a
fancy to me, perhaps because of the very persistence of my devotion to
him. I cleaned his gun, filled his powder flask, and ran to do his every
bidding.

I used in the hot summer days to lie under the elm tree and listen to
the settlers' talk about a man named Henderson, who had bought a great
part of Kentucky from the Indians, and had gone out with Boone to found
Boonesboro some two years before. They spoke of much that I did not
understand concerning the discountenance by Virginia of these claims,
speculating as to whether Henderson's grants were good. For some of
them held these grants, and others Virginia grants--a fruitful source
of quarrel between them. Some spoke, too, of Washington and his ragged
soldiers going up and down the old colonies and fighting for a freedom
which there seemed little chance of getting. But their anger seemed
to blaze most fiercely when they spoke of a mysterious British general
named Hamilton, whom they called "the ha'r buyer," and who from his
stronghold in the north country across the great Ohio sent down these
hordes of savages to harry us. I learned to hate Hamilton with the rest,
and pictured him with the visage of a fiend. We laid at his door every
outrage that had happened at the three stations, and put upon him
the blood of those who had been carried off to torture in the Indian
villages of the northern forests. And when--amidst great excitement--a
spent runner would arrive from Boonesboro or St. Asaph's and beg Mr.
Clark for a squad, it was commonly with the first breath that came into
his body that he cursed Hamilton.

So the summer wore away, while we lived from hand to mouth on such
scanty fare as the two of them shot and what we could venture to gather
in the unkempt fields near the gates. A winter of famine lurked ahead,
and men were goaded near to madness at the thought of clearings made and
corn planted in the spring within reach of their hands, as it were, and
they might not harvest it. At length, when a fortnight had passed, and
Tom and Ray had gone forth day after day without sight or fresh sign of
Indians, the weight lifted from our hearts. There were many things
that might yet be planted and come to maturity before the late Kentucky
frosts.

The pressure within the fort, like a flood, opened the gates of it,
despite the sturdily disapproving figure of a young man who stood silent
under the sentry box, leaning on his Deckard. He was Colonel George
Rogers Clark,