A Virginia Scout Part 43

Dunmore and White Eyes, the friendly Delaware chief, rode into camp and conferred with Colonel Lewis; and as a result we started the next day for Point Pleasant and Virginia. The men were all but out of bounds, so furious were they at not being loosed at the Shawnees.

Then began the talk that Dunmore brought on the war to keep our backwoodsmen busy in event the colonies rebelled against England; also, that he closed it prematurely so that the Indians might continue a menace to the border and thus keep the frontier men at home.

I was as hot as any against His Lords.h.i.+p for the way the campaign ended.

We demanded blood for blood in those days; and never had the Virginia riflemen a better chance for inflicting lasting punishment on their ancient foes. And we were quick to blame His Lords.h.i.+p for a variety of unwholesome motives.

But with political rancor long since buried we can survey that campaign more calmly and realize that as a result of the battle the northwest Indians kept quiet for the first two years of the Revolutionary War, and that during this period Kentucky was settled and the vast continent west of the Alleghanies was saved to the Union.

If the battle of Bushy Run took the heart out of the tribes confederated under Pontiac's masterly leaders.h.i.+p, then Dunmore's War permitted us to begin life as a republic without having the Alleghanies for our western boundary. Nor can I hold in these latter days that His Lords.h.i.+p was insincere in waging the war; for England was against it from the first.

I believed he pushed the war as vigorously and shrewdly as he knew how; and I believe his was the better judgment in securing the best peace-terms possible instead of heaping defeat on defeat until the allied tribes had nothing left to bargain for. So I give His Lords.h.i.+p credit for making a good bargain with the Indians, and a bargain which aided the colonists during the struggle almost upon them. But I was very happy when Colonel Andrew Lewis drove him from Virginia.

CHAPTER XIII

PEACE COMES TO THE CLEARING

Early winter, and the wind was crisp and cold as I rode into Howard's Creek. Smoke rose from the cabins. I limped toward the Davis cabin, a strange shyness holding me back. Some one inside was singing:

"Ye daughters and sons of Virginia, incline Your ears to a story of woe; I sing of a time when your fathers and mine Fought for us on the Ohio.

In seventeen hundred and seventy-four, The month of October, we know, An army of Indians, two thousand or more, Encamped on the Ohio."

There was a whirl of linsey petticoats behind me, and two plump arms were about my neck; and her dear voice was sobbing:

"They didn't know! I feared you were dead beyond the Ohio!"

"But I sent you a message!" I protested, patting her bowed head. "I sent word by Moulton that it was only an arrow-wound in the leg, and that I must wait."

"And he never came, nor brought your word! He stopped in Tygart's Valley and sent his brother to bring Mrs. Moulton and the children. One man said he heard you had been hurt. I wrote to Colonel Lewis but he was not at Richfield. So I never knew!"

We walked aside, and I petted her and listened to her dear voice and forgot the cold wind biting into my thin blood, forgot I would always walk with a slight limp. When we did awake, because the early dusk was filling the clearing, the singer was finis.h.i.+ng his seventeen-stanza song:

"As Israel did mourn and her daughters did weep, For Saul and his host on Gilbow, We'll mourn Colonel Field and the heroes who sleep On the banks of the Ohio."

And I thought of Shelby Cousin and the others, who gave their lives that we might meet thus without the war-whoop interrupting our wooing. And I wondered if our children's children would ever realize that the deaths died at Point Pleasant made life and happiness possible for them. I prayed it might be so, for lonely graves are not so lonely if they are not forgotten.

THE END