START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY*** E-text prepared by Beth Baran and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 48291-h.htm or 48291-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48291/48291-h/48291-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48291/48291-h.zip) Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). A carat character is used to denote superscription. A single character following the carat is superscripted (licens^d). STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY [Illustration: (See page 12 "GOOD LUCK! GOOD LUCK!" SHOUTED DOBY. "I'VE FOUND THE THING I MOST NEED")] STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY The Adventures of a Boy Pioneer by JOHNSTON GROSVENOR Illustrated [Illustration: logo] Harper & Brothers Publishers New York and London STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS PAGE FOREWORD ix CHAPTER I. LONG, LONG AGO 1 Digging for treasure-trove with Parson Cutler among the Mound-Builders' work at Marietta. CHAPTER II. TAMING THE WILD 15 Helping Johnny Appleseed to teach a red deer near the seat of Burr's Conspiracy at the Fairy Isle of Belpre. CHAPTER III. GOBBLE! GOBBLE! 28 Bagging a wild turkey to feast Ol' Pap Soisson after his story of the French Grant at Gallipolis. CHAPTER IV. MAKING A SCOUT 41 Saving Simon Kenton's foxhound from the dangers of the new city of Cincinnati. CHAPTER V. BLUE-JAY FEATHERS 55 Riding with Colonel Johnson's Long Hunters down the Clark War Road to the rescue of Boonesboro. CHAPTER VI. LEFT HIND FOOT 77 Henry Clay's home at Ashland and a runaway slave from Cumberland Gap. CHAPTER VII. THE DROWSY VILLAGE 96 A man-hunt in the vineyards of the Dufours' Swiss colony at Vevay. CHAPTER VIII. GOIN' TO MEETIN' 109 Wrestling with Lorenzo Dow and the rowdies in camp-meeting time at the Big Falls. CHAPTER IX. UNDER THE ELM 123 A boy's trial by Judge Jonathan Jennings during a recess of the Constitutional Convention at Corydon. CHAPTER X. THE SPELLING-MATCH 139 Reciting and writing by moonlight to please a little stranger in an early school of Spencer County. CHAPTER XI. A PIONEER PUPPY 154 Struggling with wolves on the way to Old Vincennes over the bottom-land of the Wabash. CHAPTER XII. ONE PERCUSSION CAP 166 How a bear disturbed Father Rapp's model communistic village at Harmony. CHAPTER XIII. THE VOYAGEUR 178 A type of the early inhabitants. CHAPTER XIV. THE BEAVERS' DAM 190 Creatures of the wild help to save a town. AFTERWORD 221 ILLUSTRATIONS "GOOD LUCK! GOOD LUCK!" SHOUTED DOBY. "I'VE FOUND THE THING I MOST NEED" _Frontispiece_ THE BIRD JUMPED AT THE BOY. THE BOY STABBED AT THE BIRD _Facing p._ 38 EACH SAVAGE GIBED AT THE BOY'S PAINTED TALISMAN, BUT EACH OBEYED ITS MESSAGE " 74 DOBY WHIPPED OUT HIS KNIFE AND CUT THE THONGS " 116 FOREWORD IN the very heart of our United States is a vast and wonderful valley. Through the primeval hardwood forests of its hillsides, long ago, ran the naked, rollicking boys of the Stone Age, choosing the best paths as they hurried out to play, each one with his pet wolf puppy. Afterward, in the rich alluvial soil of the bottom-lands, fur-clouted lads of the Mound-Builders laid out good trails whereon every one could drive tandem his team of captured fawns. Later still, Indian striplings found the streams that might best bear, with least portage, the birch-bark canoe in which, with his doeskin blanket aflutter and his trained hawk on prow, many a one has shot the rapids. Then came the white men. They discovered these routes and followed them. Over the waterways, in the native canoes which he borrowed, sailed the Jesuit missionary explorer with standard and altar; then the French trading "voyageur" with bundles of skins and bead trinkets. Through the old forest paths marched the scarlet-coated British soldier and the ragged Continental volunteer who defied him. By the trails advanced the best of all scouts, the backwoodsman. His suit of fringed buckskin, with his 'coonskin cap and his moccasins, made up the most artistic, the most serviceable, and the most characteristic garb the New World has yet evolved. His vigorous body, his keen intelligence, and his warm heart bespoke the true American--the father of a mighty race. Following fast upon the heels of these trooped the home-seekers, the builders of a nation. For picturesque effect and political significance, the groups who floated down the Ohio River in home-made flatboats, and the families who crossed overland through the romantic Cumberland Gap in their wagon-trains, have never been excelled. The saboted French, the wide-breeched Germans, the straw-crowned Swiss, the beshawled Irish, the shad-coated New-Englander, the gray-frocked Quaker, the sandy Scotch, all mingled in the brotherhood of citizenship, while laughing black slaves looked on. The wings of the air--geese, ducks, and songbirds; the hoofs of the fields--deer, buffalo, and boar; the fins of the rivers--bass, trout, and pickerel--all added to the zest of this new life, as did also the luscious growth of plants and the odor of flowers. One hundred years ago, this Middle West of ours had reached a most interesting period. Never before and never since could there have been more curious happenings than in those stirring times. One boy, coming down the river then to seek his fortune, heard tales of the past and hopes for the future from the people whom he met. Strong Parson Cutler, quaint Johnny Appleseed, brave Simon Kenton, Colonel Johnson's Long Hunters, pious Lorenzo Dow, the reformer Rapp, the statesman Henry Clay, the legislator Jennings, and the boy Abraham Lincoln were all his friends. The strange stories about them in this book are _almost_ true! For that boy told them to a