A BORDERER IN AMERICA

It would be matter for wonder if, in the histories of old Border families, record of strange personal experiences did not at times crop up.  Sons of the Border have wandered far, and have sojourned in many lands, and borne their part in many an untoward event.  But it is not likely that any can lay claim to adventures more strange and romantic than those which, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, befell a youthful member of one of the most ancient of these Border clans.  This story of his adventures is literally true, as the family records prove, but the descendants of the person to whom they happened prefer that he should not figure in the tale under his own name.  For convenience, therefore, it must suffice here to call him Andrew Kerr.

The responsibilities of life began early in his day.  A boy who would now find himself in a very junior form at school, was then considered old enough to serve his Majesty in a marching regiment, or left his home to engage in business whilst yet his handwriting had scarcely emerged from childhood’s clumsy formation, and veritable infants served as midshipmen in ships of war.  Young Kerr was no exception to this general rule.  Long before the boy had reached the age of sixteen he was shipped off to New York, there to join an uncle who, in order to engage in commerce, had lately retired from the 60th “Royal American” Regiment, then a famous colonial corps.

Those were stirring times, and for a passenger the voyage to America was no hum-drum affair devoid of excitement or peril.  We were at war with France and Spain.  Every white sail, therefore, that showed above the horizon meant the coming of a possible enemy; no day passed, in some part of which there might not chance to arise the necessity to employ every device of seamanship if escape were to be effected should the enemy prove too big to fight, or in which there was not at least the possibility of smelling powder burned in earnest.

Nor were danger and excitement necessarily ended with the ship’s arrival in New York harbour.  We were still fighting the French in Canada; men yet told grim tales of Braddock’s defeat and of the horrors of Indian warfare.  To him whom business or duty took far from the sea-board into the country of the savage and treacherous Iroquois, there was the ever-present probability that he would some day—­perhaps many times—­be compelled to fight for his life, with the certainty that, if disabled by wounds he fell into the enemy’s hands, the scalp would be torn from his skull ere death could put an end to his sufferings; whilst capture meant, almost for a certainty, the being eventually put to death after undergoing the most hideous tortures that the cruelty of the Redskins could devise.  To the colonists, “the only good Indian was a dead Indian”; and doubtless, by the newly-landed Andrew Kerr, the order at once to proceed up-country with a convoy