The Conquest. Eva Emery Dye
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old woman peered from the door of a hut in a gorge of the hills, late in the afternoon.
"We are members of the Virginia Legislature fleeing from Tarleton's raid."
"Ride on, then, ye cowardly knaves! Here my husband and sons have just gone to Charlottesville to fight for ye, an' ye a runnin' awa' wi' all yer might. Clar out; ye get naething here."
"But, my good woman, it would never do to let the British capture the Legislature."
"If Patterick Hennery had been in Albemarle, the British dragoons would naever ha' passed the Rivanna."
"But, my good woman, here is Patrick Henry."
"Patterick Hennery? Patterick Hennery? Well, well, if Patterick Hennery is here it must be all right. Coom in, coom in to the best I have."
But Daniel Boone and three or four others were captured, and carried away to Cornwallis to be released soon after on parole.
"Tarleton's troop!" cried little Meriwether Lewis, seven years old.
Sweeping down the Rivanna came the desperado to the home of Colonel Nicholas Lewis, away in the Continental army.
"What a paradise!" exclaimed Tarleton, raising his hands.
"Why, then, do you interrupt it?" inquired Mrs. Lewis, alone at home with her small children and slaves.
The trooper slept that night in his horseman's cloak on the kitchen floor. At daylight Mrs. Lewis was awakened by a clatter in her henyard. Ducks, chickens, turkeys, the troopers were wringing their necks. One decrepit old drake only escaped by skurrying under the barn.
Bowing low till his plume swept the horse's mane, Tarleton galloped away.
The wrath of Aunt Molly! "Here, Pompey, you just catch that drake. Ride as fast as you can, and present it to Colonel Tarleton with my compliments."
On flying steed, drake squawking and flouncing on his back, the darkey flew after the troopers.
"Well, Pompey, did you overtake Colonel Tarleton?" was Aunt Molly's wrathful inquiry.
"Yes'm."
"What did he say?"
"He put de drake in his wallet, and say he much obleeged!"
Little Meriwether, sitting on the gate-post, laughed at his aunt's discomfiture.
The roll of a drum broke the stillness of Sabbath in the Blue Ridge.
"Tarleton's troop!" By the bed of her sick husband sat a Spartan mother at Staunton. Her sons were in the army at the north, but three young lads, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen were there.
Placing their father's old firelock in their hands, "Go forth, my children," she said, "repel the foot of the invader or see my face no more."
But Tarleton did not force the mountain pass—the boys went on down to join Lafayette.
From farm and forest, children and grandsires hurried to Lafayette. The proud earl retired to the sea and stopped to rest at the little peninsula of Yorktown, waiting for reinforcements.
Down suddenly from the north came Washington with his tattered Continentals and Rochambeau's gay Frenchmen, and the French fleet sailed into the Chesapeake. Cornwallis was bottled up at Yorktown.
The boy, Lafayette, had simply put the stopper in the bottle and waited.
Seventy cannon rolled in on Yorktown. George Rogers Clark, all the West, was appealing to Washington, but the great chief unmoved kept his eye on Lord Cornwallis.
On the 19th of October, 1781, the aristocratic marquis, who had commenced his career as aide-de-camp to a king, surrendered to the rebels of America.
"'Wallis has surrendered! surrendered! surrendered!"
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark flung up their caps with other boys and shouted with the best of them, "'Wallis has surrendered!"
After the surrender of Cornwallis, Washington and Lafayette and the officers of the French and American armies went to Fredericksburg to pay their respects to Mary, the mother of Washington. The entire surrounding country was watching in gala attire, and among them the old cavalier, John Clark of Caroline.
On his white horse Washington passed the mulberry trees. Quick as a flash little William turned—"Why, father, he does look like my brother George! Is that why people call our George the 'Washington of the West'?"
A provisional treaty was signed at Paris, November 30, 1782, a few days after the return of George Rogers Clark from that last Chillicothe raid. Slowly, by pack-horse and flatboat, the news reached Kentucky.
The last of the British army sailed away. Washington made his immortal farewell, and went back to his farm, arriving on Christmas Eve. Bonfires and rockets, speeches, thanksgiving and turkey, ended the year 1782.
But with his return from the last scene at Yorktown, the father of Meriwether Lewis lay down and died, a martyr of the Revolution.
XX
THE OLD VIRGINIA HOME
Back over Boone's trace, the Wilderness Road he had travelled so many times, went General George Rogers Clark sometime in the early Spring of 1783, past the thrifty fields of Fincastle and the Shenandoah Germans, with their fat cattle and huge red barns. Every year the stout Pennsylvanians were building farther and farther up. Year by year the fields increased, and rosy girls stacked the hay in defiance of all Virginian customs across the Ridge.
But the man who a thousand miles to the west held Illinois by the prowess of his arm and the terror of his name, sprang not with the buoyant step of six years before when he had gone to Virginia after the gunpowder. His thoughts were at Kaskaskia, Vincennes, Louisville, where his unsustained garrisons were suffering for food and clothing.
"Peace, peace, peace!" he muttered. "'Tis but a mockery. Must Kentucky lie still and be scalped?"
Still the savages raided the border, not in numbers, but in squads, persistent and elusive. Isham Floyd, the boy drummer of Vincennes, had been captured by the savages and three days tortured in the woods, and burnt at the stake.
"My boy-brother in the hands of those monsters?" exclaimed the great-hearted John Floyd of the Bear Grass. A word roused the country, the savages were dispersed, but poor Isham was dead. And beside him lay his last tormentor, the son of an Indian chief, shot by the avenging rifle of John Floyd.
Riding home with a heavy heart on the 12th of April, a ball struck Colonel Floyd, passed through his arm, and entered his breast. Behind the trees they caught a glimpse of the smoking rifle of Big Foot, that chief whose son was slain. Leaping from his own horse to that of his brother, Charles Floyd sustained the drooping form until they reached the Bear Grass.
"Charles," whispered the dying man, "had I been riding Pompey this would not have happened. Pompey pricks his ears and almost speaks if a foe is near."
At the feet of Jane Buchanan her brave young husband was laid, his black locks already damp with the dew of death.
"Papa! Papa!" Little two-year-old George Rogers Clark Floyd screamed with terror. Ten days later the stricken wife, Jane Buchanan, gave birth to another son, whom they named in honour of his heroic father.
With such a grief upon him, General George Rogers Clark wended his lonesome way through the Cumberland Gap to Virginia. Now in the night-time he heard young Isham cry. Not a heart in Kentucky but bewailed the fate of the drummer boy. And John Floyd, his loss was a public calamity.
"John Floyd, John Floyd," murmured Clark on his lonely way, "the encourager of my earliest adventures, truest heart of the West!"
Lochry's men haunted him while