person who told them to another person who told them to me. In substance they are a faithful picture of the sort of adventures that helped pioneer lads of the Great Valley to grow into the full measure of men. J. G. INDIANA, 1917 STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY STRANGE STORIES OF THE GREAT VALLEY I LONG, LONG AGO _A Mound-Builder's Treasure-trove_ "O--YI--O! O--yi--o!" sang fifteen-year-old Obadiah Holman--called Doby for short--as he tried to skip a flat stone across the big river. "O--yi--o! O--yi--o!" Dark clouds were tumbling up from the southwest, but March sunshine still dimpled and danced and sparkled with the current. "It _is_ pretty water. That's what the Indian name means, O--yi--o, beautiful. A river beautiful," and he hopped about joyously, kicking out another hatchet-shaped stone or two on the stream's edge of one of the choice town lots of the O--hi--o river-port of Marietta in the new farthest northwest State of Ohio, beyond whose small beginnings of civilization lay the wilderness of the great Northwest Territory in this year of 1816. A flatboat made of green-oak planks, which held a family's household goods and farming tools, was anchored 'longshore in a bayou that promised safety from the coming storm. The boxes and bales on it, made shipshape against wind and water, were stacked in the form of a hollow square. They stood as walls to this tiny floating fort. They protected the people and animals traveling on it. The walls, in turn, were covered with branches of trees. The boy's father was one of many pioneers, some from stony New England, some from sandy eastern coasts, who had joined the crowds of emigrants floating westward down the Ohio. Like most of the others, he was searching for a place where he could afford to buy rich land on which to build a homestead. "I couldn't see our boat, 'though I was looking straight at it," the boy said, proudly. "It is exactly like a piece of the river-bank." "If the Indians cannot see it, or if they fail to shoot through the barriers if they _do_ notice us as we drift down-stream, I, too, Doby, will be pleased with our work on it," answered his father, as they hurried up a hill before the wind toward Marietta's great stockade of Campus Martius. This fort was a hundred and eighty feet square and twenty feet high. It was made of logs, each one flattened at the sides to fit snugly to the next one, planted in the earth at the lower end and sharpened to a point at the upper, like a huge picket fence without a crack in it, big enough for a giant's dooryard. There were boxes for lookouts atop the wall, blockhouses on its corners, and cabins inside its strong defenses. Parson Cutler, at the head of the Ohio land company's New England shareholders, had ceremoniously blessed this fort when it was completed and ready to stand guard over the million and a half of their fertile acres. As he neared it Doby said, "Ma has already gone inside to the schoolma'am's house." "She means to get a book so she can give you a lesson every day as we move. This town isn't quite thirty years old, yet it has had an academy for twenty. 'Tis probably your ma's last chance to talk with scholars." "I'll study the book," promised Doby. "I don't want to be a dunce like the boys who can't spell their own names. Some cannot even cut their initials on trees in the towns where we stop." And Doby sniffed with scorn. "If I had a really good knife--a strong one--I could carve better than I do now," he sighed, as he thought of his one great need. "Piff! Puff!" the wind echoed his sigh. "Piff! Puff! Puff!" Rain was close on their heels. Mr. Holman pulled his 'coonskin cap down tight over his long hair, girded up his fringed buckskin breeches, and ran for the fort, his heavy boots clumping out a path through last year's weed-stalks. Doby tucked his cap under his arm and let his tow thatch take the breeze and, light as a ball in his moccasins, bounded along behind his father. They were not swift enough to gain the fort. As the downpour overtook them they ducked underneath the branches of a gnarled and broken oak and found good shelter. "Much obliged, old tree," laughed Doby. "You've saved us a drenching." He tried to girdle it with his arms. "I can't reach half-way. It's the _biggest_ trunk!" "This _is_ an old fellow. His crown has been twisted off by some hurricane. There are lightning marks upon him. He feels his age. The storm makes him shiver." And Mr. Holman placed an uneasy foot upon the quaking roots. "It's a big tree for such a little hill," was Doby's comment. "I never did see so many funny little hills as are in this valley. Wasn't it lucky there happened to be one over where the Muskingum River comes into the Ohio? It is at the very best spot for Parson Cutler's settlers to build their stockade." Mr. Holman shook his head as they looked from their own small oak-capped hill to the big one on which stood the fort defying the lightning and wind of the storm quite as boldly as it had often done the burning arrows and the wild rushes of Indian foes. "That knoll did not _happen_ to be at the point of vantage," he said. "It was built on purpose ages ago as a fort of earthwork to defend this valley." "Who did it?" asked Doby. "I don't know. The folks who threw up that earthwork and the one over there--and there--and there," and his father pointed out through the broken curtain of the rain and sleet to a long rampart of earth, then to another circle of low-lying, grass-grown walls, and afterward to several small knobs, some with trees, some without. "The race who did it could not have been white people, for they were all dead and gone centuries before white men came to this continent." "Maybe they were Indians," ventured