outhwestern Pennsylvania.

Two years passed. In March, 1773, Simon Butler, aged eighteen, was
camped with two other hunters, named Strader and Yager, beside the
Great Kanawha River of northwestern West Virginia. They were trappers
as well as hunters: white Indians who traded their furs in at Fort Pitt.

This day Indians attacked the camp; Yager toppled over, dead; and when
Simon and his older comrade, Strader, managed to gain the highway of
the Ohio River, westward, they were nearly dead, too, from starvation.

Simon soon became a scout. He achieved fame as a spy against the
Indians. From Fort Pitt he and another Simon--Simon Girty--employed by
the military government of Virginia traversed the forests far and near,
watching the movements of the Indians. Simon Girty deserted to the
Shawnees, during the Revolution, and was a cruel enemy to all his
former fellow-Americans; but Simon Butler remained true blue.

[Illustration: Simon Kenton in trouble. (From an Old Print)]

When in the fall of 1774 he entered Kentucky the lovely, he had reached
full stature. Six feet one inch he measured, in his stockinged feet--a
real Long Hunter; weighed one hundred and ninety pounds, and could
spare not an ounce; was the light-haired, blue-eyed, gentle-mannered,
laughing type of fighter, with a great good-nature and a single-track,
simple mind; but when he was desperate or angered his blue eyes blazed
and his strength was prodigious.

So, at nineteen, Simon Butler had turned out a personage to be reckoned
with.

He was at the Lower Blue Licks country, where Daniel Boone was captured
later, before the founding of Boonesborough. He built a cabin at
Washington, south of the Ohio River in northeastern Kentucky, and from
there prowled about with two comrades. In September of 1775 another
white wanderer told them that American men and women were living on the
Kentucky River in the interior to the south.

Rejoicing, they abandoned Washington, and traveled down to new
Boonesborough. It seemed good to see white women again.

Simon still thought that he had killed his rival Leitchman. He kept
his name of Butler. Daniel Boone was glad to have such reinforcement.
Soon he liked the young man. In the course of the sieges of 1777 Simon
rescued him, before the gates; shot his nearest foe and grabbing him
carried him, leg broken, into the fort.

Daniel Boone was a man of few words. But he spoke roundly--for him.

"Well, Simon, you