with human freight wheeled over the rough
country, and boats, large and small, were afloat on the streams which
pour into the Great Kanawha and at length mingle with the Ohio at
Point Pleasant, where the battle was fought which opened the gates of
Kentucky.

Some of the travelers poured into the little settlement at the junction
of the Elk and the Kanawha, where Charleston now lies. Others, who had
been later in starting or had come from a greater distance, gathered
along the banks of the Kanawha. At last shouts from those stationed
farthest up the stream echoed down the valley and told the rest that
what they had come out to see was at hand.

Several pirogues drifted into view on the river, now brightening in the
sunshine. In the vessels were men and their families; bales and bundles
and pieces of household furnishings, heaped to the gunwale; a few cattle
and horses standing patiently. But it was for one man above all that the
eager eyes of the settlers were watching, and him they saw clearly as
his boat swung by--a tall figure, erect and powerful, his keen friendly
blue eyes undimmed and his ruddy face unlined by time, though sixty-five
winters had frosted his black hair.

For a decade these settlers had known Daniel Boone, as storekeeper, as
surveyor, as guide and soldier. They had eaten of the game he killed and
lavishly distributed. And they too--like the folk of Clinch Valley in
the year of Dunmore's War--had petitioned Virginia to bestow military
rank upon their protector. "Lieutenant Colonel" had been his title
among them, by their demand. Once indeed he had represented them in the
Virginia Assembly and, for that purpose, trudged to Richmond with rifle
and hunting dog. Not interested in the Legislature's proceedings, he
left early in the session and tramped home again.

But not even the esteem of friends and neighbors could hold the great
hunter when the deer had fled. So Daniel Boone was now on his way
westward to Missouri, to a new land of fabled herds and wide spaces,
where the hunter's gun might speak its one word with authority and
where the soul of a silent and fearless man might find its true abode in
Nature's solitude. Waving his last farewells, he floated past the little
groups--till their shouts of good will were long silenced, and his fleet
swung out upon the Ohio.

As Boone sailed on down the Beautiful River which forms the northern
boundary of Kentucky, old friends and newcomers who had only he