He went straight from the door of Cedar House to the stable under the hill, stopping at his cabin only long enough to get his rifle.  The stable was very dark within, but he knew where to find the pony that he always rode, and the saddle and bridle which he always used, without needing to see.  And the pony knew him, too, for all the darkness, and welcomed him with a friendly whinny which said so as plainly as words.  For the boy and the pony were good friends, and moreover they understood one another perfectly, which is rarely the case with the best of friends.  And then they were both foundlings, and that may have made another bond between them.  The pony had been a wild colt caught in the forest on the other side of the river.  Nothing was known of his ancestors, although they were supposed by those who knew best, to have been the worn-out horses of good blood which had been deserted in the wilderness by the Spaniards.  But then everything cruel was laid at the door of the hated Spaniards in those days, when they had so lately been forced to take their throttling grasp from the throat of the Beautiful River.  The pony certainly bore no outward mark of noble ancestry.  He was a homely, humble, rough-coated little beast.  Yet David liked him better than all the other finer horses in the judge’s stables, notwithstanding that some of these had real pedigrees; for good horses were already appearing in Kentucky.  The judge allowed David to claim the pony as his own.  Robert Knox was a kind man when he did not forget, and he never forgot any one without forgetting himself,—­first and most of all,—­as he did sometimes.

David always thought of the pony as an orphan like himself, and his own bruised feelings were very tender toward the friendless little fellow.  He led him from the stable now as a mark of respect and because it was dark; for he knew that the pony, with a word, would follow him anywhere, at any time, like a faithful dog.  It was not quite so dark outside, and springing into the saddle, the boy bent down and stroked the rough neck and the tangled mane that no brush could ever make smooth.  The pony lifted his head to meet the caress, and then these two orphans of the wilderness looked out dimly, wondering, over this wonderful new country into which both were come, without knowing how or why or whence, through no will or choice of their own.

That portion of Kentucky rises gently but steadily from the river, and rolls gradually upward toward its eastern hills.  On this October night so close to the very beginning of the commonwealth, these terraced hills were still covered with the primeval forest.  Hill after hill, and forest after forest, on and on and higher and higher, till the earth and the heavens came together.  Near the river on the natural open spaces, and where earliest the clearings had been made, the boy could see the widely scattered rude homes, the young orchards, and the new fields, which the first Kentuckians had won from the wilderness,