Doby. "Not like any Indians we know. For Indians roam over the country and live by hunting and fishing. Indians never get to be as numerous as these builders of mounds must have been. Only a great nation, somewhat civilized, could put up the immense defenses they did. Each Indian needs more acres than you can imagine to live on--" "Savages don't work together. They quarrel and kill one another and keep their numbers small," interrupted Doby. "There may not be as many Indians in the State of Ohio now as there are white people in the town of Pittsburg where we started our boat down the river," his father continued. Doby considered. "Wigwams and canoes are all that Indians build. These people raised regular forts. Look at that plain! Even a storm like this can't break those heavy banks. See the hail slide down them! It must have taken lots of men with muscle to pile such heaps of dirt." Doby spoke as one who knew what spading meant. "Back from the river wherever settlers go they find these strange earthworks in the valleys; huge masses for forts, fancy curves for altars, and small piles for tombs. Walls surround what must have been good-sized hamlets." As his father raised his voice to be heard against the swish of the sleet Doby stared out over the plain with round eyes. "Those walls where the trees are swaying so are as high as Cutler's stockade. There is some timber-work, but no masonry in any of them. They inclose half a hundred acres." "What are those long ditches?" queried Doby, catching sleet on his eyebrows as he leaned forward to look. "They must have been canals full of water leading from one walled town to another. 'Tis trade and commerce on short cuts that made it possible to keep up such thickly populated villages as the Mound-Builders must have had." Gusts of wind were fanning his words away, but Mr. Holman was determined to tell Doby all he could, so he added: "Rivers are big highways. Canals are smaller ones. A country thrives when its citizens can trade with one another by easy routes. The new towns that settlers are building in Ohio need just such waterways to make the bartering good." Here he became emphatic. "If these old canals are mended or new ones built--as the State is planning to do--then the countryside will again be full of rich towns." Suddenly they both had to hang on to the tree for safety. "Whew! What a blast!" cried Doby. "See the trees go down!" "Watch out!" yelled his father. Leaping to one side, he caught Doby's hand and fled down the hill with the boy like a living kite on short tether waving behind him. There was roaring--grinding--snapping--crashing. Then came showers of branches--leaves--bark--clods. Doby had done a series of flipflaps. He was dizzy and confused, but he lent a hand to his father, who was flat on the ground. The uproar deepened. Then it shrilled away. In another moment the sleet was gone, the sun was bright, the storm had passed. The oak was standing on its head, kicking its heels in the air. The mound was a lopsided dirt-pile. Already dozens of excited men were pouring out of the stockade. They ran with shovels and rakes and sticks to poke about in the cavity which the capsized oak's roots had torn through the mound. The genial parson came with them and looked on laughingly, to see fair play at the digging. This Dr. Mannassah Cutler was one of the big men of his time. He held the standard of his town so high that each of the other Ohio settlements had to set its best foot forward to keep up with Marietta's march of progress. He had a scholar's interest in mounds. He ordered them preserved. He had an explorer's interest in their treasures. He examined them scientifically. He had a leader's interest in his people. He made them play fair. He was their court of last resort. In spite of the desperate curiosity driving him, Doby had not the weight to hold his own at the front of this line of human gophers. He was forced back to a spot where he could use nothing but his ears. For two or three hours all he got out of the hole was some scraps of conversation like this: "Any gold?" "Never _is_ any gold." "Any money?" "Never _is_ any money." "Any jewelry?" "Copper bracelets. Who wants copper bracelets?" "Pearl beads, gone dull." "Fine cloth wrappings--coarse cloth--all rotted through." "Clay pots, every one broken." "Bones, bones, bones. Ashes, ashes, ashes." "The oak must be five or six, perhaps seven or eight hundred years old." "Stuff buried when it was an acorn isn't much account now." Not until after dark did the greedy crowd give up searching or cease to hope for hidden treasure where so much else was buried. "No luck in this mound. Nothing but boys buried here." Curled in his sleeping-blanket within the fort walls, Doby gave himself up to thoughts of the boys whose bones were once clothed with plumpness like his own. "I wonder if those boys started the fires in the earthwork watch-towers on the highest hills, where deep ashes show that countless fires have flashed in signal warning to other far-away towers." In his dreams, he found himself running with the horde of young barbarians into a walled town. With them slamming shut great gates, heaving the bars in place, racing across the moat, hoisting aloft the drawbridge, barricading the second set of gates, covering stores of corn, herding women and children in huts of sod, catching blazing arrows. In scant fur garments, wild of hair, jingling his copper anklets, armed with spears and shouting an uncouth language, he pranced along the top of mountain mounds and defied a besieging enemy. After such activity further sleep was impossible. Doby sat up, tied a knot in the corner of his blanket, and just before dawn mounted the sentry's ladder, wedged the knot in the slot