not be taken as anything but a terrible misfortune.
Traveling on to the west they came to another and still mightier river, called by the Indians, so Ross said, the Tennessee, which means in their language the Great Spoon, so named because the river bent in curves like a spoon. This river looked even wilder and more picturesque than the Cumberland, and Henry, as he gazed up its stream, wondered if the white man would ever know all the strange regions through which it flowed. Vast swarms of wild fowl, as at the Cumberland, floated upon its waters or flew near and showed but little alarm as they passed. When they wished food it was merely to go a little distance and take it as one walks to a cupboard for a certain dish.
Now, the aspect of the country began to change. The hills sank. The streams ceased to sparkle and dash helter-skelter over the stones; instead they flowed with a deep sluggish current and always to the west. In some the water was so nearly still that they might be called lagoons. Marshes spread out for great distances, and they were thronged with millions of wild fowl. The air grew heavier, hotter and damper.
"We must be approaching the Mississippi," said Henry, who was quick to draw an inference from these new conditions.
"It can't be very far," replied Ross, "because we are in low country now, and when we get into the lowest the Mississippi will be there."
All were eager for a sight of the great river. Its name was full of magic for those who came first into the wilderness of Kentucky. It seemed to them the limits of the inhabitable world. Beyond stretched vague and shadowy regions, into which hunters and trappers might penetrate, but where no one yet dreamed of building a home. So it was with some awe that they would stand upon the shores of this boundary, this mighty stream that divided the real from the unreal.
But traveling was now slow. There were so many deep creeks and lagoons to cross, and so many marshes to pass around that they could not make many miles in a day. They camped for a while on the highest hill that they could find and fished and hunted. While here they built themselves a thatch shelter, acting on Ross's advice, and they were very glad that they did so, as a tremendous rain fell a few days after it was finished, deluging the country and swelling all the creeks and lagoons. So they concluded to stay until the earth returned to comparative dryness again in the sunshine, and meanwhile their horses, which did not stand the journey as well as their masters, could recuperate.
Two days after they resumed the journey, they stood on the low banks of the Mississippi and looked at its vast yellow current flowing in a mile-wide channel, and bearing upon its muddy bosom, bushes and trees, torn from slopes thousands of miles away. It was not beautiful, it was not even picturesque, but its size, its loneliness and its desolation gave it a somber grandeur, which all the travelers felt. It was the same river that had received De Soto's body many generations before, and it was still a mystery.
"We know where it goes to, for the sea receives them all," said Mr. Pennypacker, "but no man knows whence it comes."
"And it would take a good long trip to find out," said Sol.
"A trip that we haven't time to take," returned the schoolmaster.
Henry felt a desire to make that journey, to follow the great stream, month after month, until he traced it to the last fountain and uncovered its secret. The power that grips the explorer, that draws him on through danger, known and unknown, held him as he gazed.
They followed the banks of the stream at a slow pace to the north, sweltering in the heat which seemed to come to a focus here at the confluence of great waters, until at last they reached a wide extent of low country overgrown with bushes and cut with a broad yellow band coming down from the northeast.
"The Ohio!" said Ross.
And so it was; it was here that the stream called by the Indians "The Beautiful River"—though not deserving the name at this place—lost itself in the Mississippi and at the junction it seemed full as mighty a river as the great Father of Waters himself.
They did not stay long at the meeting of the two rivers, fearing the miasma of the marshy soil, but retreated to the hills where they went into camp again. Yet Ross, and Henry, and Sol crossed both the Ohio and the Mississippi in the frail canoe for the sake of saying that they had been on the farther shores. The three, leaving Paul and the schoolmaster to guard the camp, even penetrated to a considerable distance in the prairie country beyond the Ohio. Here Henry saw for the first time a buffalo herd of size. Buffaloes were common enough in Kentucky, but the country being mostly wooded they roamed there in small bands. North of the Ohio he now beheld these huge shaggy animals in thousands and he narrowly escaped being trampled to death by a herd which, frightened by a pack of wolves, rushed down upon him like a storm. It was Ross who saved him by shooting the leading bull, thus compelling them to divide when they came to his body, by which action they left a clear space where he and Henry stood. After that Henry, as became one of fast-ripening experience and judgment, grew more cautious.
All the party were in keen enjoyment of the great journey, and felt in their veins the thrill of the wilderness. Paul's studious face took on the brown tan of autumn, and even the schoolmaster, a man of years who liked the ways of civilization, saw only the pleasures of the forest and closed his eyes to its hardships. But there was none who was caught so deeply in the spell of the wilderness as Henry, not even Ross nor the shiftless one. There was something in the spirit of the boy that responded to the call of the winds through the deep woods, a harking back to the man primeval, a love for nature and silence.
The forest hid many things from the schoolmaster, but he knew the hearts of men, and he could read their thoughts in their eyes, and he was the first to notice the change in Henry or rather less a change than a deepening and strengthening of a nature that had not found until now its true medium. The boy did not like to hear them speak of the return, he loved his people and he would serve them always as best he could, but they were prosperous and happy back there in Wareville and did not need him; now the forest beckoned to him, and, speaking to him in a hundred voices, bade him stay. When he roamed the woods, their majesty and leafy silence appealed to all his senses. The two vast still rivers threw over him the spell of mystery, and the secret of the greater one, its hidden origin, tantalized him. Often he gazed northward along its yellow current and wondered if he could not pierce that secret. Dimly in his mind, formed a plan to follow the yellow stream to its source some day, and again he thrilled with the thought of great adventures and mighty wanderings, where men of his race had never gone before.
Knowledge, too, came to him with an ease and swiftness that filled with surprise experienced foresters like Ross and Sol. The woods seemed to unfold their secrets to him. He learned the nature of all the herbs, those that might be useful to man and those that might be harmful, he was already as skillful with a canoe as either the guide or the shiftless one, he could follow a trail like an Indian, and the habits of the wild animals he observed with a minute and remembering eye. All the lore of those far-away primeval ancestors suddenly reappeared in him at the voice of the woods, and was ready for his use.
"It will not be long until Henry is a man," said Ross one evening as they sat before their camp fire and saw the boy approaching, a deer that he had killed borne upon his shoulders.
"He is a man now," said the schoolmaster with gravity and emphasis as he looked attentively at the figure of the youth carrying the deer. No one ever before had given him such an impression of strength and physical alertness. He seemed to have grown, to have expanded visibly since their departure from Wareville. The muscles of his arm stood up under the close-fitting deerskin tunic, and the length of limb and breadth of shoulder in the boy indicated a coming man of giant mold.
"What a hunter and warrior he will make!" said Ross.
"A future leader of wilderness men," said Mr. Pennypacker softly, "but there is wild blood in those veins; he will have to be handled well."
Henry threw down the deer and greeted them with cheerful words that came spontaneously from a joyful soul. They had built their fire, not a large one, in an oak opening and all around the trees rose like a mighty circular wall. The red shadows of a sun that had just set lingered on the western edge of the forest, but in the east all was black. Out of this vastness came the rustling sound of the wind as it moved among the autumn