Page:The Conquest.djvu/31

Rh Can you help?" Boone removed his coonskin cap and wiped his perspiring face with a buckskin handkerchief. His forehead was high, fine-skinned, and white.

"That is our business,—to settle the country," answered the young surveyors, and through the timber, straight as the bird flies over rivers and hills, they helped Boone with the Wilderness Road.

It was in April of 1775. Kentucky gleamed with the dazzling dogwood as if snows had fallen on the forests. As their axes rang in the primeval stillness, another rover stepped out of the sycamore shadows. It was Simon Kenton, a fair-haired boy of nineteen, with laughing blue eyes that fascinated every beholder.

"Any more of ye?" inquired Boone, peering into the distance behind him.

"None. I am alone. I come from my corn-patch on the creek. Are you going to build?"

"Yes, when I reach a certain spring, and a bee-tree on the Kentucky River."

"Let us see," remarked Floyd. "We may meet Indians. I nominate Major Clark generalissimo of the frontier."

"And Floyd surveyor-in-chief," returned Clark.

"An' thee, boy, shall be my chief guard," said Daniel Boone, laying his kindly hand on the lad's broad shoulder. "An' I—am the people." The Boones were Quakers, the father of Daniel was intimate with Penn; his uncle James came to America as Penn's private secretary; sometimes the old hunter dropped into their speech.

But people were coming. One Richard Henderson, at a treaty in the hill towns of the Cherokees, had just paid ten thousand pounds for the privilege of settling Kentucky. Boone left before the treaty was signed and a kindly old Cherokee chieftain took him by the hand in farewell.

"Brother," he said, "we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it."

They were at hand. Through the Cumberland Gap, as through a rift in a Holland dyke, a rivulet of settlers came trickling down the newly cut Wilderness Road.