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 of the fort, and loopholed.  At the four corners of the parallelogram the cabins jutted out, with ports in the angle in order to give a flanking fire in case the savages reached the palisade.  And then there were huge log gates with watch-towers on either sides where sentries sat day and night scanning the forest line.  Within the fort was a big common dotted with forest trees, where such cattle as had been saved browsed on the scanty grass.  There had been but the one scrawny horse before our arrival.

And the settlers!  How shall I describe them as they crowded around us inside the gate?  Some stared at us with sallow faces and eyes brightened by the fever, yet others had the red glow of health.  Many of the men wore rough beards, unkempt, and yellow, weather-worn hunting shirts, often stained with blood.  The barefooted women wore sunbonnets and loose homespun gowns, some of linen made from nettles, while the children swarmed here and there and everywhere in any costume that chance had given them.  All seemingly talking at once, they plied us with question after question of the trace, the Watauga settlements, the news in the Carolinys, and how the war went.

“A lad is it, this one,” said an Irish voice near me, “and a woman!  The dear help us, and who’d ’ave thought to see a woman come over the mountain this year!  Where did ye find them, Bill Cowan?”