between pickets, and lowered himself to the outside world. Still under the spell of his fancies, he declared to himself, "Those boys would not vanish without leaving me something. They liked me first rate, even if they did all have to turn to bones. I'll go back where they are and do some digging." He ran to the mound, seized one of the abandoned shovels, and dug and dug. The spectral light o' day gave him a chill sensation. The six or eight hundred years of weird memories grinning at him from the skulls in this desecrated tomb filled him with awe. But he was more inquisitive than he was nervous, so he made the shovel fly. In the loosened dirt, he used his fingers as a rake and dragged out funny old tobacco-pipes well worth the trouble of burrowing. As the light grew stronger his fingers struck something different--the promise of a big find. He could not pull it out. He dared not use the clumsy shovel. He went through his pockets and found one of the hatchet-shaped stones he had picked up at the river's brink. He used it as a lever and gently pried out a knife. It was long and sharp and just the right weight for his hand. Here was treasure indeed. Beautifully shaped, double-edged, an ancient poniard, a knife of flint! "Good luck! Good luck!" shouted Doby, not at all surprised to see that his father and the parson had followed him and were now near enough to ask, "What are you up to?" "I've found the thing I most need--a really good knife. Bring on a pie! I can cut it. Or I can skin a rabbit. I can whittle anything." He looked at the parson. "Do you suppose that it will be right for me to keep this knife?" The parson reassured him. "Although the laws of treasure-trove are complicated, I am glad to be able to tell you that in this case--in most cases like yours--finding is keeping." "I suppose that is because there are no Mound-Builders left," reasoned Doby, trying the edge of his knife on his thumb. "What became of them?" Doctor Cutler answered: "Perhaps some powerful enemy came along and killed them all. Perhaps some dreadful disease overtook them and they perished. Perhaps they were akin to the southern people--Aztecs and others--whom the Spaniards discovered in the tropics. They may have heard about their own kin far away. And then they may in time have gathered their goods together and floated down the river." "Ha!" cried Doby, "that was sensible. If they were clever enough to build all those fine mounds, I know they were adventurous and emigrated down the river beautiful. I hope that is what they did. I'm glad they left this knife for me." Then he turned over his digging-stone. "This little hatchet they might have made also." The parson shook his head. "No; you must have pried that out of the river mouth. Those stone hatchets were made by prehistoric men who lived ages before the Mound-Builders' time." "O--oh!" gasped Doby, "o--oh! the stone-hatchet men lived a long, long time before the Mound-Builders came. The Mound-Builders lived a long, long time before the Indians came. The Indians were here a long, long time before we came. Everything is so old--old--old--that I can't think _how_ old. If this country is so old--old--old, why do we call it the new West?" "Because it is new to us. The West is new in the same way that this day is new. It is full of fresh promise for you and for me and for our race. Some day this will be the very heart of America!" II TAMING THE WILD _The Fairy Isle in Burr's Conspiracy_ "LET'S pretend, Doby, that I'm an Indian," whispered Obadiah Holman to himself, as he slipped along, pigeon-toed and silent, in his moccasins, "and I'll sneak up on that buck and give it a scare." The white flag of the buck's tail had caught Doby's eye. His keen sight made out the dun form under the antlers. He advanced slowly through the undergrowth, knowing that the wind blew toward him--that the buck could not catch his scent. He hoped to have a good view of it. Then he meant to give a great shout to startle it, just for the fun of seeing it flee, crashing through the forest. His father's flatboat was tied to a tree on the lee shore of an island which was sometimes called the Fairy Isle and sometimes the Haunted Isle. Near by, across the Ohio River, was the settlement of Belpre. Mr. Holman, on trading bent, had taken his scow to Belpre, while his wife watched the flatboat and Doby went hunting for fresh meat in the safety of the Haunted Isle. It was secure from the ordinary dangers of the river, for Indians and renegades alike avoided this place. They feared the ghost of a beautiful scarlet-cloaked lady, the ghost of a magnificent velvet-clad gentleman, and the ghosts of liveried servants wandering there. Once upon a time the common people of Belpre and the soldiery of her army post would scull across the river to catch envious glimpses of the island's house of brick and stone, so different from their own wooden cabins, and to stare open-mouthed at fine folk arrayed in satins and laces, living so elegantly just beyond the frontier's workaday world. Then on an evil day the gallant family on the island had been arrested and marched away and exiled as criminals. The house had been burned to warn other offenders against the Republic. And ever since, on chill and foggy days, when the mists hung over the river, ghosts walked in the ruins of the splendid mansion hidden among the flowering trees of the Fairy Isle. They drifted through the desolation where once sweet gardens bloomed. They danced with the wind in weird couples on the forsaken lawns. And when the broken moonlight came it showed them huddled in gray, fantastic groups along the shore. The shuddering boatmen hugged the opposite bank and turned away their faces that they might not see too plainly the