He took the parson's cool delicate hand in his big hot one.
Alone in the glow of the golden dusk of that day he was sitting outside his
cabin on the brow of the hill, overlooking the town in the valley. How
peaceful it lay in the Sunday evening light! The burden of the parson's
sermon weighed more heavily than ever on his spirit. He had but to turn his
eye down the valley and there, flashing in the sheen of sunset, flowed the
great spring, around the margin of which the first group of Western hunters
had camped for the night and given the place its name from one of the
battle-fields of the Revolution; up the valley he could see the roof under
which the Virginia aristocracy of the Church of England had consecrated
their first poor shrine. What history lay between the finding of that spring
and the building of that altar! Not the winning of the wilderness simply;
not alone its peace. That westward penetrating wedge of iron-browed,
iron-muscled, iron-hearted men, who were now beginning to be known as the
Kentuckians, had not only cleft a road for themselves; they had opened a
fresh highway for the tread of the nation and found a vaster heaven for the
Star of Empire. Already this youthful gigantic West was beginning to make
its voice heard from Quebec to New Orleans while beyond the sea the three
greatest kingdoms of Europe had grave and troubled thoughts of the
on-rushing power it foretokened and the unimaginably splendid future for the
Anglo-Saxon race that it forecast.
He recalled the ardour with which he had followed the tramp of those wild
Westerners; footing it alone from the crest of the Cumberland; subsisting on
the game he could kill by the roadside; sleeping at night on his rifle in
some thicket of underbrush or cane; resolute to make his way to this new
frontier of the new republic in the new world; open his school, read law,
and begin his practice, and cast his destiny in with its heroic people.
And now this was the last Sunday in a long time, perhaps forever, that he
should see it all--the valley, the town, the evening land, resting in its
peace. Before the end of another week his horse would be climbing the ranges
of the Alleghanies, bearing him on his way to Mount Vernon and thence to
Philadelphia. By outward compact he was going on one mission for the
Transylvania Library Committee and on another from his Democratic Society to
the political Clubs of the East. But in his own soul he knew he was going
likewise because it would give him the chance to fight his own battle out,
alone and far away.