Chapter 10 - FRESH FIELDS

DOZEN years after the close of the war Johnny's new orchards blossomed and fruited in little towns and on well-cleared farms all the way out to the head- waters of the Miami, but John- ny was not there to see them.

For the thousands of people who had come to live in the Ohio River Valley the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five was marked by the completion of the Cumberland Road to Wheeling, Virginia, and by the journey to the new West of the Marquis de Lafayette. It was a triumph of pioneer energy and faith that the nation's aged guest was able to travel by post from the Potomac, and then by a palatial steamboat to St. Louis. Banquets and balls were given him in river ports of astonishing size and resources, and far up in Indiana, at the head of navigation on the Wabash, a venturesome settlement was made in that year and named in his honor.

It was thus that the floods of population and trade had fallen down the Ohio and backed up the larger tributaries. But behind and above these navigable streams the coun- try of Johnny's beautiful labors was still heavily wooded and thinly settled, and must remain so until canals and railroads ended their isolation.

Even there, however, people were living in comfort and security. What Indians were left were confined to reservations; w r ild ani- mals w r ere disappearing, and little flocks fed on a thousand hills. Few children were more than five miles from a log school-house, and few families farther than a half -day's journey from a mill town near which Johnny had a flourishing nursery. In the matter of or- chards this region, too, could now grow its own supply while the sower was off to fields unsown.

To the people of America a new door of dreams had been set ajar. With the boom- ing of successive cannon from Buffalo to the Battery, an all-water route w r as opened through the Erie Canal, from the mountain- walled seaboard to the prairies and forests that lay back of Toledo and Detroit. Sailing- vessels and steamers from the old Indian trading-posts around the Great Lakes waited at the Niagara docks to transfer their wild cargoes of peltries, maple sugar, tan -bark, potash, dried huckleberries and boiled honey, to canal barges. They returned loaded to the guard-rails with eager emigrants and all their worldly goods. From the boat-yards of Cleveland, and from the orchards and corn- fields of the lake shore westward to Sandusky, Johnny had glimpses of the magnitude of this new migration as he went over his territory planting seeds, distributing trees, selling his nurseries to responsible men for the small sums that would outfit him for this new ven- ture, and taking leave of old friends.

No one tried to dissuade him; indeed, many rejoiced. The setting sun has always been the shining goal of men, and America is still breeding a tribe of Israelites who move on, seeking the land of Canaan. Scarred vet- erans of pioneering in the rough hills of Ohio and western Pennsylvania also struck out for the level lands of Michigan and Indiana.

And no reason could be urged against his going. At fifty-one Johnny was ageless. His dark hair was pointed with silver, it is true, but his senses were as keen and his wiry fig- ure as active, erect and tireless as they had ever been. To him time was an illusion of the mind, and seasons existed only in the soul. It was the springtime of life so long as the vision beckoned and the spirit leaped to some task undone.

He was now gleaning seeds at the cider- mills in his earliest orchards at Chillicothe, Belpre and up the Muskingum Valley. Late in February he crossed from Zanesville to Columbus on short relays of horses that could be returned at once to their owners. On his way to Detroit he stopped for his farewell visit with Betty.

What changes the years had brought to the home on the old border which he had re- stored to beauty and she had kept together so bravely! At twenty the twin boys were in trade in Cincinnati, and, by much self-denial, paying Jimmy's way through Andover. In her seventeenth year Mary-go- 'round had had a gay winter in Marietta. There she had lost her heart to Ethan Hildreth. He was a distant cousin of the literary physician who had long shared and then succeeded to the medical practice of the lamented Dr. True, and who indulged a harmless fad for keeping records of the weather. The gilded cock on the gable of Dr. Hildreth's house, that waved its tail feathers gallantly in the teeth of every wind, was the never -failing subject of face- tious comment. When gibed about the rest- less habits of the bird, the doctor was wont to remark, dryly:

"You keep your ears open and you'll hear that rooster crow one of these days," and went off to add some item to the tabulated report which he made annually to the Ameri- can Journal of Science.