beckoning fingers of vapor, the foggy hair, and the trailing robes of cloud, so unreal, so full of romance, and so disquieting to all who knew the story of this place. Doby was not to be startled by ghosts; at least he said he wasn't. Though ghosts and goblins were merely names to him, he liked the idea of a Fairy Isle. Few boys could carry the heavy guns of that day for any distance. Doby did not try to do so. His plan was to get what game he could with snare and knife. He was bidden to keep within running distance of the boat, and he set rabbit-traps in the brier patches. From the briers he had sighted the buck. It was all aquiver, snorting and twitching its ears. Doby hid behind a buckeye and softly shinned into the first crotch lest the restless beast should turn and charge in his direction. "I'd like to know what is the matter with the buck," thought Doby. "It is watching something that makes it half curious and half afraid." The boy stared into the glen before him until his eyes became accustomed to the shadows--until he saw what the buck saw. When he did see he almost fell out of the tree with astonishment. He looked again. He shut his eyes; he opened them; stared some more; he blinked; then he gazed fixedly. "No wonder the buck is nervous," gasped Doby. "I'm s'prised myself," and still he looked and could not believe that he saw what he really did see. For there on a log, in the shade of an elm, sat a gnome--a big gnome. Doby was perfectly willing to be entertained by ghosts and fairies in the gossip of the river towns. He liked such stories. But he knew, of course, that there are no such things as wraiths and sprites. Even on a fairy isle there could not possibly be a gnome. "I feel dreadfully queer to be looking at him when I know he isn't there," and something inside of Doby began to turn round and round. The gnome, all of a faded bark color like the earth he grubbed in, sat with his feet crossed, his thin arms akimbo, his beard hanging in a point down his breast, and his hair tied in a wad on his head so that it had a shape something of a peaked-cap style. He was motionless. He was not a crooked stump. He was not a gnarled branch. He was alive! Laughter was running out of his mouth like cider gurgling from a jug. Between chuckles, his soft, clear voice was scolding the buck. "Now, Mr. Red Deer," he was saying, "this is the third time I have caught you trying to break down the brush barricade and nipping at my seedling apple-trees. Don't you know that seedlings can never grow up to be trees and bear fruit if you tear the fence and reach over and bite their heads off?" The deer was so inquisitive about the quaint, still figure with the soothing voice, that it advanced and retreated as if in fascination, while the voice flowed on: "How can you be so greedy, Mr. Deer? I'm ashamed of you. I'll have to carry away the seedlings so you can't get them. I'll plant them in neat orchard rows for a farmer I know." Doby craned forward, his mouth agape. He must watch this thing through, no matter what happened. "If I were you," continued the gnome, "I'd be a good stag and run along home, before some boy with a stone knife speared at me." Here the unbelievable gnome stared straight across the glade into Doby's face and winked. Winked! This was too much! With a thump Doby tumbled from the tree. With a leap the deer vanished from the glen. Doby thought, "This is the queerest dream I've ever had. I know I'll be all right as soon as I wake up." He did not wake up. He was picked up--by the gnome! Gentle hands helped him. A friendly face looked into his. A musical voice said, "I reckon you're not hurt a mite. That was no bump for a boy. I was wishing I had some one to help me; so you are in time to give Johnny a boost with his apple seedlings." Johnny! Apple seedlings! "O--o--h!" Doby regarded the gnome with a different interest. "O--o--h! Are you Johnny Appleseed? The man who is traveling over this countryside, gathering up apple seeds from the cider presses, cleaning and sprouting and transplanting them for the farmers who don't know how to do it for themselves? Starting orchards for settlers? Teaching 'em how to make trees grow?" "Yes, I'm Jonathan Chapman, the nurseryman." "Coming down the river, we talked about you. I heard about these secret seedling-pens where you hid people while the War of 1812 was going on. Those folks must have been much obliged to you for saving their scalps from the British Indians." Modest Johnny nodded. Then, "Take your knife, son," he said. "It looks like a good flint. I'll show you how to prune these little trees as we handle and move them. Now is your chance to learn spring planting." Doby rolled up his sleeves, spat on his hands, dug his soft-shod toes into the ground, and went at it. His teacher was the wisest grower in the Ohio Valley. This eerie companion told him: "Our native fruits, cherries, plums, haws, crabapples, pawpaws, huckleberries, gooseberries, and grapes, all reached perfection in the magic gardens of this isle, where once the owners of this fine estate helped me with my experiments in raising plants. I find that they need only a little cultivation to make them hang heavy with harvest around every barren frontier home." Doby licked his lips. "I suppose you know how to gather sugar from maple-tree sap and when to pick honey from bee-trees!" He was sure that, "Fruit does make corn bread and bacon taste better." "Wild roses, honeysuckle, goldenrod, and clematis would nod a glad 'Good morning' at the door of every lonesome cabin if we welcomed them with care," continued Johnny, hoping to interest the boy. The idea of spreading healthfulness through a fruit diet and joy by way of flower-gardens was part of Johnny's