A Volunteer with Pike Part 14

Of this and the nefarious plans since charged to that great dreamer, I then had not the remotest suspicion, and soon turned my attention from the pondering senor.

Scattered up and down the midchannel for three miles or more was a string of barges, flats, and keelboats, laden with flour, lumber, and other up-river products, for the market at New Orleans. Like ourselves, they were coming down from the higher shipping-ports with the Spring fresh.

At my request, Alisanda kept within the house, until, by a vigorous bit of sculling, I had sent our craft beyond earshot of the nearest of these barges. The huge, clumsy craft, which must have been upwards of four hundred tons burden, was manned by the usual crew of twenty-five or thirty rowdy, drunken rivermen, whose ribaldry and rude jests were unfitted for the ears of a gentlewoman.

By adroit steering and an occasional return to my sculling, we were fortunate enough to keep our distance from these other boats, and for the greater part of the day I had the pleasure of pointing out to Alisanda the beauties of the river scenery. Rightful in fact, and most appropriate in truth, is the interpretation which tells us that "Ohio"

means "the beautiful river."

A day of clear, warm sunshine, marred by only one shower, gave us our first chance to share the ever-shifting views of headlands and rolling, wooded hills. Though the forest was as yet only half in leaf, and the height of the flood covered all other than the highest of the bottoms, the nature of the scene was an unending wonder to my companions, who in turn compared it with the sterile mountains of Old Spain and the deserts of New Spain. They could not liken it to the tamed woodlands of England; for, notwithstanding a generation of settlement, with the river long since the main artery of a great commerce, these banks were as yet in many places unbroken wilderness, the abode of elk and deer and wolf, of tigerish panther and lumbering bear.

High above us soared eagles and turkey buzzards, spying for carrion and live prey, each according to his nature, as they had soared and spied in the late sixties and early seventies, when Gist and Boone and the great Washington first threaded the untraced wilderness and skimmed downstream in their bark canoes to the dark and b.l.o.o.d.y hunting-grounds of the hostile tribes. Since then what vast changes had come over the land!

What thousands of homesteads hewn out of the gloomy depths of beech and oak, walnut and maple forest! What scores of settlements and towns, ranging in size up to Cincinnati, with its three hundred and more houses, many of brick and stone, its fifteen hundred whites and thousand slaves, its genteel coaches and chariots, and its educational inst.i.tutions!

Yet, aside from the slaughtered buffalo and the backward-driven savage, how small the change in the forest life! Along the rocky banks the deadly rattlesnake and copperhead still lay coiled in wait; the deer came timidly down to the water along old game traces where the panther still lurked; and flocks of screaming, chattering paroquets still flew up river from the southwest, their emerald plumage contrasting with the bright hues of the redbirds and woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, the orioles and kingfishers.

The following day, below the mouth of the Scioto River, we had view of one of the strangest sights of the West,--a flight of pa.s.senger pigeons.

The flock pa.s.sed upstream above the left sh.o.r.e in a dense column and with a tremendous roaring sound of their millions of wings. Though we were going in a contrary direction, hours pa.s.sed before we saw the last stragglers of their amazing mult.i.tude, and this despite the fact that they are among the swiftest of birds. While making a southward bend of the stream, we came beneath them, the lowermost flying so near overhead that I was able to kill a number simply by flinging f.a.gots among them.

As their flesh, though dark, is choice eating, we enjoyed a most savory pie at the evening meal.

During the night the boat caught me nodding and gave itself into the grasp of an eddy, which held it fast for two hours or more. My regret over the delay was short-lived, since at dawn I made the welcome discovery that it had caused us to part company with the last of the cargo flotilla. The rivermen were well supplied with skiffs, and as some of them are not above theft and even outright piracy, I had spent most of these two nights in vigilant watch, with my rifle and Don Pedro's pistols charged and primed against a night attack.

Less welcome than the absence of such consorts was the cold rain which set in before dawn and lasted well along toward noon, with now and then a slashing drive of sleet. I spent the dreary hours fast asleep in my bunk, for Don Pedro insisted upon his right to share the hardships of our voyage.