Mary came home to wear her mother's yellowing wedding-gown and veil under the blushing trees of the orchard. It was she and her shrewd and energetic young Yankee hus- band who remained on the big, prospering farm. And now two babies of a new genera- tion had begun to tumble out of a larger cabin into every happy day. 'Round her small world of home and social duties, for the place was the center of neighborhood life, Mary moved briskly on endless errands, with a cheerful ease and efficiency that were de- lightful to look upon. She greeted Johnny with the old affection, and then left him to visit with her mother.

Betty sat in his low rocking-chair, knitting a tiny red stocking, and with Mary's crowing baby on her lap. At forty there was not a w r hite hair in her bright crown, but her large, wistful blue eyes seemed lost in her pale, delicately featured face. Mary, always ten- derly conscious of her mother, turned a warn- ing look on Johnny when he told his purpose, for Betty went still whiter and put her hand to her heart as if in a spasm of pain.

"Oh, Johnny ! going so far away from us all, for so long a time?"

When he could he followed Mary out of doors. Fitful sunshine now and then broke through clouds, making the bare trees of the orchard etch their blue shadows on the snow.

" Isn't Betty well?"

"Who? Oh, mother! No one calls her that any more but you, Johnny. I thought you meant that fat rogue, Little Betty. Yes, I guess she's as well as usual. Anything start- ling always  " Her lips trembled. "I'll tell you just how it is, Johnny. In that terriblewar-time her heart was injured. We children never knew until Jimmy went away to college last fall. Then, when there was no one to lean on her any more she gave way all at once. She might live for years, in much comfort, if she would only spare herself. She's the mind and heart and conscience of the country- side. Every one runs to her and wears her out. Watch her to-day and you'll see what I mean."

Ah, he did watch her with a proud and breaking heart. How lavishly she burned the oil of life to keep the light shining for less-endowed people who were stumbling up- ward along dim, rough ways. The old trail had become a main-traveled road, and all day passers-by dropped in to consult her  about raising money to keep the school going until corn-planting time; to cut the first pink calico dress a pretty, excited girl had ever owned, and to ask her to persuade the un- progressive not to oppose a much -needed road tax. She prevailed with the leader of the young men to give up the rude and cruel sport of a shooting-match. Then a new set- tler, of whom she had never heard before, came to say that the baby had died and his wife was distracted because no travel- ing preacher could be found for the funeral. Betty would go herself.

" Give the poor mother my loving sympathy and tell her that I'll come to say a few words, and fetch the singing-school so there will be music."

"There!" cried Mary, with helpless tears, when the comforted man was gone. "It's seven miles, Johnny, and such roads and weather! It will send her to bed for a week."

"Don't be so troubled about me  please, dear. I must go. A little bit of a baby can- not be put away in the cold earth without people being reminded that of such is the Kingdom of God."

When Mary was in the spare room, tacking a new quilt in the frame for a quilting-bee, Betty and Johnny had an hour alone; and because this might be a last parting they touched upon memories never spoken of be- fore or afterward.

"Johnny, do you remember the night David brought me here, a bride? You  you lit the fire to welcome us home; and then we were sheltered with loving companionship, and you were out alone in the roofless night?"

"I would have stayed, Betty, if I could have borne it." Across the chasm of a quarter of a century of silence he looked his confession of a love foregone.

"I know," she murmured. "I think I have always known since the night Aunt Mary Lake died. There was no one in the world, then, as near and dear as you. If you "

For the remaining years of his life he had the knowledge to bear that, if he could have chosen differently, her days on earth might have been longer. A glowing stick broke into coals and faded to an ashen rose on the hearth, and the clock on the chimney-shelf ticked away a little space of eternity. And then a look of brooding tenderness.

"You have not been unhappy, Johnny?"

"No, dear. My mission has filled the cup of life, and having you in the same world has made it overflow."

After another silence she laid her hand on his in gentle pressure. "You have made my life infinitely happier. I cannot imagine any world, here or hereafter, where you were not."

In the evening he stored up other memories for years of solitary wandering. As the day darkened to a close the wind grew to a gale which penetrated the crevices of the house, so that Mary settled her mother in a high- backed chair and folded the scarlet cloak about her. The first new-born lamb of the season was brought in by the fire, and stories were told of brave and faithful Old Guard, who had run his race. With the two chil- dren in rosy sleep, Betty sitting w T ith closed eyes and folded hands, Mary knitting, and Ethan Hildreth shaping a hickory ax-handle "to the fit of his own fists" with an almost pious absorption, Johnny rested his elbows on the hearth and read aloud by the light of the fire.