self-sacrificing religion. He preached it with ardor to every listener. For more than a hundred years his words and his plants have borne fruit through these valleys. Doby stopped work from time to time to ramble and root about the wreckage of the fine house. He asked, "Wasn't that grand Irish gentleman, Mr. Blennerhasset, who bought this island home, a friend of Aaron Burr's when Burr was Vice-President of the United States?" "He was a friend and a welcome guest here," Johnny answered. "If Mr. Blennerhasset and other friends of Aaron Burr wanted to give him ships from the boat-builders in Marietta and hire him men from the idlers in the West, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so? Why shouldn't they man a fleet for him? If Aaron Burr wished to help free Mexico from the Spanish, why wasn't it right for him to try it? Mexico is always out of luck." Johnny's face grew sad. "Many good people, like the Blennerhassets, thought it right to help free Mexico. But our Government learned that Burr had plans to take a piece of our Western country, to organize it into a separate state, to join it to Mexico and perhaps to rule it all himself." "To split off a part of his own country and make himself a king! Gold crowns and scepters--oh--fine!" cried Doby, sarcastically. "That's why they call him a traitor, and no wonder. The people who helped him to break up our independent nation ought to be punished, even if they were innocent of his motive. No good comes of treason." Johnny brightened up. "Perhaps great good may, after all, grow out of the sad mistake of Burr's conspiracy. It has made the Government think that if the East and West had been better acquainted, if the people of both sections had been able to travel back and forth and had come to think of themselves as all belonging to the same United States, the idea of separating under Burr would never have occurred to them. So now, to guard against any more such treason, it is going to build a fine road straight 'cross country, from East to West, so that the two sections will be tied together with a bond which all can understand." Doby studied over the idea. "'Twill stir up commerce and patriotism and loyalty. All travelers, all farmers, all dealers, even you and I will be glad to have a great highway--a big national pike." He picked up an arm-load of trees to lug them toward the shore. Johnny told him to look back. "The buck may follow us," he said. Doby was sure that its antlers showed among the brush. "I'll have pa shoot it when he comes back. If I don't get a rabbit we will need venison." "Don't," begged Johnny. "I can't bear to see anything shot. I want to be a brother to dumb animals as well as to men and to plants." "What if the buck chews these trees?" asked the boy. "What if it gets dangerous?" The gentle answer was: "Be more careful of the trees. Take heed for yourself. Never hurt any living thing. Let that pretty creature be. Some day I may be able to domesticate the deer and the buffalo as I am doing now with our wild plants." Quite to himself, hungry Doby gave an impatient sniff. He was thinking, "I don't intend to abuse anything; likewise I don't intend to let anything abuse me--not an old bobtailed thief of a buck, anyway." His mother climbed a stool and peeped over the high wall of baggage on the flatboat to smile at him and his new friend, as he took his spade and tried to keep pace with Johnny in digging a series of deep holes. The nurseryman said, "I intend to plant mulberry-trees in this sunny spot." "I know," cried Doby. "This hole grows to grow a tree to grow a leaf to grow a worm to grow a silk frock to grow a fine lady," and he returned his mother's smile. Behind them the silent buck had ventured up to take a browse at the seedlings. Doby foolishly ran toward it to drive it off. Angrily it rose on its hind legs to strike him. Horrified Johnny felt that death was coming in that brutal downward cut of hoof. Instantly, desperately, he flung his spade at the deer. The metal clanged on its antlers. The deer turned aside. Doby vaulted to the top of the boat's barricade, yelling for Johnny to follow him. Johnny had seized the other spade and had thrown it in his own defense. It hit the deer on the flank. Doby and his mother shrieked like mad. Startled and confused by the attack and the noise, the buck took flight. Whirling about wildly, it chose the one dangerous direction--straight away, over the sunny open space where the digging had been done. Its forelegs went down in one hole, its head seemed to light in another, and the flying brute turned a complete somersault. Leaves and grass and dirt filled the air. Doby's screams redoubled. Johnny gained the boat's wall. He knew they were out of danger's reach, should the buck turn back to rend them, for the baggage stockade would protect them. But he was shaken by their peril. While getting his breath and calming Doby and his mother, he watched uneasily for the next movement of the irate beast. After many minutes of waiting he knew that it would never move again. Its neck was broken. Then Johnny Appleseed leaned his bark-colored form back against the woodsy setting of the leaf-covered boat wall, crossed his feet, set his arms akimbo--the kindest gnome who ever lived, the good spirit of the Fairy Isle, the best-known and most-beloved character on the frontier--and murmured to Doby: "Now that the deer has done the killing himself, you might as well have some fresh venison to eat before we go on with our work." III GOBBLE! GOBBLE! _Hard Times on the French Grant_ "IT is, 'Doby, do this,' and, 'Doby, do that,' from morning to night. I've worked and worked and wor-r-rked," groaned Obadiah Holman, "'til both of my heels are stone-bruised and I have a rag