going to Lexington, and I was to take a more direct road for Frankfort and the Governor; the time was at hand for us to part, but I secured the chance to say to Marian the words which had been in my mind for days as we rode through the mountains, and which I felt now I had a right to say.

  " Marian," I said, " I love you/*

  Her face flushed the hue of the rose, but she made no answer.

  " Marian, I love you; will you marry me? "

  " I thought you were going to New Orleans to fight the English."

  " So I shall; would you have me stay? "

  " No, I would not like you, Philip, if you did not go."

  " Then give me my answer."

  " When you come back again."

  I dared to take her hand and kiss it, after our olden style. When I came back again! I was not afraid, and we rode on through the deepening brown of the summer.

  I was the first to reach the Governor with the mes sage that the British were coming with a great force against New Orleans, expecting to take the entire South west from us, and after I had received his thanks for diligence I mounted my horse and rode to the south west to see my father, knowing now that the news of the coming attack on New Orleans would soon spread throughout the West.

  It had been four years since I had seen my father or been in Kentucky, but around me everything was the same. To me it seemed old, and I spoke of it as the old land because I had been born there; yet less than forty years ago it had been a wilderness occupied only by the

  288 A HERALD OF THE WEST.

  wild beasts and hunting parties of the Indians. Here, as elsewhere, we had fought for every inch of the soil, and I was treading ground already historic, for every hillside bore the memory of some fierce forest encounter, and though but ten or fifteen may have fought it was as im portant to them and as dangerous as the battlefield on which a hundred thousand men meet.

  I reached my father's house in the middle of the afternoon, and saw him sitting on the front porch smok ing his pipe, his gigantic figure, from which I have in herited my own size and strength, at ease in an arm chair. He was still strong and hearty, though far ad vanced in years, with hair quite white. He and my mother had not married until late, for the Revolution coming on had claimed eight years of such constant at tention from him that he could find no time to marry, and after that he had to come to Kentucky and found a new home before he could claim a wife. So I was the child of their middle years, their only child, and here still lived my father, though my mother's grave was in the garden, marked by a white stone.

  We greeted each other with a warm handshake and no more, for we Western people are taught to conceal our emotions, and then when I had rested and seen all the old folks whom I knew we went in to supper, and after that, while we sat on the porch in the twilight, I told him all I knew. He was not surprised at the pro jected attack upon New Orleans; in truth, he had thought that it would be made sooner, owing to the ex posed nature of the town, the foreign character of its people, and its vast distance from the region containing American population in any numbers.

  " The Government should have provided for defence there long ago," he said, " but it has been as lax about New Orleans as it has been careless about Washington. If the spirit and foresight of the Government had only equalled the spirit and courage of the people we would

  OVER THE MOUNTAINS. 289

  have been victorious always. But it will be different at New Orleans nevertheless. Andrew Jackson will com mand there."

  I had heard of him, a public man of some note, and likewise the brave and alert leader who had taken the Tennessee militia against the powerful confederacy of the Creek Indians, an expedition which Mercer and Courtenay had joined, and before I left Washington I had received a letter from Mercer describing all their battles, and that last terrible one of the Horseshoe Bend, in which the Creek army was annihilated. Yes, I had heard of Jackson, and his name brought confidence. I was glad, moreover, that we Westerners were to be led by a Western man, and success or failure alike would be wholly our own.

  " You must go to New Orleans, Philip," said my father. " It is your duty. I should like to go too, but I'm too old to fight, and I can do more good here by sending others. It seems strange to me that England, who should be the best of our friends, is the most bitter of our enemies. She should welcome in us the rise of another Anglo-Saxon nation, but instead she has chosen to persecute us, to tyrannize over us, and to crush us if she can, no matter what the means. No other country has villified us to such an extent, and I think some time, when all the world is against her, as it is sure to be, she will be sorry that in these early days she chose to make us her enemy when we would be her friend, and she will want our help."

  He spoke with regret, that lingering affection for the old country which I had noticed so often in the talk of the people of the Revolutionary epoch. I am convinced that the distrust and bitterness with which most of us regard Great Britain dates not from the Revolution but from the war of 1812, and the long period of malignity and oppression immediately preceding it, when the worse England ruled the better.

  290 A HERALD OF THE WEST.

  I spoke of Major Northcote.

  "A man of strong qualities perverted/' said my fa ther. "He was your mother's distant cousin, a child hood playmate of hers, and was one of the most ardent of the New York Loyalists in the Revolution. Banished from New York at the close of the war, and his property confiscated, he went to Canada with the others, United Empire Loyalists they call themselves, and I do not sup pose that this country has a more bitter enemy the world over. You may meet him again at New Orleans, for it is said now that the army which the British have in the Chesapeake will he shipped there."

  I remained for some time at home or in the vicinity preparing for the far campaign and inci
ting and helping others to do likewise. There was no lack of spirit, none could complain of that, for Kentucky and Tennessee blazed up at the news that New Orleans was threatened, and as the Tennesseeans, with the help of the Georgians, had recently crushed the great confederacy of the South western Indians, they were full of spirit for a new cam paign against a more powerful foe. It was the same in Kentucky; but Kentucky, though only twenty years a State when the war began and still fresh from its Indian wars, had been sending army after army to the North western frontier, some of which never came back again, and thus both States were almost stripped of men, of arms, and other military resources. But as the President had said most truly, New Orleans could not save herself, and if she should be saved at all the Kentuckians and the Tennesseeans must come. And the spirit was there. In that war we Kentuckians, though, as I have said, but twenty years a State, fought all the way from the north woods of Canada to New Orleans over an arc of two thou sand miles, and the Tennesseeans were as good. An en emy permanently fortified at the mouth of the Mississippi was what neither could endure, and we had not gone to so much trouble to remove the Spaniard and the Frenchman

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  to let the Englishman take his place. The wrath aroused by the news of the burning of Washington added a new flame to this spirit, and it was a certainty that the Gov ernor would have men for New Orleans, though it was an other thing to arm them and to get them there.

  While I helped with the recruits, the news of the glorious victories in the East and North came and in spired us with new ardour for our task. The fleets and armies of Eoss and Cochrane had been beaten off before Baltimore; the New Englanders, after their long period of sloth and halfway or whole treason, had shown that they were still of the stern old stuff of the Revolution, and with the aid of some slender companies from New York and Pennsylvania had defeated the best troops of Europe again and again, man for man, on the Canadian frontier; and then, too, came the news that the great invasion from Canada in Burgoyne's old track had been beaten back at Plattsburg, while at the same time our fleet on Lake Champlain had defeated and captured the more numerous fleet of the British. The whole tide of the war changed now was flowing our way, and we rejoiced.