The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ark of 1803, by C. A. (Charles Asbury) Stephens, Illustrated by H. Burgess

THE ARK OF 1803

THE

Ark of 1803

A STORY

OF LOUISIANA

PURCHASE TIMES

By C. A. STEPHENS

Illustrated by

H. BURGESS

New York

A. S. BARNES & COMPANY

1904

Copyright, 1904

BY

A. S. BARNES & CO.

May, 1904

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ARK OF 1803

CHAPTER I
THE MASTER’S HOLIDAY

“He’s taking holidays enough. I guess he can give us one,” said Moses Ayer, signing his name laboriously uphill.

“One licking more likely,” said Lewis Hoyt. He grinned as he took the big smooth-faced chip from Moses and added his signature. “Here, Molly, it’s your turn. Remember, you want to leave room for all the others that can possibly squeeze on.”

“If I couldn’t write smaller than that I wouldn’t sign,” retorted Molly Royce over his shoulder. “He’s got to stand treat and that’s all there is to it.”

While the three signers were busy at the master’s table, a little cloud of turkey feathers broke suddenly over a group of boys and girls who were gathered round the fireplace of the big schoolhouse. Jimmy Claiborne had thrown a handful of the feathers he was plucking at Louis Gist.

Louis, who was busy with another turkey, dropped it and sprang at Jimmy. Jimmy dodged among the others. The benches were overturned. In a moment a skirmish had broken out and the school was a mass of dodging figures, laughs and screams.

“Stop that racket,” cried Moses Ayer, pounding on the master’s table. “Listen here!—Jimmy Claiborne, you and Louis stop your fussing and come and sign this petition. Quit fooling. He may be banging at the door any minute.”

“Louis says Marion Royce don’t want me to go on the ark,” shouted Jimmy, “and I want to know if it’s true.”

“Come and sign,” yelled Moses. “The ark won’t be starting for a month and this petition goes into effect to-day. Quit your squabbling and come here.”

“I tell you you won’t go to New Orleans on the ark,” screamed Louis Gist, swinging his turkey round his head as he charged with it.

“Never mind New Orleans, I tell you,” cried Moses, reaching after Jimmy as Jimmy dodged the turkey swung at him. “Look out what you’re doing!” He caught at the turkey to ward it off, tripped over a puncheon, and went over, dragging the turkey and its holder with him.

Lewis Hoyt was still grinning. He caught the passing Jimmy by a fringe of his buckskin and drew him to the master’s desk.

“Sign here, if you’ve got sense enough,” he said. “You look as if you’d been rolling in a torn feather bed. If I were Marion Royce I’d leave you two muddle-heads behind even if I had to fill your places with girls.”

“I guess Marion would be mighty glad to fill one of their places with a girl,” gasped Moses Ayer, emerging from the little boys who had promptly fallen over him when he tripped.

Everyone laughed and looked at Milly Ayer. She blushed and bent over her book. She was one of the older girls who had sat quietly in the back rows, paying no attention to the younger ones about the fire.

“Don’t mind him, Milly, he’s only your brother,” said Louis Gist. Now that Jimmy Claiborne was captured he could return to finish plucking his turkey at the fireside. “Won’t we have a grand barbecue, if the old rascal doesn’t come!”

“We’ll have it even if he does come,” insisted Moses Ayer. “I guess an old toper that can stay away from his school four days at a time hasn’t much right to keep us from having a holiday. I guess he’s pretty lucky to be allowed to teach here at all.”

Lewis Hoyt, who was patiently guiding Jimmy Claiborne’s hand through the evolution of his long name, looked up.

“You can depend on it, Master Hempstead wouldn’t be here in Fish Creek teaching us if he wasn’t addicted to the bowl. He’s a scholar, and some day you’ll regret you didn’t appreciate what he’s tried to teach you.”

“Lewis is preaching again,” cried Moses. “What’s Master Hempstead taught us except the way to the Marietta tavern?”

“Who needs to go to Marietta since the Claibornes bought their new still,—except to hide himself?” asked Louis Gist.

There was a sudden silence over all the room. It was so quiet that Jimmy Claiborne’s labored writing was heard, and all the older scholars exchanged glances. The Claiborne still had been a bitter subject at Fish Creek, and some of the older boys had said that it was already ruining Jimmy Claiborne.

Lewis Hoyt held his hand closed over Jimmy’s as the silence fell,—a silence timed by the steady booming of the puncheon mauls at the little shipyard where the ark was building.

Jimmy’s hand trembled and stopped. Lewis steadily drove it to the finishing of the name.

“I wish there wasn’t a still on the whole length of the Ohio river,” Lewis said very quietly. “Come here, Louis Gist, it’s your turn to sign.”

Jimmy Claiborne went back to the fire, sullen, red-faced and silent, and while the incident was soon dismissed by the others he sat looking into the fire or plucking savagely at the feathers of his turkey. He and Louis had caught them that morning, just outside the schoolhouse, in their turkey trap.

Over at the shipyard the treenail hammers sounded, blending their sharp raps with the measured hollow strokes of the mauls. All the men on the creek were working on the ark which young Captain Marion Royce was building to go down to New Orleans with the spring “fresh.”

Jonas Sparks, the veteran shipwright, had come down from Marietta to oversee the work. Even Gaffir Hoyt was working there, and Uncle Amasa Claiborne, half of whose scalp the Indians had taken thirty years before.

And Louis Gist had told Jimmy that Marion would not let him go. Jimmy knew why. They were gradually coming to distrust him. He and Kenton and MacAfee were one party in the Fish Creek school; Moses and Lewis and Louis Gist another.