When I turned out, the sun had burst through, and the leaden clouds were rolling away to the eastward. My first act was to sweep the Ohio sh.o.r.e with an anxious glance. The swiftly changing vistas of winding river and pleasant hills that undulated beneath their cloak of budding green, told me that we had entered upon the run of the Great Bend. By good fortune, I was just in time to sight the well-remembered hills of my childhood home. Another twist of the channel brought us in view of the Little Miami.

Cap in hand, I stepped to the side of the flat, and stood quiet and apart, gazing at the rough, white stone that rose clear against the sky-line on the first crest below the stream's mouth. What memories of childhood rushed in upon me! what bitterness and grief!

At last the envious river swept us around a masking hill. I turned slowly about, with all my heaviness plainly written in my look. Less than three paces behind me stood the senorita, her dark eyes fixed upon me with a soft pity far different from their usual mockery.

"You grieve!" she murmured.

"It is the grave of my mother."

Don Pedro dropped the handle of the steer-oar and turned to me with a courtesy that went far deeper than outer form. "Your mother? May the Virgin bless her!"

Alisanda made the sign of the cross, and her lips moved in quick prayer: "_Ave Maria purisima_--"

After a little the don ventured a word of consolation: "It is a beautiful place for a tomb,--serene and grand on its solitary hillcrest.

When my own time comes, may I rest as well!"

Serene!--beautiful! The words roused me from my unmanly weakness.

"You do not know!" I cried. "Her grave was dug among the ashes of our home. She was murdered by the Shawnees."

"You speak of the Indian savages?" murmured Alisanda. "Is it so long ago as that?"

"In my boyhood--in ninety-one--the Spring before St. Clair's terrible defeat. The northern tribes raided the settlements from above Pittsburg to the lower Kentucky, with a fury before unknown. The ferocious braves crept by night through the very streets of Cincinnati and under the walls of Fort Washington. Our home, outlying yonder on the Little Miami, was one of the first struck. The memory of that morning is burned deep into my brain. My father had gone into town to barter some skins for flour, and my mother was part way down the hillside, ploughing for corn.

I had gone up to the cabin to fetch a jug of cider, and was half-way back, when a score of Shawnees in their black war paint leaped from the ravine and set upon my mother.

"I ran to help her, but she, striking bravely at the treacherous savages with the ox-goad, screamed to me to fly for the guns. I turned as she fell under the stroke of a tomahawk. The murderers leaped after me, yelling and firing. Rifle b.a.l.l.s and arrows whistled about me, some piercing my shirt. But I gained the cabin unhurt. On the pegs beside the door lay my father's rifle and his old Queen Anne musket of the Revolution, which I had that morning charged half to the muzzle with swanshot in preparation for a bear which had been stealing our porkers.

"Barring the door with one hand, I caught down the musket with the other, and fired through the nearest loophole. My pursuers were coming on fairly in a body, and the distance was such that the swanshot scattered just enough to cover the foremost warriors. One fell dead and three more were wounded. In a twinkling all others than the one killed leaped to either side and checked their rush.

"But their chief came bounding up from the rear through their midst, flourishing his b.l.o.o.d.y tomahawk and yelling to them to come on. Young as I was, if given a support for the heavy barrel, I could handle my father's rifle as well as he himself. The chief fell within twenty paces of the door, with the hole of the rifle ball between his glaring eyes.

At this, fearful that they had run upon a trap, the red warriors ran dodging and side-leaping to the nearest brush, while I caught up a knife and rushed out to scalp the chief--"

"_Por Dios!_" cried Don Pedro. "You ran out!--you took the scalp of the chief under the eyes of his followers?"

"My mother's scalp hung at his belt. I was mad with fury. I would have struck the murderer even had the others already turned."

"They did turn?" asked Alisanda, her eyes widening with the horror of the vision she pictured.

