Chapter 12. In The Dark Land - Page 2

the O-hio than on the Yadkin. It's a good hunting time, and snow'll keep the redskins quiet. What's bad for us is wuss for them, says I. . . . I won't worry about winter nor redskins, if old Jim Lovelle 'ud fetch up. It beats me whar the man has got to."

"Wandered, maybe?" suggested the first speaker, whose name was Neely.

"I reckon not. Ye'd as soon wander a painter. There ain't no sech hunter as Jim ever came out of Virginny, no, nor out of Caroliny, neither. It was him that fust telled me of Kaintuck'. 'The dark and bloody land, the Shawnees calls it,' he says, speakin' in his eddicated way, and dark and bloody it is, but that's man's doing and not the Almighty's. The land flows with milk and honey, he says, clear water and miles of clover and sweet grass, enough to feed all the herds of Basham, and mighty forests with trees that thick ye could cut a hole in their trunks and drive a waggon through, and sugar-maples and plums and cherries like you won't see in no set orchard, and black soil fair crying for crops. And the game, Jim says, wasn't to be told about without ye wanted to be called a liar--big black-nosed buffaloes that packed together so the whole placed seemed moving, and elk and deer and bar past counting. . . . Wal, neighbours, ye've seen it with your own eyes and can jedge if Jim was a true prophet. I'm Moses, he used to say, chosen to lead the Children of Israel into a promised land, but I reckon I'll leave my old bones on some Pisgah-top on the borders. He was a sad man, Jim, and didn't look for much comfort this side Jordan. . . . I wish I know'd whar he'd gotten to."

Squire Boone, the speaker's brother, sniffed the air dolefully. "It's weather that 'ud wander a good hunter."

"I tell ye, ye couldn't wander Jim," said his brother fiercely. "He come into Kaintuckee alone in '52, and that was two years before Finley. He was on the Ewslip all the winter of '58. He was allus springing out of a bush when ye didn't expect him. When we was fighting the Cherokees with Montgomery in '61 he turned up as guide to the Scotsmen, and I reckon if they'd attended to him there'ud be more of them alive this day. He was like a lone wolf, old Jim, and preferred to hunt by hisself, but you never knowed that he wouldn't come walking in and say 'Howdy' while you was reckoning you was the fust white man to make that trace. Wander Jim? Ye might as well speak of wandering a hakk."

"Maybe the Indians have got his sculp," said Neely.

"I reckon not," said Boone. "Leastways if they have, he must ha' struck a new breed of redskin. Jim was better nor any redskin in Kaintuck', and they knowed it. I told ye, neighbours, of our doings before you come west through the Gap. The Shawnees cotched me and Jim in a cane-brake, and hit our trace back to camp, so that they cotched Finley too, and his three Yadkiners with him.