on every toe." The expression of his face showed that he held strong feelings on the subject of child labor and that those feelings were all against it. Chore-boys did not get together and organize themselves in the olden days. Protests against overtime jobs received so little attention that Doby grumbled: "No use to sputter. S'pose I'll have to keep right on quarryin'." He had dropped his task to glance about the town of Gallipolis. It was a lean and wizened, yet quaint and romantic settlement of Old World Frenchmen. The log cabins were the same cubes of houses that pioneers were everywhere building. But the town had a different air from bustling Pittsburg or dignified Marietta. He examined one home after another. In the tiny holes of windows hung beribboned curtains of white. Never before had he seen frilled curtains; never before a curtain in a cabin window where there was neither sash nor glass. Under the windows were crocuses and daffodils and leaf points of the lilies-of-France showing gaily. Beside each door were sociable little benches inviting the passer-by to stop and chat. Under the eaves hung tambourines ready for a moment's playtime. Doby wondered over these attempts at refinement of living in a land where as yet the bare living itself was not quite certain. "This is a brave little town," he decided. Half a dozen years later there was born near here, at Point Pleasant, that Ulysses S. Grant, whose soldierly courage under difficulties, and whose steadfast purpose to make the best of national disaster, should forever remain a watchword for those struggling to win success. His achievements were brilliant and worldwide. Those of his neighbors were smaller but happily complete; for in a few years more they, too, overcame their handicaps. Warned by rumors of Indians down the river, Doby's father had tied up his flatboat at this hamlet and had brought his wife and son ashore until the waterway became safe again. To return the rather meager hospitality of Ol' Pap Soisson, a French bachelor, who had offered them half of his cabin, Mr. Holman was taking some round stones from the wash of the creek and was building for his host a safe cobblestone chimney. Most of the settlers had chimneys woven like birds' nests, of sticks plastered together with mud, inside and out. When they dried out they became dangerous. A stone one was fire-proof. It could hold the heat, could reflect it into the room, and could cook food better than the plastered one. In the business of piling up masonry for the chimney Doby was first assistant. Ol' Pap Soisson was a poor second. Doby was an unwilling worker, but the bachelor useless. He was too small, too weak, too old. As he himself explained to Doby, "It is of a certainty that I have never yet had enough of the food to make a growth or a strength." His bright eyes measured the boy as if to guess how stocky he himself might become if fed aright. "Greed possesses me when I sit at the savory meals prepared by that so accomplished madam, your mother." He chuckled comfortably as he recalled the breakfasts, the dinners, and the suppers which she had given him. The thought of them helped him to roll up a big stone. Exhausted, but triumphant, he sat upon it and became sociable. "Once I lived in Paris. To me, at my trade of wigmaker, comes the man Duer, of the Scioto Company, dealers in land American. I am then of the restlessness of youth. To work at a living is a matter uninteresting. That horror of all horrors--the Reign of Terror--approaches." He glared fiercely and made a gesture of cutting his throat. "To escape its mad mob of hungry-driven guillotinists I seek a land where successful revolutionists like the Americans enjoy liberty restrained." His whole quivering body expressed utter fear resulting from the "freedom" of the French Revolution. "When the Scioto Company's agent offers us land in this saner Republic so prosperous, scores of us small tradesmen give him our savings in exchange for paper titles to New World estates. Gladly we leave that disturbed kingdom. Gladly we come to this." Here the little man danced a few steps of derision, jeered at his own cabin, and snapped his fingers at the landscape. "Land is a good thing," declared practical Doby. "You got land, didn't you?" "By the truth, no! Our titles, you understand, are of a badness unbelievable. We are ruined. Swindle is the name of it. Voyaging through discomforts numerous and cuisine scant, by ocean, by forest, by mountain, by stream, in that long ago, we have arrived." He raised his eyebrows in a grimace. "The land is not ours, but that of another. Like lambs we are shorn by that Duer American. We cannot pluck sugar from the trees of maple as is promised us. We cannot light the candles of the barberry-bush as is also promised. To live we must have agriculture. Agriculture is an art. We know it not. For me, I am a wigmaker. That is my art. Behold!" He threw out ten fingers to cover the case. "In ignorance of agriculture we starve; we freeze. Some die. Some wander away." Doby sat down beside him to express sympathy. Mr. Holman gave his whole attention to the tale. "Seeing us about to perish, the United States, in pity, gives us this land. It is the French Grant, in that year of the famine which is worse than all other bad times, of the date 1790." "How many acres?" asked Doby, who every day talked about land values with all sorts of emigrants. "Of the number of forty thousand." "Forty thousand acres make a big grant," cried Doby, much relieved by his country's bit of justice toward these men. "A large colony can live well on that much land." "Ha!" shrugged Ol' Pap Soisson. "With that we take courage. By day we learn the so necessary agriculture. By night we fiddle, step