He wanted to go to New Orleans. He was entitled to. All winter long he had planned it. Marion Royce would not dare refuse. But Louis’ unconsidered speech rankled in his bitter heart. He would have been glad to escape into the woods, but he sat sullenly plucking his turkey for the barbecue, entrenched behind his knowledge that he had as much right in the schoolhouse as any of the others who chattered around him.

Free public schools had not yet been established in Ohio, but the pioneer families maintained a “subscription school” for their children in primitive schoolhouses of logs afterwards widely known as “Brush College.” Here masters of greater or less merit taught school six days in a week, with no holidays. Not a few, indeed, of the early schoolmasters of this new region were men whom certain weaknesses of character or appetite had exiled from the older walks of civilization. Except for such infirmities many of them were instructors of remarkable ability.

Master Hempstead’s foible was the all too common one of a fond and apparently ungovernable liking for beverages which inebriate. On a number of occasions he had dismissed school in the middle of the forenoon, and after touching homilies to his pupils, had walked out and not been seen again for several days. He had then reappeared, visibly the “worse for wear.”

Marietta, then a vigorous young colony of farmers and shipwrights from New England, was the Mecca to which Master Hempstead’s erratic pilgrimages were directed; and it was from one of these, after an absence of four days, that he was returning, in no very pleasant humor, on the morning of our story.

In the meantime his little kingdom had run riot and tasted the sweets of self-government. An exuberant hilarity indeed was in the air during these first years of the century just past. Moreover, Ohio had become a state that month, and daring schemes for capturing New Orleans from the Spanish were on foot.

On every day of Master Hempstead’s absence his pupils, numbering nineteen, of various ages, had assembled, in expectation of his reappearance. They played “gool,” “I spy” and “hide-and-seek” in the underbrush about the stumpy clearing. Of more interest still was a trap for wild turkeys which the boys had constructed at a distance in the woods.

This trap was a covered pen of stakes and brush, into which a “tunnel” led from the outside. This subway, as well as the pen, was baited with corn, and wild turkeys, which abounded in the forest, were thus allured to enter. The two turkeys which the boys were plucking this morning had been caught in this way.

It was the custom at these early subscription schools of Ohio for the master to “stand a treat” on New Year’s Day, and provide, at his own expense, a bushel of hickory nuts and ten pounds of candy. This coveted festival Master Hempstead had ignored, much to the dissatisfaction of his pupils; and now they determined to bring him to terms.

To guard against a surprise they had closed the door and barricaded it with their benches, which consisted merely of rough “puncheons,” each having four wooden pins for legs; and Moses Ayer, Lewis Hoyt and Molly Royce had prepared a species of “round robin,” containing the demands of the school, written laboriously on a large, smooth chip.

Such was the state of affairs when, at about ten in the forenoon, the instructor entered the clearing where the schoolhouse stood, and was promptly espied by more than one pair of sharp eyes at the one small, four-pane window.

Beyond doubt the man was in bad plight. His indiscretions were heavy upon him; a raging headache and many other aches oppressed him sorely; his coonskin cap was pulled low over watery eyes. He noted the smoke from the rock chimney and strode to the door.

But the latch-string, that ancient token of hospitality, had disappeared within its hole, and the door itself was fast shut. He thundered at it with his fist, but obtained no response, unless an ambiguous and irritating snicker from within could be thus construed.

“Open the door! It is I, the master! Open this door!” he shouted.

Still no response; but now the window was pushed slowly aside, and out through the hole there came a long stick, to the end of which was tied a huge, fresh, white-walnut chip; on the smoothed side of this the master at length noticed there was a black, coarse scrawl.

“What’s this?” exclaimed the irate pedagogue, starting backward as they dangled the chip under his nose.

“Read it, master!” yelled a chorus of wild voices from within the dark hole. “Read it, master! Ye can’t come in till ye do.”

With a snarl of disdain Master Hempstead snatched at the chip.

“‘Read it!’” he muttered. “That’s more than you could do yourselves, I warrant. What blockhead of ye wrote this? What ignoramus of ye spelled it?” In truth the spelling was not above reproach. But those were pioneer days. The chip read as follows:

We the undersined Scollars of Fish Creke want and are determined to have a Hollerday. You didn’t give us one at New Yere’s. You can’t kepe school here again til you do. Ohio is a State. We want to cellarbrate it. We dimmand that you get a bushel of hickerry nuts, or wallnuts ten ponds of Candy and five ponds of Raizeans. Say you will or you cant come in. Sine your name at the bottom of this with your led pensel to let us know you mene it and all will yit be wel. If you dont you cant never come in here again for you are a bad-drinking Old Fellar.

Moses Ayer

Lewis Hoyt

Molly Royce

James Claiborne

Louis Gist

And all the rest of us.

This, as must be confessed, was hardly respectful or complimentary, but these were rough times and these children had much to learn. Master Hempstead was accustomed to the utmost consideration. The man of learning had then, as now, the highest place in the regard of the community, and his anger seethed, as, with the hastily adjusted aid of his horn-bowed glasses, he perused this gage of rebellion.

“Numskulls!” he shouted. “After all I have taught ye, to spell like that! Y-e-r-e, year! R-a-i-z-e-a-n-s, raisins! T-i-l, till! P-o-n-d-s, pounds! S-i-n-e, sign! O you young ignoramuses! You will go out into the world and disgrace me!”

“Sign your name, master!” shrilled the unfeeling chorus inside.

“O you young vipers! Vipers whom I have cherished in my bosom! Mox anguis recreatus! Sting the hand that nourished you! And spell like that!”