"They turned as I burst from the cabin. I was surrounded--seized fast--but not before I had torn off the scalp of their chief and shaken it in their painted faces!" My eyes flamed at the memory of that fierce vengeance.

"_Madre de Dios!_" breathed the Spaniard--"You stung them to wildest fury!"

"I sought to make them strike me down. Better death under the tomahawk than the slow agony of torture at the stake. What greater shame to them than for a boy of twelve to kill two of their most famous warriors,--to taunt them with the b.l.o.o.d.y scalp of their chief?"

"Yet they spared you!" whispered Alisanda, her eyes fixed upon my flushed face.

"For the torture. When they took me north to the Shawnee towns, I was made to run the gantlet. Being quick-footed and nimble, I avoided most of the heavier blows and midway of the line dodged out sideways, tripping up the old squaw who sought to stop me. Before the rabble could overtake me, I had set myself in the midst of the chiefs and foremost warriors of the village, whose dignity had prevented them from joining in the lesser torture.

"My craft in tripping the squaw and avoiding the greater number of my tormentors won me the protection of the chiefs, and while they waved off the boys and squaws, the young warrior Tec.u.mseh, one of the brothers of the chief I had killed, claimed me for adoption in place of his kinsman.

The other brother, Elskwatawa, promptly seconded Tec.u.mseh. After much dispute, their claim was allowed, and for three years I lived as a member of the tribe, always watched against escape, yet treated with utmost kindness.

"That Fall the leading members of my tribe were present with the braves of the Miamis, Delawares, Wyandots, Iroquois, and other tribes, who made a second Braddock's Defeat of their battle with General St. Clair. They brought back no captives, but such quant.i.ties of plunder and such tales of slaughter that I could hardly credit either my eyes or my ears.

"After this I was taken to the neighborhood of the British fort near the Maumee Rapids, where the notorious renegade McKee proved that even the worst of men have their better nature. He sought to ransom me from my adopted brothers. This was refused, but I was permitted to come and go freely to the fort. One day, chancing upon a book of physic in the scant library of the post surgeon, I showed such interest that the portly old doctor seized upon me as a _protege_.

"Within a year I was forced to return to the Shawnee towns, but with me I took a Latin grammar and my precious treatise on physic. Again I was brought to the Maumee, and there placed for safekeeping in the fort during General Wayne's cautious but steady advance north from Fort Washington. This meant months more of study under the tuition of my kindly surgeon; so that upon the day of Wayne's glorious victory at Fallen Timbers, when he drove the routed warriors of the allied tribes past the very walls of the fort, I was further advanced in my studies than many an English schoolboy of seventeen or eighteen, and, I must confess, fast acquiring British sympathies.

"But the sight of Wayne's victorious cavalry, who rode up defiantly within pistol-shot of the palisades, roused in me such a feverish desire to escape that I should have flung myself upon the bayonets of the sentinels rather than have remained. Fortunately the garrison was so intent upon the burning of the dwellings and trading establishments without the fort by our army, that I was able to slip over the stockade with the aid of a rope, and make off safely in the darkness."

Alisanda sighed her relief of the suspense that had held her tense. "So you escaped!" she exclaimed.

"To the American camp where I found both my father and my mother's cousin, Captain Van Rensselaer. The captain had been shot from his saddle during the battle, but was able to return with us to Cincinnati when my father's term of service as a mounted volunteer expired. It was Captain Rensselaer who, upon his return to New York, sent for me to complete my medical and other studies in Columbia College."

"_Por Dios!_ What a life!" cried Don Pedro. "We also have our Indian battles. But to live among the ferocious savages--_Santa Maria_! Small wonder you men of the forest wilderness are men of iron!"

"Many settlers of soft fibre have come over the mountains since the days of peace. But the men who first hewed their homes in the wilderness had to be of iron. Such are those who now press on to the new frontiers of the South, the Lakes, and the Mississippi."

"Among whom is our friend Don Juan," replied Alisanda.

I looked, thinking to see a mocking glance, and instead found myself gazing down into the fathomless depths of her eyes.

CHAPTER X