to measure, sing the 'Marseillaise.' On Sunday, to preserve respect to ourselves and to honor the Virgin, we say a mass and make a toilette of fashionable attire." Doby stared. "Do you mean to tell me that you dressed up in your city wigs and furbelows? In the wilderness?" he demanded. "Of a certainty, yes! We love the good appearance. We want the laughter and the social life. Arrayed, I promenade the street for pleasure. A wild red heathen with a hatchet comes from behind and scalps me of my holiday wig, my best one!" "No!" cried Doby. "No!" "Yes! Yes!" bobbing his head a dozen times, the Frenchman insisted. "Yes! Yes!" He added: "The land is full of game. To pursue it is to live well. But see! for a quarter of a century I run from bear, from deer, from charging buffalo. Never do I pursue. Ever I am the pursued one. Of meat I taste little; of game nothing." He shook his head. "Now--have the young men of our kind learned the pioneering. We old mastered it not." Doby was shocked. Such robbery and disappointment worried him. He looked to his father to say something cheery to the plucky little man. Mr. Holman, big and brawny, equal to any demand of frontier life, gazed kindly at Ol' Pap Soisson, who had found its trials almost too much for him. "We will give you a taste of game to-day. Go, Doby, and shoot that gobbler we have been hearing." "But, pa," protested Doby, "wild turkey isn't good in the spring. Nobody eats it." "It _will_ be good if your ma cooks it. I know some one who can eat it," and he smiled at the Frenchman. Ol' Pap Soisson flashed thirty-two white teeth in assent. Stone-bruised heels were forgotten. Rags were torn from Doby's toes. They did not hurt--much. He slipped on his moccasins, not because his bare feet minded the March rime of frost, but just because all hunters did wear moccasins. He carried bow and arrows. Pioneer boys were clever with these, for they were easy to pack about. Early guns were heavy. "Wild turkeys are hard to shoot," he remembered as he trotted along the edge of the wood. "If I can't get that gobbler, I'll bring home something to cook in the new oven. Ol' Pap Soisson deserves a square meal." His father had pointed out the probable turkey-run. Doby had expected to discover tracks at once, but he had to keep on and on, still in sight of the cabin, until, when at last he did find fresh traces, he must have been all of four miles away. But what are four miles to a hunter? Mere detail! He hid himself in the heart of a sycamore and waited for game to pass. Sitting astride a limb in a rough old tree is much easier than lugging stone for an oven, especially if it is one of those big outdoor affairs fastened to the chimney. His father would build a vent to make the draught strong. Then a fire would have to burn for hours in the oven until the stones were scorching. The coals would then be raked out and the turkey--_if Doby got it_--would be shut in the hot empty oven to let the reflected, heat roast it. "If I were to tell that bony bachelor about the apple turnovers and rabbit pie, the gingerbread and quail dumplings, the baked beans and mince tarts, the succotash and blackberry short-cake, the whole shoats and cinnamon buns, the halved squash pudding and caraway cookies that ma can bake in such an oven, the poor fellow would lick his chops and fall sick from in-di-ges-tion of the im-ag-i-na-tion!" From some source Doby had learned that, in the Old World, every plant and animal which is good to eat had been discovered and used by men centuries before people had begun to write down any sort of history. In the New World of the Americas, the natives had long ago found out what was good to eat on their continent, and could show the immigrating white man delicious foods which he had never before tasted--the golden maize, the bison, and the turkey. Doby felt that a personal experience of some of these dainties would make Ol' Pap Soisson joyous. So he kept his eye out for the turkey. He was hidden where he could not be seen by any man. He fancied that he could not be noticed by any wild creature and that he himself could see everything about him. Deluded hunter! If he had been clever enough to peer more closely into the weeds below him, what trouble he might have saved! Soon, along the run far to the north, there was a stir. He could not make it out. To the south was other movement. "Doby, 'tend to business," he cautioned himself. From the north came a turkey--a gobbler--_the_ gobbler. This _was_ luck. Doby fitted an arrow. From the south came a boy--a big boy--an Indian. This was not so lucky. Doby slackened his bowstring. The savage had already seen the turkey. Silent and shadowy, he crept from tree to tree toward the stately bird. His stalk was a model of woodcraft. What chance had Doby against such skill--against any grown boy? Very little. Against a wild Indian he had none at all. The dismayed Holman sat so still that he could hear his own ribs creak. This was no longer his game. The hunter Doby was in danger of becoming the hunted Doby. He lost all appetite for turkey. The wise gobbler--he was neither young nor tender--kept a sharp outlook on the shadows, an alert regard for his own giblets. He was watching the Indian quite as closely as the Indian was watching him, and with as much anxiety as Doby was watching them both. Then with a strategic side-step he scuttled into the weeds near the foot of Doby's tree and was off at a tangent. Instantly the Indian let fly one arrow, then a second one. Both whizzed in the same direction and at the same mark. There followed a great squawk and
{'title': 'Strange Stories of the Great Valley: The Adventures of a Boy Pioneer by Grosvenor', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}