when he halted he called me to him, my
answers to his questions seeming to amuse him. Indeed, I became a kind
of pet with the backwoodsmen, Cowan often flinging me to his shoulder as
he swung along. The pack was taken from the sorrel mare and divided
among the party, and Polly Ann made to ride that we might move the
faster.

It must have been the next afternoon, about four, that the rough stockade
of Harrodstown greeted our eyes as we stole cautiously to the edge of the
forest. And the sight of no roofs and spires could have been more
welcome than that of these logs and cabins, broiling in the midsummer
sun. At a little distance from the fort, a silent testimony of siege,
the stumpy, cleared fields were overgrown with weeds, tall and rank, the
corn choked. Nearer the stockade, where the keepers of the fort might
venture out at times, a more orderly growth met the eye. It was young
James Ray whom Colonel Clark singled to creep with our message to the
gates. At six, when the smoke was rising from the stone chimneys behind
the palisades, Ray came back to say that all was well. Then we went
forward quickly, hands waved a welcome above the logs, the great wooden
gates swung open, and at last we had reached the haven for which we had
suffered so much. Mangy dogs barked at our feet, men and women ran
forward joyfully to seize our hands and greet us.

And so we came to Kaintuckee.

CHAPTER X

HARRODSTOWN

The old forts like Harrodstown and Boonesboro and Logan's at St. Asaph's
have long since passed away. It is many, many years since I lived
through that summer of siege in Harrodstown, the horrors of it are faded
and dim, the discomforts lost to a boy thrilled with a new experience. I
have read in my old age the books of travellers in Kentucky, English and
French, who wrote much of squalor and strife and sin and little of those
qualities that go to the conquest of an empire and the making of a
people. Perchance my own pages may be colored by gratitude and love for
the pioneers amongst whom I found myself, and thankfulness to God that we
had reached them alive.

I know not how many had been cooped up in the little fort since the early
spring, awaiting the chance to go back to their weed-choked clearings.
The fort at Harrodstown was like an hundred others I have since seen, but
sufficiently surprising to me then. Imagine a great parallelogram made
of log cabins set end to end, their common outside wall being the wall o