“Ah,” he said, “that I can’t tell even to you.”

“To catch Hamilton?” I ventured at random.

He looked at me queerly.

“Would you go along, Davy?” said he, laughing now.

“Would you take Tom?”

“Among the first,” answered Colonel Clark, heartily.

We were seated under the elm near the spring, and at that instant I saw Tom coming toward us.  I jumped up, thinking to please him by this intelligence, when Colonel Clark pulled me down again.

“Davy,” said he, almost roughly, I thought, “remember that we have been joking.  Do you understand?—­joking.  You have a tongue in your mouth, but sense enough in your head, I believe, to hold it.”  He turned to Tom.  “McChesney, this is a queer lad you brought us,” said he.

“He’s a little deevil,” agreed Tom, for that had become a formula with him.

It was all very mysterious to me, and I lay awake many a night with curiosity, trying to solve a puzzle that was none of my business.  And one day, to cap the matter, two woodsmen arrived at Harrodstown with clothes frayed and bodies lean from a long journey.  Not one of the hundred questions with which they were beset would they answer, nor say where they had been or why, save that they had carried out certain orders of Clark, who was locked up with them in a cabin for several hours.

The first of October, the day of Colonel Clark’s departure, dawned crisp and clear.  He was to take with him the disheartened and the cowed, the weaklings who loved neither work nor exposure nor danger.  And before he set out of the gate he made a little speech to the assembled people.

“My friends,” he said, “you know me.  I put the interests of Kentucky before my own.  Last year when I left to represent her at Williamsburg there were some who said I would desert her.  It was for her sake I made that journey, suffered the tortures of hell from scalded feet, was near to dying in the mountains.  It was for her sake that I importuned the governor and council for powder and lead, and when they refused it I said to them, ’Gentlemen, a country that is not worth defending is not worth claiming.’”

At these words the settlers gave a great shout, waving their coonskin hats in the air.

“Ay, that ye did,” cried Bill Cowan, “and got the amminition.”

“I made that journey for her sake, I say,” Colonel Clark continued, “and even so I am making this one.  I pray you trust me, and God bless and keep you while I am gone.”

He did not forget to speak to me as he walked between our lines, and told me to be a good boy and that he would see me in the spring.  Some of the women shed tears as he passed through the gate, and many of us climbed to sentry box and cabin roof that we might see the last of the little company wending its way across the fields.  A motley company it was, the refuse of the station, headed by its cherished captain.  So they started back over the weary road that led to that now far-away land of civilization and safety.