One day Erskine brought the skin of the panther which he was preparing for
him, to take the place of the old one under his table. He brought his rifle
along also,--his "Betsy," as he always called it; which, however, he
declared was bewitched just now; and for a while John watched him curiously
as he nailed a target on a tree in front of John's door, drew on it the face
of the person whom he charged with having bewitched his gun, and then,
standing back, shot it with a silver bullet; after which, the spell being
now undone, he dug the bullet out of the tree again and went off to hunt
with confidence in his luck.
And then the making of history was going on under his eyes down there in the
town, and many a thoughtful hour he studied that. The mere procession of
figures across his field of vision symbolized the march of destiny, the
onward sweep of the race, the winning of the continent. Now the barbaric
paint and plumes of some proud Indian, peaceably come to trade in pelts but
really to note the changes that had taken place in his great hunting ground,
loved and ranged of old beyond all others: this figure was the Past--the
old, old Past. Next, the picturesque, rugged outlines of some backwoods
rifleman, who with his fellows had dislodged and pushed the Indian westward:
this figure was the Present--the short-lived Present. Lastly, dislodging
this figure in turn and already pushing him westward as he had driven the
Indian, a third type of historic man, the fixed settler, the land-loving,
house-building, wife-bringing, child-getting, stock-breeding yeoman of the
new field and pasture: this was the figure of the endless Future. The
retreating wave of Indian life, the thin restless wave of frontier life, the
on-coming, all-burying wave of civilized life--he seemed to feel close to
him the mighty movements of the three. His own affair, the attack of the
panther, the last encounter between the cabin and the jungle looked to him
as typical of the conquest; and that he should have come out of the struggle
alive, and have owed his life to the young Indian fighter and hunter who had
sprung between him and the incarnate terror of the wilderness, affected his
imagination as an epitome of the whole winning of the West.
One morning while the earth was still fresh with dew, the great Boone came
to inquire for him, and before he left, drew from the pocket of his hunting
shirt a well-worn little volume.
"It has been my friend many a night," he said. "I have read it by many a
camp-fire. I had it in my pocket when I stood on the top of Indian Old
Fields and saw the blue grass lands for the first time. And when we
encamped on the creek there, I named it Lulbegrud in honour of my book. You
can read it while you have nothing else to do;" and he astounded John by
leaving in his hand Swift's story of adventures in new worlds.