rhaps
he was planning a career of soldiering, for in later years he was to
distinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack.
Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him
by the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where
buffalo and deer roamed in thousands. Perhaps he meant to set out
ere long in search of the great adventure of his dreams, despite the
terrible dangers of trail making across the zones of war into the
unknown.

However that may be, Boone straightway followed neither of these
possible plans on his return to the Yadkin but halted for a different
adventure. There, a rifle shot's distance from his threshold, was
offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was
twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in
no mind to refuse what life held out to him in the person of Rebecca
Bryan. Rebecca was the daughter of Joseph Bryan, who had come to the
Yadkin from Pennsylvania some time before the Boones; and she was in her
seventeenth year.

Writers of an earlier and more sentimental period than ours have
endeavored to supply, from the saccharine stores of their fancy, the
romantic episodes connected with Boone's wooing which history has
omitted to record. Hence the tale that the young hunter, walking abroad
in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes shining
in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot--his
aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was
missing its mark at ten paces, Cupid's dart was speeding home. So runs
the story concocted a hundred years later by some gentle scribe ignorant
alike of game seasons, the habits of hunters, and the way of a man with
a maid in a primitive world.

Daniel and Rebecca were married in the spring of 1756. Squire Boone,
in his capacity as justice of the peace, tied the knot; and in a
small cabin built upon his spacious lands the young couple set up
housekeeping. Here Daniel's first two sons were born. In the third
year of his marriage, when the second child was a babe in arms, Daniel
removed with his wife and their young and precious family to Culpeper
County in eastern Virginia, for the border was going through its darkest
days of the French and Indian War. During the next two or three years
we find him in Virginia engaged as a wagoner, hauling tobacco in season;
but back on the border with his ri