In a voice of extraordinary beauty, now loud and clear, now soft and thrilling, he amplified such texts as "Heaven is not out- side a man, but within." Then with poetic imagery he pictured the Garden of God where every order of creation dwelt in harmony, and each found its own highest happiness and usefulness. Until the fire was covered for the night he lay marking guide-post passages to his hereafter in the copy of Swedenborg that he had bought for Betty. She was asleep when he departed in the morning, and, al- though he might never see her again, he would not have her awakened. But that night, unable to bear the comfort of any fire- side where she was not, he lay out on a bleak hilltop, and to a cloud- wracked sky where no star glimmered lifted up his heart in prayer for her sweet, fading life.

By ways still wild from infrequent travel Johnny went up to a point on the Sandusky River where the Senecas had a small reserva- tion. There he got an Indian guide and the loan of a horse through the bottomless, tim- bered morass of the Black Swamp to the rapids of the Maumee. To his dismay, he found the wide river that floundered in a trough of the low plain in raging flood, the waters thundering down the falls with the foam-crests of ocean surges.

His seeds were rafted across with difficulty, and he could do no planting in the saturated ground of the busy mill and transport towns which flanked the foot of the rapids. Nor could he get through the hundred miles of densely wooded and boggy bottoms to Fort Wayne. But he promised to come down- stream with the flatboat - loads of wheat, corn and hogs in the autumn. Determined and optimistic people here were clearing and draining their rich lands, and had begun work on canals to the Miami and Wabash. When these should be completed  and John- ny's hundred-mile panorama of orchards in this valley had blossomed and fruited before that labor of Hercules was done  people would pour into an unhealthy region which had fewer settlers than before the war. Then the little log lake port of Toledo, that now stood up to its ears in mud and malaria, would rival Detroit.

Room was found for his two leather bags of seeds in a train of freight-wagons carrying flour, meal and pork to feed the transients who were passing through the old wilderness capital on the strait. Miles of grassy marshes and cranberry bogs, a dozen foaming streams with crumbling banks, sunken and tilted cor- duroy, and sloughs that would have floated boats, extended all the way up to the plank sidewalks of Detroit. Johnny paid his pas- sage, at that time and for many seasons there- after, by helping pry out mired wagons, get discouraged oxen on their legs again, and re- pair broken wagons at improvised forges.

Even then the old gateway of armies and trade was a trim little city of white wooden houses and picket-fenced gardens. Stand- ing in level green fields flanked by farms, with cattle grazing under trees that trailed their low branches in tranquil waters, and with every sort of craft anchored in the roadstead, it reminded a famous traveler, a decade later, of the quiet beauties of Holland.

As this was the season when most of the wild merchandise was brought in from the woods, the open spaces of the town were full of traders from distant posts; French trappers with their violins and their gaudily decked Indian wives; priests baptizing in- fants and giving in marriage; impish half- breeds, and majestic braves in beaver-skin blankets. These mingled in the streets and shops with elegant ladies of an old French and British aristocracy, with wealthy busi- ness men and government officials. And to this sufficiently strange and varied crowd was added the Yankees, New-Yorkers, planters from the Southern seaboard, Western pio- neers, and the German, Dutch and Irish peas- ants, who poured up from a steamboat to gaze on the cliff -like forest wall through which they must break to reach their land of promise.

A day was required for goods to be tumbled out of the hold, for wagons to be loaded, and animals to find their land legs again. In a store crow T ded with time-pressed customers, where anything was to be had from a piano to a tomahawk, Johnny bought a suit of buckskin, cowhide boots water-proofed with deer tallow, a package of salt, and a bag of meal. For a stout pony he gave the last of his money to a mournful Ottawa. Loading his baggage on the animal, he was waiting in the Grand Circus for the forest-bound procession to form when a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder.

"Good omen! I never thought to see Johnny Appleseed moon rise on the woods of Michigan." It was the Territorial Governor, Lewis Cass, who grasped his hand. "Were you going through Detroit without coming to see me?"

