II

THE HOUSE OF CEDAR

So far as they knew, there was no tie of blood or relationship binding them to the kind people of Cedar House.  Yet it was the only home that they could remember and very dear to them both.

It was a great square of rough, dark logs, and seemed now, seen through the uncertain light, to stand in the centre of a shadowy hamlet, so many smaller cabins were clustered around it.  The custom of the country was to add cabin after cabin as the family outgrew the original log house.  The instinct of safety, the love of kindred, and the longing for society in the perilous loneliness of the wilderness held these first Kentuckians very close together.  So that as their own villages thus grew around them and only their own dwelt near them, they naturally became as clannish as their descendants have been ever since.

The cabin nearest Cedar House contained two rooms, and was used by its master, Judge Knox, for his own bedroom and law office.  There was a still larger cabin somewhat more distant from the main building, which was intended for the use of his nephew, William Pressley, on the marriage of that young lawyer to Ruth.  But the wedding was some time off yet, having been set for Christmas Eve, and the cabin which was to welcome the bride from Cedar House was not quite complete.  The smallest and the oldest cabin was David’s.  The long black line of cabins crouching under the hillside where the shadows were deepest, marked the quarters of the slaves,—­a dark storm-cloud already settling heavily on the fair horizon of the new state.

Cedar House itself was the grandest of its time in all that country.  Built entirely of huge red cedar logs it was two stories in height, the first house of more than one story standing on the shores of the southern Ohio.  Its roof was the wonder and envy of the whole region for many years.  The shingles were of black walnut, elegantly rounded at the butt-ends.  They were fastened on with solid walnut pegs driven in holes bored through both the shingles and the laths with a brace and a bit.  For there was not a nail in Cedar House from its firm foundation to its fine roof.  Even the hinges and the latch of the wide front door were made of wood.  The judge often mentioned this fact with much pride, and never failed to add that the leathern latch-string always hung outside.  But he was still prouder of the massive, towering chimney of Cedar House, and with good reason.  The other houses thinly scattered through the wilderness had humble chimneys of sticks covered with clay.  The chimney of Cedar House was of rough stone—­of one hundred wagon loads, as the judge boasted—­which had been hauled with great difficulty over a long distance, because there was none near by.