“Sign it, master! You got to sign it! H-i-l-l-e-l H-e-m-p-s-t-e-a-d, Hillel Hempstead. Sign it!” still yelled the dissonant chorus within.

“Ingrates! Thankless cubs! Good instruction has been wasted on ye! Open the door, that I may flog it out of ye!”

“No—no—no, master, you can’t come in!” retorted the young rebels. “You have got to sign that, and promise not to whip us!”

“Compacts with a mob! Truces with rebels! Never!” shouted the wordy old schoolmaster.

“Parley is at an end. Prepare to suffer. You shall have your deserts.”

Master Hempstead hurled the walnut chip back in at the window—where it caused lively dodging of youthful heads—and made ready for active operations.

At the wood-pile hard by lay a small hickory log, some ten feet in length and four or five inches in diameter. Heaving this up in his arms, he ran with it full tilt against the door, delivering a blow which made the whole house tremble and started the latch-bar in its socket.

“Hear that, ungrateful hearts!” he vociferated. “I am now illustrating to ye the principle of the battering-ram, which played so noble a part in the wars of antiquity. Vespasian and Titus employed it against the gates of stiff-necked Jerusalem. And thus do I batter in the gate of this stronghold of young deviltry!”

He came bang! against the door again, this time with such effect that the latch gave way and the benches were pushed back.

Yet again the doughty pedagogue drew back, and panting hard, made another staggering rush with his improvised ram. This time the shock was so forceful that everything gave way, so suddenly that both master and “ram” fell in headlong at the doorway.

The “principle,” indeed, was well illustrated; but Master Hempstead had still to deal, hand to hand, with his youthful rebels.

Lewis, Moses and the others were athletic youngsters, and the master, owing perhaps to his many “vacations” at Marietta, was at best somewhat tottery.

The battle went sorely against him. With shouts of triumph they dragged him forth into the yard, and holding him down in the snow, clamored loud for his signature. Still, with reproaches, he refused it, calling down upon them the vengeance of all known powers of good and evil.

But now an interruption occurred. Milly Ayer, who had thus far sat quietly in the back row, now donned her hood in haste, and slipping forth in the midst of the mêlée, ran down to the creek bank, where the ark was being built, to summon aid.

“Help! help!” she cried, then waved her red hood to attract attention, for her cries were drowned in the din of hammers below.

Young Captain Royce was the first to see and hear. Between Milly and himself there had long existed a warm friendship.

“What is it, Milly? What’s happened?” he shouted, and all the hammers stopped short.

“O Marion, come quick!” cried Milly. “They are fighting at the schoolhouse!”

The young captain was half-way up the bluff before these words were all spoken. The others followed him; even old Jonas Sparks, Gaffir Hoyt and Uncle Amasa Claiborne hurried stiffly to the schoolhouse in the wake of Marion Royce and Milly.

But the most sedate of them could but smile at the spectacle which was there presented. Moses Ayer and Lewis Hoyt were holding Master Hempstead fast with his back to a tree trunk, while Louis Gist was trying to bind him to it with green hazel withes. The smaller boys, equally excited, were endeavoring to bear a hand, and yelled like young redskins; while Molly Royce and the other girls looked on with something akin to enthusiasm.

“Here, here, boys! Do you know what you are doing?” the young captain exclaimed.

“What’s the trouble?”

“He’s got to sign it!” shouted Moses, hotly.

“Yes, he’s got to!” yelled Lewis.

“Yes, Mack, help us make him sign it!” chimed in Molly Royce.

“Be quiet, Molly!” replied Marion, putting his impetuous young sister aside with one hand as he strode nearer. “We will see about this. Let go, Lewis! Let go, Mose! Master Hempstead, what’s the matter here?”

The master, who had been kicking hard and hitting right and left at his assailants, recovered his dignity and struck an attitude.

“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is such ingratitude!” he cried, in injured accents. “These whom I have taught with so great patience, whose dull wits I have fostered, lo, they have lifted up the heel against me!”

“But what is it, Master Hempstead, that they want you to sign?” asked Marion, laughing in spite of himself.

“An exorbitant demand! Preposterous extortion! Stuck under my very nose at the schoolhouse door on an illiterate chip!”

“And he’s got to sign it!” interrupted Mose.

“But what is it? Let’s see it,” said Marion.

With that, Jimmy Hoyt came running with the chip, which, on being read aloud, caused Jonas Sparks and Uncle Amasa Claiborne, who had now come up, to chuckle audibly.

“And I kinder reckon, master, that they was in a fair way to make ye put yer name to it!” cried the old shipwright. “I guess ye better sign it.”

“No, no, but the rising gineration musn’t be incouraged to be sassy!” cried Gaffir Hoyt. “They’re sassy enough now. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take an ell.” Uncle Amasa agreed with him.

“Cut some switches and drub the young scamps,” said Uncle Amasa.

Public opinion being thus divided, every one, including Milly Ayer, looked to Marion for the guiding word. Already this little community had come to rely upon his judgment in emergencies.

The young captain laughed good-humoredly. “I don’t want to set my word before that of my elders,” he said, “but drubbing isn’t always the best medicine. The boys have been rough and hasty. But from all accounts, Master Hempstead hasn’t set them quite so good an example of late as we wish he would. Lewis, you and Mose and Molly must beg Master Hempstead’s forgiveness for misusing him. If they do that, you will overlook it, master, will you not?”

“HEY, WHAT? FORGIVE THEM!”

“Hey, what? Forgive them!” cried the still agitated pedagogue. “Forgive them! Well, anything but their bad spelling! Anything but that!”