Johnny smiled. "There was no need. You have an orchard."

"True; and I also have a table and a fair library where I like to see the face of a brave man and a friend. Detroit has had its orchards, and its good living from Montreal, since early French days. But the country behind it is wilder than was Ohio when you and I came out to the Muskingum, with many more Indians and ravening beasts. However, we will be shipping flour to Buffalo in five years."

"No doubt of it," Johnny agreed.

"Well, dear pilgrim, I've cut a few roads for you to travel. Would a letter from me be of use to you?"

Johnny considered a moment. "No, I think not. One doesn't need a ticket of ad- mission to men's hearts."

"You don't." The Governor compressed his lips and nodded in assent. Lifting his beaver hat with marked respect, he passed on.

With such a thrill as he had not felt since that eventful day in Pittsburg twenty-seven years before, Johnny went out on this heroic human tide. Men on saddle-horses led the way across the marshy ground to the west and into the woods. Families followed in demo- crat wagons with strings of laden animals, in carts, in frail chaises whose broken skele- tons were left to bleach along this wild way, and in the slow but sure ox-drawn prairie- schooners. Those afoot, like Johnny, had no trouble about keeping up, for in this lacustrine land of ponds, wet depressions and water-filled gullies there were no hills to climb, and the stumps and fallen trees that littered the ax-widened Sauk trail made all travel slow. Ten years later, when this forest-girt highway had become the post-road to Chicago, it was still an obstructed mire, with many unbridged streams.

But within a twelvemonth after the open- ing of the Erie Canal emigrants were pouring over it eight months of the year. Every mile of it out to the crossing of the St. Joseph rang with axes, and every considerable stream soon had a sawmill. No one could journey over it for an hour without seeing smoke curling up through the noble beeches and ship-mast conifers. The narrower ravines were spanned by tree trunks, and Johnny's Indian pony "toed" these slippery foot- bridges as easily as he; and at the sprawling log tavern which marked the limit of a day's travel, there was either a good ford or a tim- ber-raft ferry worked with ropes and pulleys.

In a beautiful wilderness where friendsprang up with the myriad delicate flowers of the forest, Johnny lived a second youth of eager joy in his mission. It was dangerous for a man to camp alone where huge bears, timber - wolves, lynxes, panthers and wild- cats were so numerous and bold; but Johnny was seldom obliged to do that, for wayfarers were nearly always on the road. Or he man- aged to reach some lichened, beechwood cab- in, where he slept on a pole-bed laced with rawhide, heaped with pine boughs and spread with deerskins. But except for his bag of meal he must often have gone hungry, for new-comers were living chiefly on game, and paying for their limitless acres with peltries. Besides the problem of food, Johnny was perplexed to know where to put in his seeds. There were no hills or bluffs, and he was obliged to rail off corners of clearings or to fence in inclosures against barns or mills with slabs or brush. So he proceeded through the timbered plains, and through the "oak openings" farther west, where every cabin was raised in a grassy copse encircled by great trees. That was a gently rolling country of park -like beauty  of wide - spreading oaks, little hills and dancing brooks, and of sunnypaces sown with blossoms, where a gay woodpecker drummed on every ancient bole and the wood-thrush filled the bright, cool days with melody.

It was on an evening late in April, when his orchards in Ohio were in bloom and his heart ached for his old day in Paradise with Betty, that he reached the point on the St. Joseph where there was a crossing to the country of the Pottawatomies. Not for ten years was a white settlement made on the north bank, from which he now saw the camp- fire and skin lodges of a village of this numer- ous tribe that held the lands around the head of Lake Michigan. Following a couple of mounted braves who forded the broad stream by the light of pine-knot torches, he rode up the steep, wooded slope and sought shelter in a cabin that he was surprised to find on the edge of the Indian town. Pulling the latch-string, after the custom of the country, he walked in. A white woman, petticoated in deerskins like a squaw, screamed, and her rough husband dropped a shotgun.

"Thought it was them pesky redskins, stranger. Air you that appleseed mission- er?" Johnny's fame ran everywhere be-fore him. "Haul up a stool and pitch into the grub."

