ated. Findlay was ill, and
Holden, Mooney, and Cooley had had their fill of Kentucky; but Squire,
Neely, Stewart, and Daniel were ready for more adventures. Daniel, too,
felt under the positive necessity of putting in another year at hunting
and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family.
Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp.
Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of "Gulliver's
Travels" to entertain the hunters while they dressed their deerskins
or tinkered their weapons. In honor of the "Lorbrulgrud" of the book,
though with a pronunciation all their own, they christened the nearest
creek; and as "Lulbegrud Creek" it is still known.

Before the end of the winter the two Boones were alone in the
wilderness. Their brother-in-law, Stewart, had disappeared; and Neely,
discouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May,
Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of beaver,
otter, and deerskins to exchange in the North Carolinian trading houses
for more supplies; and Daniel was left solitary in Kentucky.

Now followed those lonely explorations which gave Daniel Boone his
special fame above all Kentucky's pioneers. He was by no means the first
white man to enter Kentucky; and when he did enter, it was as one of
a party, under another man's guidance--if we except his former
disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But
these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they
met with loss and hardship and measured the certain risks against the
possible gains. Boone, the man of imagination, turned to wild earth
as to his kin. His genius lay in the sense of oneness he felt with his
wilderness environment. An instinct he had which these other men, as
courageous perhaps as he, did not possess.

Never in all the times when he was alone in the woods and had no other
man's safety or counsel to consider, did he suffer ill fortune. The
nearest approach to trouble that befell him when alone occurred one day
during this summer when some Indians emerged from their green shelter
and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with
rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently
cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing
without haste to take him, meanwhile greeting him with mock amity. Over
the cliff leaped Boone and into the outspread