“Wal, master, that is a fault you must try to remedy!” cried old Jonas, laughing. “Good spelling is the gift of Heaven. I only wish that it had been given to me.”

“But the holiday!” exclaimed Molly. “We want the holiday!”

“What do you say, Master Hempstead?” Marion asked him, with much respect. His manner did more than any words could have done to remind the young people of the great regard in which a master was and should be held. “A holiday to celebrate the admission of Ohio to the Union would be no very bad thing, would it? Suppose you give them one and let us all come to it.”

“But I haven’t the means. I’m a poor man!” protested the master. “Candy and raisins cost good money at Marietta.”

“And so does gin and whisky!” muttered Moses, under his breath.

“Hush, Moses!” said Marion. He turned to the other older men. “How would it be if we all give something, and have the celebration next month just before the ark starts to New Orleans?”

The faces of the young people fell visibly at this suggestion of postponement, but the motion was carried, and it was arranged that the holiday should take place the day before the ark should leave for its long adventurous voyage down the Mississippi.

The master pointed to the gaping schoolhouse doorway. “In, ye renegades,” he ordered, and they trooped noisily in to straighten the overturned benches and settle down to their study after the four days of unofficial vacation.

Jimmy Claiborne did not follow them. He waited until the men were starting back to the shipyard, then he stopped Marion Royce.

“Louis Gist says you won’t let me go on the ark,” he said, fixing the young captain with his sombre, discontented eyes. “I guess Uncle Amasa could make you, seeing what a share we’ve got in the cargo, but I just wanted to ask you if it’s true—what Louis said—that you don’t want me.”

Marion wished, as he looked gravely at the boy, that the ark were not taking the Claibornes’ share of the cargo at all, but he only said:

“That depends on yourself, Jimmy.”

Jimmy made no answer in words. He turned and strode off towards the woods behind the schoolhouse clearing. Marion called to him, but he gave no sign of hearing, and after waiting a moment longer Marion went back to his work.

CHAPTER II
THE ARK IS LAUNCHED

Young Captain Royce went slowly back to the shipyard, thinking of the sullen look in Jimmy Claiborne’s eyes.

“The boy means to make trouble,” he said to himself. But beyond the annoyance which would result from being obliged to refuse, if Jimmy got Uncle Amasa to plead for him, there seemed to be nothing much that Jimmy could do. Young as he was—scarcely twenty-two—Marion Royce had already won the confidence of the settlement by his courage and coolness, and those who had chosen him as leader and captain would certainly uphold him in any position which he might take in regard to the selection of his crew. But between being merely upheld in a disagreeable duty, and having the cordial good feeling of all the shareholders, there was much to choose.

He was tempted, as he went along through the woods between the little shipyard and the schoolhouse, to turn a deaf ear to his own better judgment. But he had made three trips down the river to New Orleans, and he knew the importance of an efficient crew, just as he knew the danger of a single insubordinate spirit.

“If it were anybody else but Jimmy Claiborne”, he thought, “it would not so much matter.” There were the twenty barrels of peach brandy and whisky—the Claibornes’ share of the cargo—and in the long monotonous days and nights only ceaseless vigilance would keep the men from broaching them. If Jimmy were in the crew, his sense of proprietorship in this portion of the cargo would make the danger of it very much greater.

It was a voyage of untold perils. Every year an increasing number of white outlaws, hidden in the caves along the river, harried and robbed the boatmen who floated down from the upper settlements. There were lurking bands of hostile Indians. And there was the river itself with its treacheries; its snags; its mud bars and its floods. It was no unusual thing for an ark to set out as this one was about to do, provided against all foreseeable disasters, and never be heard from afterward. Some were wrecked, some were robbed and their crews obscurely murdered. But no tidings of their fate came back to the solitary homes on the upper Ohio.

To set out on such a voyage with a single man or boy who could not be trusted, might mean the loss of the boat or even of every life on board of her. Marion Royce looked ahead of him, suddenly throwing back his shoulders and breathing deeply.

“It’s got to come, and it had better be over with at once,” he said aloud. “Oh, Uncle Amasa! Ho, Uncle Amasa! Hold on and let me catch up with you!”

The old man could be seen through the thinning trees that covered the slope leading down to the creek’s mouth. He stopped and waited for the captain to come up to him.

“We’ll get them twenty barrels down from the still this afternoon, son,” he began, as Marion joined him. “It’s time to get your cargo collected, and them casks will do just as well down here at the shed where there’s room for ’em. We’re pretty crowded with them up to the still.”

“It isn’t the cargo I’m worrying so much about,” said the captain slowly. “It’s the supercargo.”

The old man looked at him shrewdly. He understood as well as if Marion had told him in so many words that he did not want to take Jimmy.

“It’s a rough voyage,” the captain said. “If I thought it would help to make a man of Jimmy I’d take him and risk his stirring up a feeling of insubordination in those Marietta fellows that he knows better than I do. But my feeling is that Jimmy ought to stay at home. There’s plenty of chance for him to show what stuff he’s made of, and if we get back all right we may be able to take him next year. The boy’s a little wild, and it won’t do him any good to go to Natchez—all devildom is loose at Natchez. And then there may be a French fleet at New Orleans. There may be fighting. The Spaniards may have shut the city in our faces. We may have to fight to be allowed to land, but if we do have to, I guess ten thousand or so rivermen will help us to show the Spanish governor whether he can shut the gate of the world to us Americans.”

“Ye think there’s any truth in that tale of Bonaparte’s seizing the Mississippi, son?”

“No,” said the captain, “I don’t. I believe Jefferson is going to buy out the Spaniards or drive them home, and that the country will belong to us clear to the sea.”