But Johnny stood aloof in the doorway. "The Indians are peaceable. Why should they molest you?"

Because I'm squattin' on their land, an' they're try in* to scare me out. I'm willin' to pay, but  "

"You are not. You do not expect to pay, for you are well aware that they will not sell. You are a thief, and the meanest kind of an enemy of every decent white man in the country. If your family is killed the crime will be on your own head. I'll report your wicked trespassing to Governor Cass. When you move across the river I'll plant an orchard for you."

Sick at heart to find the old wrongs and hostilities springing up like poisonous weeds on this new border, he led his pony to the Indian village. That he had been Logan's brother would not commend him to a tribe that boasted the massacre of Fort Dearborn. But they had seen him leave the cabin a moment after entering, and the most un- friendly savage was disarmed by a claim on his hospitality.

THOUGHT IT WAS THEM PESKY REDSKINS, STRANGER. AIR YOU THAT APPLESEED MISSIONER ?"

' I need food/ ' he said, simply. ' ' All men, white and red, are my brothers; but I do not break bread with thieves and trouble-makers. But leave that man alone. I will rid you of him without violence."

They made room for him at the fire. In the morning they offered to keep his tired pony on the fresh pasture, and to lend him a canoe to go down the historic "St. Joe" to Lake Michigan. There were already many cabins along the north bank of this stream that was navigable by steamboats. Near them he found sheltered nooks for his seeds in high banks; and he found coves back of the cliffs that sprang from the silver beach below the old French trading-post at the harbor mouth. In these northern lands the season was later than in Ohio, so, until the end of May, he continued his planting in a region where later generations reaped a mil- lionfold. Long after his labor of love had ceased Michigan became the commercial or- chard of the Middle West.

The new clearings were bannered with corn, and all the glades were red with wild strawberries when he returned to the Indian village. The tribe had refused to care for anursery, but Chief Pokagon hitched a horse and an ox to a flaming chariot and drove Johnny down to the Tippecanoe River. He had reason to be proud of the wagon that he had made for himself, after no known model, long before a white man's vehicle was seen in that country. The hay-rack bed was mounted on hickory axles, and the solid wheels, hewn and burned and scraped out of cross-sections of a white-oak tree, were painted a bright vermilion. Until the Potta- watomies signed away their ancestral lands and went west of the Mississippi, Johnny could always count upon a lift of fifty miles in this triumphal car. Throned on a high seat beside the chief, who wore his war bonnet of eagle feathers, they rumbled across the lake-dotted prairies of northern Indiana, with its great herds of deer and buffalo. After crossing the shallow head-waters of the Tippecanoe, he and his pony were set on the southward trail.

A true Indian path in prairie country, it followed every turn of the eastern bank and clung to the shadow of the trees. Sheltered alike from sun and storm, it had a broad ribbon of water and a double belt of wood- land between it and prairie fires. On the onehand were ancient camping-places, all the for- est fruits and blossoms, and the rapture of thrushes; and on the other an emerald sea of wind-rippled grass, with its fleets of cloud shadows, and the fluting of the meadow-lark. And all the way down to where it poured its tribute into the Wabash the Tippecanoe had every witchery of prairie streams  flowery meads, and marshes sky-woven with water- fowl; long stretches of bottom-land wooded with sycamores, maples and hawthorns, and deep, winding ravines brimming with beauty, where the water twisted and foamed for miles over rocky rapids.

Starting from the busy little year-old river port of Lafayette, Johnny spent the sum- mer exploring the enchanting valley of the Upper Wabash, searching out the settlers in the bottoms, the mills on the creeks, and the " neighborhoods" of from six to ten cabins on adjoining quarter-sections of prairie. Peo- ple who had been on the treeless areas five years had wood-lots growing from black wal- nuts and the seeds of locusts, and they had hedges of hawthorn shrubs and osage orange- trees, planted on ditched and sodded ridges for wind and fire breaks.

In the shelter of a few such living fences on the Wea and Wildcat prairies, in the knot of hills that overlooked Lafayette, and on bluffs above high water, Johnny began to put in his seeds. It was late in September, when the whistle of the first steamboat of the sea- son was a Gabriel's trump over a forty-mile radius of country. During a month of dry and windless weather he worked rapidly up- stream. From the sources of the Wabash he had only to make a twenty-mile portage across the low undulations of the watershed to reach Fort Wayne and the valley of the Matimee.

