It was the morning of the wedding.
According to the usage of the time the marriage ceremony was to take place
early in the forenoon, in order that the guests, gathered in from distant
settlements of the wilderness, might have a day for festivity and still
reach home before night. Late in the afternoon the bridal couple, escorted
by many friends, were to ride into town to Joseph's house, and in the
evening there was to be a house-warming.
The custom of the backwoods country ran that a man must not be left to build
his house alone; and one day some weeks before this wagons had begun to roll
in from this direction and that
direction out of the forest, hauling the logs for Joseph's cabin.
Then with loud laughter and the writhing of tough backs and the straining of
powerful arms and legs, men old, middle-aged, and young had raised the house
like overgrown boys at play, and then had returned to their own neglected
business: so that to him was left only the finishing.He had finished it and
furnished it for the simple scant needs of pioneer life.But on this, his
wedding morning, he had hardly left the town, escorted by friends on
horseback, before many who had variously excused themselves from going began
to issue from their homes: women carrying rolls of linen and pones of bread;
boys with huge joints of jerked meat and dried tongues of the buffalo, bear,
and deer. There was a noggin, a piggin, a churn, a homemade chair; there was
a quilt from a grandmother and a pioneer cradle--a mere trough scooped out
of a walnut log.
An old pioneer sent the antlers of a stag for a hat-rack,
and a buffalo rug for the young pair to lie warm under of bitter, winter
nights; his wife sent a spinning-wheel and a bundle of shingles for
johnny-cakes. Some of the merchants gave packages of Philadelphia groceries;
some of the aristo-cratic families parted with heirlooms that had been
laboriously brought over the mountains--a cup and saucer of Sevres, a pair
of tall brass candlesticks, and a Venus -mirror framed in ebony.
It was about three o'clock in the afternoon when John Gray jumped on the back of a
strong trusty horse at the stable of the Indian Queen, leaned over to shake
the hands of the friends who had met there to see him off, and turned his
horse's head in the direction of the path that led to the Wilderness Road.
But when he had gone about a mile, he struck into the forest at right angles
and rode across the country until he reached that green woodland pathway
which led from the home of the Falconers to the public road between
Lexington and Frankfort. He tied his horse some distance away, and walking
back, sat down on the roots of an oak and waited.