“Hm,” said the old man. “Well, son, if there’s goin’ to be any such doings down to New Orleans, I’d be terrible sorry for Jimmy to miss it. I reckon I couldn’t very well leave Maria. I expect I’m pretty tolerable old for a trip like what you say it is to go down the river, even when everything is fav’rable. I’d mebby do best to cossett what’s left of my scalp and not run the risk of losing it to a strange Indian when I could just as easy lose it to one nearer home. I don’t reckon Maria would consent to my going, but I’d set a right smart store on one of our family havin’ a hand in them doin’s down to New Orleans, and I reckon them rivermen at Natchez won’t corrupt Jim any more than the roustabouts around Marietta shipyard. I just reckon you’ll have to take him along, son.”

There was no resentment whatever in the old man’s tone. He made no defense of Jimmy, although Jimmy was his idolized grandson, and Jimmy’s father had been taken captive by the Indians before Jimmy was a year old—which was sixteen years ago—and nothing had ever been heard of him. But Uncle Amasa had lived as a pioneer among pioneers, where every man had to stand by himself, for himself, and for those whom his presence protected. He made no defense of Jimmy.

There was an uncomfortably long pause. They were near enough to the little shipyard at the mouth of the creek, so that they stopped to finish their discussion before they joined the men who were working. Little old Uncle Amasa stood shrunken like a withered bush on which a workman had hung his coat and cap. Captain Royce faced him, young and alert and vigorous, sure of his judgment, but reluctant to oppose the old man whom the entire settlement loved.

“Uncle Amasa,” he said at length, smiling at the shrewd light-gray eyes that looked into his, “you’ve always been too hasty.”

“Aye,” admitted the old pioneer, “and if I’d been a trifle hastier, I’d ’a’ saved my whole scalp instead of only half of it. It’s a grand thing to be hasty, son, when you’re dealing with savages.”

“You were hasty when you bought the still without considering how it would affect the settlement here,” continued the captain, gravely. “Until this year, good Master Hempstead and his like had to go clear to Marietta to indulge their little foibles. You want me to tell you why you are so anxious to have Jimmy go with me on this trip? It’s because you see you were too hasty, and you want to separate him as far as possible from that new still. But I’m afraid that you can’t do that so long as I am taking the twenty barrels of brandy and whisky along in the cargo. I’ll take the cargo, or I’ll take Jimmy. I can’t take both even for all the things you’ve done for me and mine, and for the help you’ve been in building the ark here. As long as I’m captain, and the whole settlement has appointed me to represent them in disposing of their year’s harvest and work, I owe my first duty to the safety of the cargo and the lives I’m taking along with me. The Marietta hands will have no right in the boat, and I can handle them if Jimmy isn’t along to stir up insubordination.”

“He’ll be along,” said Uncle Amasa, cheerily. “If there are to be doin’s at New Orleans, I’d like for him to see them and have them to tell to his children when he grows old. Life is pretty much all in the way you see it, and I’ve seen a heap, and I want that Jimmy should. The only comfort I’ve ever had in these long years since his pa disappeared is been in thinking of the strange secrets he must have got to know. I reckon if James was to come back from captivity alive, I’d be so curious to hear about his experiences that I’d clean forget to rejoice at having him home again.”

The young captain looked at Uncle Amasa. Queer characters were the rule rather than the exception among the settlers who had willingly turned their backs on civilization and safety, but in all his experience he knew of no other pioneer whose foolhardiness could be inspired by sheer curiosity.

“Do you mean to say, Uncle Amasa, that since you can’t go yourself the chance of your grandson seeing new things makes you insist upon my taking him, even if his presence jeopardizes the welfare and success of the whole expedition?”

“Jimmy will be good, I reckon,” said the old man, “and he’s old enough now; so I should like for him to see a little of the world.”

“You’re a shareholder, like the rest of us,” said the captain, “and I don’t mean to seem disrespectful; but I think you’re acting hastily, Uncle Amasa, and I hope you won’t encourage Jimmy to feel that he has a right to come without my consent, for I should have to put him off, and that would be a humiliation, and I don’t want to embitter him any more than I can help. But I won’t have him on the ark, and that’s all I can say about it.”

“Well, well, we won’t discuss it, son; we won’t discuss it at all,” said Uncle Amasa. “But I’d like to know how ye think I would look going back to his widowed mother and telling her that you didn’t trust her only son to conduct himself as bravely as any of you?”

A smile broke over the young captain’s face at the idea of any such message going to the acrid lady who had made the Claibornes’ home-clearing a place to be cautiously approached and discreetly avoided. “I wouldn’t say anything to Maria at all,” he advised. “I would just gradually get Jimmy out of the notion.”

The captain felt that he had not come out of the argument at all well. It seemed rather absurd for a man to set himself against a boy—a boy, moreover, whom he had seen grow up—but there were so many reasons for Jimmy’s own sake why he should not be allowed to go that Uncle Amasa’s calm refusal to even consider them filled him with uneasiness. If the grandson proved as unimpressionable as the grandfather, there was trouble ahead. And Marion Royce felt that he was undertaking enough in this venture without adding anything that might bring about disorder or mutiny.

They went down the hill, the captain silent, Uncle Amasa gossiping cheerily as a snow-bird, and both men were soon at work on the great ninety-foot ark or “broadhorn” that still rested on its rude ways at the edge of the creek.

“We’ll get it into the water before night,” said the captain, looking lovingly at the unwieldy bulk that was more like a scow, built to be towed, than like a boat designed to navigate itself among channels and currents. It would, indeed, be more at the mercy of the elements than any scow, because its high freeboard would catch the wind as well as its clumsy upperdeck. It was built of rough hewn timbers, and put together with pins and treenails, so that it could be readily taken apart and sold as lumber for house-building in New Orleans, when its service as a cargo boat should be over.