The prairie-grass had grown six feet high and turned brown. With sharp nights it lost its embroidery of purple and gold ray-flowers. Long imprisoned in forests, Johnny fell under the spell of these spaces bare and grand, arched over by wide, sun-drenched or star- ry domes, where the winds blew free and the spirit fared forth to brave adventure. Often before seeking shelter for the night he climbed a tree to look out over the sunset - gilded billows, with their horizon lines of blazing autumn woodlands. Wild herds were drowned in that ocean of herbage; cabin roofs were awash; the canvas-covered schooners of new-comers, the wagon-loads of corn and wheat, and the droves of hogs and cattle going down to flatboats on the river, plowed through like ships at sea, with parted waters in their wake.

But it was a landscape of terror as well as of beauty, where the vigilance of men never ceased. A spark from a careless hunter's fire, borne on a high west wind, would sweep a sea of flame over a fifty-mile prairie in an hour, often overtaking fleeing herds of deer and buffalo. Around every "neighborhood" the farmers mowed and burned a wide strip of grass and plowed the land as a protection. Johnny was cautioned to sleep in a cabin when he could, and to camp on the eastern banks of waterways, where he would find old Indian cobble-lined fire-holes in cleared spaces in the timber belts.

In the last week of October he reached the house of one of the few Scotchmen in the country. The man had a plot in the shelter of the thorny hedge ready for him, and, in a cold wind that threatened to blow the shock of red hair from his head, sat on a sawbuck and talked as Johnny worked.

"I hae a braw coatie o' buffalo-hide to fend the cauld frae ye. It cost me nae mair thana chairge o' pooder an' shot, so there's nae occasion for gratitude. But an orchard here is like the grace o' God. It canna be had for siller."

"The best things in life are those that can- not be bought."

"Ay, ye gang aboot gien yer bonny trees wi'oot price." By and by he remarked that it was blowing up to rain or to drive one of the deil's ain fires. His look was one of anxious concern. "Man, ye'll bide the blawy nicht?"

Johnny thought not. The planting season was short, and no time was to be lost. With such a wind at his back he could easily make the ten miles to the portage by nightfall and be in Fort Wayne the next evening. Filling the pockets of the warm fur coat with corn-dodgers and the hickory-nuts that the children had patiently picked out for him, he took the river trail.

With the waning day the wind increased. The sun set in a bank of fiery rose, with a smoky pall above it; and after it disap- peared no light lingered on the plain, for a wrack of gray storm-clouds hid the moon and stars. In the darkness Johnny could not seeto cross a steeply walled and watered ravine, nor could he venture to build a fire in the dry leaves and underbrush of the narrow belt of woods that topped the west bank. Tethering the pony under the trees and supplying him with grass, he ate his own supper, and with his half-empty bag of seeds for a pillow lay down with a huge hollow log to windward.

What with the roar of the wind and crowd- ing thoughts, it was long before he slept. In the settlement which had grown up around "Mad Anthony's " old fort and Indian agency, a big plot would be ready for him, and men who had brought in corn and marsh-hay would be waiting to take him all the way out to Shane's Prairie and Twenty-four-mile Creek. Brave women were there who never winced if a bear or a panther scrambled across the roof, but who cried in their sleep for the bowery homes they had left in the East. Ah, what a mission! Again, as in Ohio, it was to be his privilege to feed the multitude in these new wilds with comfort and beauty.

He decided that he would leave his pony on the farm of William Worth near the town, and go down the Maumee with the flatboats. From Toledo he could make a quick passageto Erie, paying his way by pushing cord-wood under the boiler of a steamboat. Thence he could cross to his old gleaning-field in the Allegheny Valley. In the spring he could work his way down the Ohio and up the Miami to Piqua. Thus he could save time and energy  but for the first year since he had known her he would not see Betty! All he could hope for was to have word from her when he came into Pittsburg in February. Turning upon his bag of seeds he buried his face in his arm, and when he was at peace again he slept like a child.

