arms of a friendly maple,
whose top bloomed green about sixty feet below the cliff's rim, and left
his would-be captors on the height above, grunting their amazement.

During this summer Boone journeyed through the valleys of the Kentucky
and the Licking. He followed the buffalo traces to the two Blue Licks
and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy
moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not be counted. For many miles
he wound along the Ohio, as far as the Falls. He also found the Big Bone
Lick with its mammoth fossils.

In July, 1770, Daniel returned to the Red River camp and there met
Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued
their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in
Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that
winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the
hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before.
In the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin
another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in
the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker,
afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing
sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself
stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the
strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a
deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his
mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This
incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the
men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.

In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing
the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt
and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years.
But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in
the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took
everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.

Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky

When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in
the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen
first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more
recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in
conflic