Jonas Sparks, the old Marietta shipwright, who was overseeing the work, nodded at the captain. There was still a vast amount of decking or roofing to be done, and for this some of the lumber was still to be brought over from Marietta sawmill.

“It would be a good job done,” said Jonas Sparks, “if you could get your timber sawed up to Marietta while she is swelling. It will save that much time.”

“The new Pittsburgh mill hands haven’t come,” said the captain, “and they can’t get enough men at Marietta to work on the new brig and run the mill. The men won’t work. I expect we’ll have to go up and saw the lumber ourselves. What do you think?”

“Well,” said Jonas, to whom the difficulty of getting any sort of skilled or regular labor was too familiar to cause annoyance, “we’ll just put her into the water and see what can be done about getting the boards. There comes Charlie Hoyt with another load of the Claibornes’ whisky.”

A wagon team was drawing into the shipyard clearing with a load of casks. Everyone about the ark went to the shed in which the cargo for the ark was being gradually piled up, and soon the men were busy helping Charlie Hoyt unload. When he had finally driven off again, considerable time had been wasted, and in the afternoon, when the boys trooped down after school to help in the launching, they found that it had been necessary to postpone it for another day. Next month, when the river should have risen with the melting snows, the delay of a day might mean all the difference between success and failure, safety and total wreck. But the Ohio was still locked between its ice banks, below the mouth of the creek, and a day meant little or nothing to the pioneers of the wilderness.

As thieving Indians occasionally slipped into the clearings at night, Jonas Sparks had volunteered to sleep in the shed, which served as storage warehouse for such portions of the cargo as the settlers had already brought down. He took his meals at the Royces, however, and it was sometimes late before he picked up his lantern and his rifle and went over to the shipyard.

It was late that night. There was no moon, and his lighted lantern showed the tree trunks like moving shapes in the snow; but the old shipwright trudged along as fearless as in the open day, swinging his lantern as if it did not make him a target for any unseen red or white enemy who might be skulking through the woods.

Suddenly he began to run. Flames had shot up in the clearing around the shipyard, and he heard the crackle of the huge pillar of fire that flared and waved to the height of the treetops.

“The ark is burning!” he shouted, forgetting in his excitement that no one could possibly hear him. He rushed down to the clearing and saw the great flames lapping up the shed like thirsty dogs. Bright embers floated out over the trees, and some circled down onto the ark, which had not yet begun to burn. As the old shipbuilder saw all this, he realized that the fire was too far along for anyone to stop it or to hope to save any of the cargo in the shed. The light in the sky would soon bring all the settlers in the neighborhood, accustomed as they were to an alert vigilance against Indian surprises. So he hurried down to the creek to break through the covering of snowy ice and carry bucketful upon bucketful of water, which he poured over the half-decked boat. The intense heat of the fire so close at hand was scorching the timbers and the steam rose in white masses as the icy creek water ran in thin streams over the ark.

Marion Royce was the first to reach the fire. The flames were at their height, waving long streamers above the treetops so that their light could be seen for ten miles down the river, and settlers farther down thought that Marietta was burning.

“What could have started it?” asked the captain, as he and Jonas came up from the creek with a hogshead nearly filled between them.

“I can’t imagine,” said the shipbuilder. “The Indians would rather have stolen the stuff than burnt it up, and no one round hereabouts has any grudge agin’ the ark.”

“You didn’t see anyone?” asked the captain.

“No one but Jimmy Claiborne,” answered Jonas. “Just as I came into the clearing I saw him runnin’ for dear life along the road to the Ayreses, to get help, I reckon, and that’s why I didn’t lose any time carryin’ the alarm. I knew he’d take it.”

“Jimmy Claiborne!” echoed the captain. A thought flashed into his mind, but he refused to consider it.

“I wonder if we couldn’t slide the blocks out from under her and let her drop down the ways,” he said. “She’s beginning to burn here at the bow, from the heat. We can’t keep her from burning. The ways are bound to go. Look, Jonas! Merciful goodness—Look out!”

The shed had caved in. The column of fire hung for a moment like the jet of a waterspout, then dropped back into the heart of the fire, and the flames billowed out in a huge circle that swept the bows of the ark and curled in blue threads about the ways on which it rested.

“We can’t do it singlehanded,” shouted Jonas, above the terrible roar of the fire. “We can’t move it. It’s got to go unless somebody comes to help us. It’s frozen to the ways and the tackle is all in the shed.”

“We’ve got to do it,” the captain shouted back. He took up a puncheon maul and began desperately pounding at the blocks that kept the ninety-foot hull from dropping down the snowy, ice-crusted ways.

“Great stars, man, can’t you let it alone?” cried the shipwright. “Can’t you see that even if you did start her she’d smash herself on the bottom of the creek? We’ve got to have men and tackle to let her down.”

There was a shout from the edge of the clearing, and Jonas and the captain turned to see Moses Ayer and Lewis Hoyt and Louis Gist come plunging towards them, having outrun their elders who were following.

“Run to Uncle Amasa’s to get his hoisting tackle,” cried Jonas to Louis Gist. “We’ve got to launch the ark, and everything we had here is burning up in the shed. Here, Mose, come and tote water.”

The two boys hurried to carry out his orders, and Lewis Hoyt caught up a board and began shoveling snow onto the ark. The heat was frightful, and the boys smelt their buckskins singeing as they rushed about the fire, and the cinders fell on them.

