The Crossing | Page 5

one gray day, his horse jaded and cut, and he
was dressed all in wool, with a great coat wrapped about him, and high
boots. This made me stare at him. When my father drew back the bolt
of the door he, too, stared and fell back a step.
"Come in," said he.
"D'ye ken me, Alec?" said the man.
He was a tall, spare man like my father, a Scotchman, but his hair was
in a cue.
"Come in, Duncan," said my father, quietly. "Davy, run out for wood."
Loath as I was to go, I obeyed. As I came back dragging a log behind
me I heard them in argument, and in their talk there was much about
the Congress, and a woman named Flora Macdonald, and a British fleet
sailing southward.
"We'll have two thousand Highlanders and more to meet the fleet. And
ye'll sit at hame, in this hovel ye've made yeresel" (and he glanced
about disdainfully) "and no help the King?" He brought his fist down
on the pine boards.
"Ye did no help the King greatly at Culloden, Duncan," said my father,
dryly.
Our visitor did not answer at once.

"The Yankee Rebels 'll no help the House of Stuart," said he, presently.
"And Hanover's coom to stay. Are ye, too, a Rebel, Alec Ritchie?"
I remember wondering why he said RITCHIE.
"I'll no take a hand in this fight," answered my father.
And that was the end of it. The man left with scant ceremony, I guiding
him down the creek to the main trail. He did not open his mouth until I
parted with him.
"Puir Davy," said he, and rode away in the night, for the moon shone
through the clouds.
I remember these things, I suppose, because I had nothing else to think
about. And the names stuck in my memory, intensified by later events,
until I began to write a diary.
And now I come to my travels. As the spring drew on I had had a
feeling that we could not live thus forever, with no market for our pelts.
And one day my father said to me abruptly:--
"Davy, we'll be travelling."
"Where?" I asked.
"Ye'll ken soon enough," said he. "We'll go at crack o' day."
We went away in the wild dawn, leaving the cabin desolate. We loaded
the white mare with the pelts, and my father wore a woollen suit like
that of our Scotch visitor, which I had never seen before. He had
clubbed his hair. But, strangest of all, he carried in a small parcel the
silk gown that had been my mother's. We had scant other baggage.
We crossed the Yadkin at a ford, and climbing the hills to the south of
it we went down over stony traces, down and down, through rain and
sun; stopping at rude cabins or taverns, until we came into the valley of
another river. This I know now was the Catawba. My memories of that

ride are as misty as the spring weather in the mountains. But presently
the country began to open up into broad fields, some of these
abandoned to pines. And at last, splashing through the stiff red clay that
was up to the mare's fetlocks, we came to a place called Charlotte
Town. What a day that was for me! And how I gaped at the houses
there, finer than any I had ever dreamed of! That was my first sight of a
town. And how I listened open-mouthed to the gentlemen at the tavern!
One I recall had a fighting head with a lock awry, and a negro servant
to wait on him, and was the principal spokesman. He, too, was talking
of war. The Cherokees had risen on the western border. He was telling
of the massacre of a settlement, in no mild language.
"Sirs," he cried, "the British have stirred the redskins to this. Will you
sit here while women and children are scalped, and those devils" (he
called them worse names) "Stuart and Cameron go unpunished?"
My father got up from the corner where he sat, and stood beside the
man.
"I ken Alec Cameron," said he.
The man looked at him with amazement.
"Ay?" said he, "I shouldn't think you'd own it. Damn him," he cried, "if
we catch him we'll skin him alive."
"I ken Cameron," my father repeated, "and I'll gang with you to skin
him alive."
The man seized his hand and wrung it.
"But first I must be in Charlestown," said my father.
The next morning we sold our pelts. And though the mare was tired, we
pushed southward, I behind the saddle. I had much to think about,
wondering what was to become of me while my father went to skin
Cameron.