Page:The Conquest.djvu/98



The continental armies had been dispersed, but now from their old war-ravaged homes of the Atlantic shore they looked to the new lands beyond the Alleghanies. Congress would pay them in these lands, and so the scarred veterans of a hundred battles launched on the emigrant trail.

In the Clark home there was busy preparation. Out of attic and cellar old cedar chests were brought and packed with the precious linen, fruit of many a day at the loom. Silver and pewter and mahogany bureaus, high-post bedsteads and carved mirrors, were carefully piled in the waggons as John Clark, cavalier, turned his face from tidewater Virginia.

Neighbours called in to bid them farewell. Mrs. Clark made a last prayer at the grave of her son, the victim of the prison ship.

"William, have you brought the mulberry cuttings?" called the motherly Lucy.

"William, have you the catalpa seeds?" cried Fanny.

Leaving the old home with Jonathan to be sold, the train started out,—horses, cattle, slaves, York riding proudly at the side of his young master William, old York and Rose, Nancy, Jane, Julia, Cupid and Harry and their children, a patriarchal caravan like that of Abraham facing an earlier west two thousand years before.

Before and behind were other caravans. All Virginia seemed on the move, some by Rockfish Gap and Staunton, up the great valley of Virginia to the Wilderness Road, on packhorses; others in waggons, like the Clarks, following the Braddock route down to Redstone-Old-Fort on the Monongahela, where boats must be built.

And here at Redstone was George Rogers Clark, come up to meet them from the Falls. In short order, under his direction, boatbuilders were busy. York and old York took a hand, and William, in a first experience that was yet to find play in the far Idaho.

The teasing Fanny looked out from her piquant sun-bonnet. Lucy, more sedate, was accompanied by her betrothed, Major Croghan.