“Where’s Jimmy Claiborne?” asked Moses Ayer when Louis came back alone with the rope and tackle, staggering under the weight of the heavy coil.

“Wasn’t there,” gasped Louis. “Uncle Amasa’s on the way, though.”

Marion Royce turned sharply to Moses. “Jimmy went to your house to give the alarm,” he said.

“He never came to our house,” declared Moses. “I saw the fire myself, through the chink over my bed where the plug has come out. I called Pop and came over. Jimmy never came near us.”

The captain’s face set. “We’ve no time to bother about Jimmy, now,” he said. “One of you carry this tackle into that biggest walnut tree and make it fast about fifteen feet above the ground. It’s only to steady the strain as she drops down. Make it fast, though. We don’t want it giving way.”

Moses was already half-way to the tree. “All right,” he shouted.

Lighted only by the fire that reflected red pools in the snow, the men and boys worked at the launching that should save the ark. The great flatboat was frozen to the ways, and it seemed as if nothing but superhuman power would ever start it. Then, suddenly, an appalling report came from the burning shed. The ground shook with it, and the flames burst out again into vast torches that flared above the trees a moment and then fell back extinguished. Timbers and brands of fire shot hither and thither through the air. The men sprung away with terrorized faces.

“The whisky casks have burst,” said the captain. “I thought they had gone long ago. Is anyone hurt?”

At the edge of the clearing the light of the flames showed a figure outstretched—a grim patch of darkness on the reddened snow.

Lewis Hoyt was the first to reach it. He turned to face the anxious men who hurried to him.

“It’s Master Hempstead!” he cried. “He isn’t killed. This beam must have struck him and knocked him down as he was coming to the fire.”

Half a dozen men bent down to examine the crumpled figure of the unconscious schoolmaster, and as they were separating to let the captain and Charlie Hoyt carry him away to be cared for by the women at the Royces, a shout made them turn to the fire again.

“The ark!” cried a dozen voices. “The ark is going!”

The vibration of the explosion had accomplished what the men alone could not have done, and the ark was slipping down the ways.

“Here,” cried Marion Royce, “take this,” and quite unconscious that it was a human being whom he was handing over absently, he dashed back to the assistance of Jonas Sparks.

But by the time he reached the ways the ark was grinding the ice of the creek, her bottom scraping the bed of the shallow stream.

Moses Ayer came up, trembling from the terrible strain on the windlass when the ark shot down. The perspiration was raining down his drawn, excited face.

“She’s launched!” he said.

CHAPTER III
JIMMY LEAVES FISH CREEK

As the captain handed over the schoolmaster’s inert form, he was too full of alarm to notice that the arms which received it were Jimmy Claiborne’s.

“Is he dead?” asked Jimmy, in a hoarse whisper.

Charlie Hoyt stared at him. “Dod rot!” he ejaculated. “You’re trembling! What’s the matter with you? The master’s not dead. Look at that.”

Then Jimmy saw the schoolmaster’s breath coming faintly like a frosty thread. He drew his own breath more freely.

“If you’re afraid to carry him, I’ll call Mose,” went on Charlie. “He’s hurt on the head. If it weren’t for that we could leave him over there by the fire till he sobers up. I wonder where he got it. Stocked up at Marietta, most likely. Here’s part of a corn-bin cover, shot out of the fire. We can lay him on that. It will carry better.”

The long bin cover, with its charred edges, was a clumsy thing to carry, and the two stumbled slowly along the dark path to the Royce’s cabin. They set their burden down several times to rest and get a better hold. Once Charlie fell and the schoolmaster slid from his rude stretcher into the snow. Perspiring and breathless they picked him up again and went heavily on.

Several women had gathered at the Royce’s from the neighboring cabins. They were all brave women, used to the alarms and hardships of their wild life, and they received the little party, that looked so much grimmer than it was, without excitement.

“It looks to me kinder like a fight,” said Charlie, when he had examined the master’s bruises carefully in the light of a tallow dip.

“It must have been a fight,” said Mrs. Royce. “That is never a blow from a flying timber. His eye is puffing up, too. He couldn’t have been lying long when you found him.”

The master roused a little. His arm went out as if to ward a blow. “They’ll drive—me—out,” he muttered. “How—tish y’se’f—cherished ’n my bosom—’n ye turn—’gainsht me.” His arm fell and he began to weep; a pitiable object.

Jimmy had taken no part in his resuscitation. He stood looking into the fire, beside the hearth. Now that he no longer feared that the schoolmaster would die, he was absorbed in his own sullen thoughts. Milly Ayer saw his look, and his clenched hands, and went over to him.

“You didn’t come back to school,” she said. “We missed you.”

“I’ll never go back to that school,” he answered. She could see the flush creep over his dark face.

“Oh, Jimmy!” she said. “When there’s hardly a month more before everybody will be going off on the ark?”

“That’s why.”

Milly reddened. She had forgotten in the excitement of the fire the trouble of the morning that had brought the quarrel between Jimmy and Louis Gist. She was about to tell him that Marion would change his mind, when the door flew open and her brother Mose and Shadwell Lincoln burst in.

“The ark is all safe,” they both cried at once. “The men are going to stay about and watch, though. Everything’s gone. All the flax, and the Hoyt’s corn, and the Claiborne whisky. And pretty near all the carpentering tools of the neighborhood.”

It was a grave loss. Tools were expensive and hard to get, and the rotted flax that had been stored in the shed had been intended to clothe the settlement for a year.

“Has anyone found out who started it?” asked Mrs. Royce, to turn the thoughts of the others from their common loss.