And then, what dreams of sound and light in the moment before awaking ! Upon the fabric of the wind  the loud moaning, the surf -rush of long grasses, and the threshing of the bare tree-tops  were woven filaments of sighs, silk- en rustlings and aerial whispers. A glow as of the rising sun was suddenly a burst of glory, as if the Creator had just spoken; and upon that were etched the black web of the trees, little flying birds and shooting stars. It was a puff of hot smoke, a blinding glare, the howling of wolves, the thunder of hoofs and the frantic plunging of the pony that brought him to his feet.

He leaped to get his hat over the faithful animal's eyes, but with an awful scream the pony broke loose and shot into that flaming sea. Shaking his blazing coat from him, Johnny fell down the bank, pursued by fire to the water's edge. Then a cloud of sparks and a billow of smoke rolled over him, filling the ravine.

There he lay immersed, with the smell of scorched fur and flesh in his nostrils, and the struggles and cries of suffocating and drown- ing creatures in his ears. Very soon, how- ever, it was so still that he could hear the shallow water chuckling over its stony bed. The smoke lifted slowly, but, once it had risen to the prairie level, was whirled away on the wind. After a long time he crept up the farther bank and, burned, drenched and blinded, lay in a gale which blew itself out in gusts that were laden with the ashes and cinders of dead fires.

When he had recovered from the shock he had to consider if this was the end  if he, like his pony and his seeds, lay on the fiery death-bed of the prairies. Then he was not dismayed. He would leave nothing behind him but the unfinished task, and from that

HE LEAPED TO GET HIS HAT OVER THE FAITHFULanimal's eyes

God called men every hour. And all that he valued was laid up in heaven or would join him there. Into his heart he gathered his treasured memories and beliefs  had a vision of the orchards that he had planted to gladden the eyes of men and angels. He summoned the image of Betty, and the kindred spirits of those who had gone before  relived hours of happy companionship with them and an- ticipated eternity until, from the agony of his burns and the torture of morning light to his eyes, he sank into unconsciousness.

Afterward he remembered that the clearest vision of all was of Logan, who knew the wild ways of these old lands of the Miamis in the dark. As on that night in the Shawnee vil- lage on the Scioto, he felt the young chief's arm about him, heard his voice calling: Brother! Brother! Brother!" until he struggled up again from some abyss into which he had slipped. He got to his feet, bandaged his eyes, and without hesitation took an un- seen path. When asked afterward how he made his way to Fort Wayne, he answered with simple and reverent conviction:

"I was led."

Three days later he staggered out of prairie-grass higher than his head, to hear the tinkle of cow-bells, and the laughing chatter of the school-children who were out on the hilly banks south of the town gathering hazelnuts. His hair was singed unevenly, and a strip of buckskin from his shirt was bound across his eyes. In his fire-blackened and water-shrunk- en garments, with his arms flung wide for the support of gathered sheaves of grass, he was such a figure as a farmer might have set up for a scarecrow in a corn-field. But from his firm, sweet lips came the gentlest speech these startled young people had ever heard. "Are there little children here?" "Yes, sir." It was Billy Worth, a tall boy of twelve, who spoke. They all picked up their Indian baskets and, running across the fire-strip of plowed ground, crowded around him with the divine compassion of childhood. Those prairie-bred little folk un- derstood his terrible plight, for the fire in which he had so nearly perished had been watched with alarm from Fort Wayne.

"Will you lead me to a doctor?" And he told his name. They looked upon him with wondering awe, for they had heard of him and his beautiful mission, as who in thatregion had not? And when he added that he had lost his seeds, but would have a new supply to plant for them in the spring, emo- tional Madeleine Bourie, the small daughter of a French trader of the place, covered his blistered hand with tears and kisses.

"Saint from heaven, have you lost your eyes, too?"

"No, dear little one; I hope not. But I cannot bear the light." And it seemed that, after three days of famine and torturing pains, he could no longer bear his own weight on his feet. He was sinking to his knees when Billy set sturdy shoulders under his arm.

"You lean on me, Johnny. I'm strong. Jean Bourie, you get on the other side o' him."

The evening glow was on land and river, and on the rude but busy trading-post around the old fort, when the children brought Johnny slowly in across the fields.

