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14 He slipped his cables and sailed away in a raking fire, and with that tragic exit all the curtains of the past were torn and through the rent the future dimly glimmered.

After Dunmore's flight, every individual of the nobler sort felt that the responsibility of the country depended upon him, and straightway grew to that stature. Men looked in one another's faces and said, "We ourselves are Kings."

Around the great fire little William Clark heard his father and brothers discuss these events, and vividly remembered in after years the lightning flash before the storm. He had seen his own brothers go out to guard Henry from the wrath of Dunmore on his way to the second Continental Congress. And now Dunmore had fled, and as by the irony of fate, on the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Patrick Henry became the first American Governor of Virginia, with headquarters at the palace.

IV

THE WILDERNESS ROAD

Daniel Boone threw back his head and laughed silently.

For a hundred miles in the barrier ridge of the Alleghanies there is but a single depression, Cumberland Gap, where the Cumberland river breaks through, with just room enough for the stream and a bridle path. Through this Gap as through a door Boone passed into the beautiful Kentucky, and there, by the dark and rushing water of Dick's River, George Rogers Clark and John Floyd were encamped.

The young men leaped to their feet and strode toward the tall, gaunt woodsman, who, axe in hand, had been vigorously hewing right and left a path for the pioneers.

"They are coming,—Boone's trace must be ready.