Moses threw a meaning look toward Jimmy Claiborne. “We haven’t found out,” he said, with hot-headed emphasis, “but everybody has a suspicion. It was done by someone who had a grudge agin the ark and wanted to set it afire to spite Marion Royce. The ark’s built of such heavy timber that it wouldn’t burn easily, but if the shed burned the ark was bound to go with it. And it would have gone, too, if Jonas and Marion hadn’t saved it.”

“No one in the settlement would have taken such a revenge as that,” said Mrs. Royce.

“Just you wait and see,” said Mose. He was boiling with indignation. Not that he had anything against Jimmy Claiborne, himself. He was simply a born partisan. Whatever came up, he must take sides and, usually, come to blows to settle it. Until a blow had been struck, Mose seldom considered a matter disposed of. He bore upon his person the evidence that he lived up to his point of view. “I guess whoever did it will be found out pretty soon, and ’pears to me Fish Creek won’t be the place for him after that.”

The women who had joined in the growing disapproval of the Claibornes in regard to bringing a still into Fish Creek settlement found themselves embarrassed at having the prejudice taking such direct expression. They wished they had not all spoken so openly before those who were too young to reason or be discreet. It was Milly who saved the situation.

“I ought to go home,” she said. “Mother and the children are alone. Mose, are you coming?”

“I can’t,” said Mose. “I’ve got to help Marion. He wants me to be on hand. Mebby to-morrow he’ll want us to start up to Marietta to help cut the lumber, if the new hands don’t get there from Pittsburgh. The new brig’s keeping everyone busy over to Marietta.”

“Jimmy,” said Milly, “will you take me?”

Jimmy reached for a rifle that stood among several muskets in a rude rack near the fireplace. The Ayers’ clearing was one of the farthest away, and while the neighborhood had been safe from prowling Indians for over a year the men still went about armed at night. He looked carefully to the flint and priming, and taking it in his arm, waited for her while she said good night.

For awhile they trudged in silence. Mose’s ill-considered words were ringing in their ears. As they skirted the shipyard clearing they saw the men silhouetted against the burning heap of ruins. Jimmy gripped his rifle in a spasm of unreasoning hate. He wondered how little old Uncle Amasa could be among them; friendly, wise, harboring no resentment.

“Isn’t that Uncle Amasa, there by the maple tree?” asked Milly.

“Yes, that’s him,” said Jimmy. “’Twouldn’t be me, that’s certain.”

“It’s all a mistake,” said Milly. “You mustn’t think of what schoolboys say.”

“I guess they heard their elders say it. It wouldn’t have come popping into their heads alone.”

“You mustn’t mind,” she said.

“You don’t catch me minding,” said Jimmy, throwing his head back. “I’m not through with Fish Creek settlement yet.”

There was a long silence, broken only by their feet in the crusted snow. Milly thought pityingly of the thankless home that Maria Claiborne had made for Jimmy and his grandfather. She wished that Marion had not said so positively that he would not have Jimmy on the ark. She would talk to Marion to-morrow and try to win him over. Now that the Claiborne cargo was destroyed, he would be apt to reconsider.

“You may get a chance to go to New Orleans, after all,” she said. “You mustn’t blame Marion, Jimmy. Think of the responsibility he will have, every day and night of that long journey—and, perhaps, fighting.”

“Well, I guess I can hold up my end of the fighting,” said Jimmy. “I never failed to do it yet.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Milly. “You and Kenton and MacAfee are so quarrelsome.”

“I know what you mean, Milly,” said Jimmy, feeling his heart harden against even her friendliness. “You’re going to try to persuade Marion to take me. Well, I ain’t going to have you do it. I won’t go. Not that way. Marion’s got to take me because I’m as good a man as the rest of ’em, or I don’t go. And if he should happen to change his mind and want me, he’ll have to ask me mighty perticular. I won’t be hanging round having every one point to me as the boy that set fire to the building shed.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, anxiously. “Oh, Jimmy, promise me that it won’t be something you’ll be sorry for.”

“Sorry? I guess not. I haven’t decided what I’ll do yet,” he added. “I’m going down to my place and think about it, and mebby get some beaver skins. The last time I was down I saw signs of them on a little creek. They’re mighty scarce now. Uncle Amasa says they won’t be a beaver between here and Cincinnati next year.”

Milly felt relieved. The place Jimmy spoke of was an almost unbroken strip of forest, about five miles away, on which Jimmy had made “tomahawk improvements”—girdled a few trees and planted a little patch of corn. He and Uncle Amasa had built a cabin there, and sometimes stayed there for weeks on end when Maria was more than usually fiery-tempered. Trappers knew the little cabin well.

“You won’t go till Marion gets through with the lumber sawing?” she asked. “There’ll be so few men at the settlement if they have to help saw lumber up at Marietta.”

Jimmy could not see her face, but her matter-of-course tone staggered him. He wondered if girls could really feel things—if they had real pride; if they understood what it was to smart under a wrong until the pain cried for a sharp revenge. He shut his teeth on the hard words that came to him, and after a moment, said quietly:

“No, Milly. I can’t wait. I’ve got to get away. I guess I wasn’t made for civilization. I guess I don’t fit.”

They were entering the clearing about the Ayers’ cabin. Light came through the window, showing that the fire was being kept up and that those within were astir.

“I’ll watch you inside the door,” Jimmy said, halting in the path.

“Won’t you come in?” she begged. “You can sleep in Mose’s shake-down in the loft.”

A little shiver passed through him. “In Mose’s shake-down?” he repeated. “No, I’m obliged to you just as much. I’ll trouble you to keep this gun for Marion. It’s his. I won’t have a chance to return it.”