Chapter 3 - GOOD SAMARITANS

OWN the Muskingum Johnny dropped so rapidly, stopping \1 only for a day or two at each ~ cluster of cabins to put in a small nursery, that he ran ahead of rumor. Below Big Bottom and Fort Frye the current slack- ened, and his approach to Marietta was in- dicated when the stream widened to two hundred yards and the spectral sycamores that marched with its banks were no longer able to meet in high arches overhead. But even there he was still in the wilds, his water highway girt by steep hills, hemmed in by tall timber, and fed by countless little singing creeks. A clearing at which he asked per- mission to use any bit of waste land suitable for his purpose, and the pleasant tinkle of cow-bells in the woods, were signs that hewas on the outskirts of the dauntless town which, only a dozen years before, had been the first to front the flood of the River Beautiful.

Then there were sounds of hammers, the zipping wail of a saw in hard wood, and the clatter of a fallen plank that sent birds and squirrels skurrying to cover. Another man in his place, after three weeks in the wilder- ness, would have dipped the paddle briskly to round the next bend where, no doubt, lay a floating mill, and some such ambitious and social business as putting proper floors and doors in a cabin was afoot. But Johnny nosed his canoe into a clump of willows on the eastern bank, jumped out, and broke through the tasseling screen into a hill and tree-rimmed cove.

It was just such a place as he looked for everywhere  a sheltered nook overgrown with all the flowering vines and shrubs of the forest. To lovely and neglected spots like this song- birds retreated before the devastation of white men, and later generations of children found the thorny thickets of wild-apple blossonis that were a beautiful by-product of John- ny's labors. Not large enough for fields, too

steeply walled for safe pastures, they were long left undisturbed to the slow-growing seeds of his planting.

Johnny lost no time in getting to work. From soil as soft and loose as an ash-heap he pulled forest seedlings and weed -stalks by hand. Tough bushes, briers and saplings he cut down with his hatchet, and grubbed out the roots; and with his hoe he destroyed the innumerable cones of annuals that, pushing through the blanket of drifted leaves, ran up every rise in flickers of pale-green fire. The ground cleared over a fraction of an acre on the well-drained slope that faced westward toward the river, he raked it free of clods, opened orderly rows of trenches, and put in and covered up his seeds.

He was used to working thus all day, often eating a noon snack of rude fare on his feet, and not stopping until he had marked the plot and closed any opening in the protecting wall with a stout barrier of stakes and brush. But for several nights now, whether in the open or on a cabin hearth, he had slept ill and had wakened shivering in the cold dawns when fog sheeted the marshy bottom-lands. In the middle of the afternoon he cooled hishot face and hands at a spring and lay down on a patch of buffalo clover.

Scarcely a murmur of the world without penetrated the little greening hollow that distilled the earliest incense of spring. The sounds of tools, so loud on the river, were soft- ened here to the drumming of woodpeckers, chattering of squirrels and songs of birds. In his swift travel, where he bespoke men only in passing, Johnny was coming to find companionship in his furred and feathered neighbors, noting their nest-building, court- ship-caroling, and busy foraging. His glance, roving up to a crow that cawed from the top of a Cottonwood, fell to a fluttering patch of the discreetly warm color of the tea-roses that had bloomed beside his grandmother's cot- tage door in Boston. Then there was a laugh that bubbled up from the heart of a child. "Oh! I thought you were an Indian!" Johnny scrambled to his moccasined feet, for he had discarded his torturing boots in the Shawnee camp, and took off his fur cap to the little maid above him. Her full- skirted gown of linsey, that blew in the breeze about her ankles, and the folded kerchief, were of a fashion that went out when the un-

happy queen for whom Marietta was named laid her lovely head on the block. The colof of the gown was but temporary  a spring blossoming, as it were, due to experimental steeping in sassafras tea.

" There are no Indians about here," Johnny reassured her, gravely; but she nodded posi- tively.

"They always come down the bluff trail along the west bank to sell their furs when the geese fly north." She seated herself on the buttressing roots of a beech-tree, on the rim of his horizon, and took her knitting from her belt. Girls were obliged to grow up early in that day and place. At sixteen most of them were married, and idleness was sin in a maid of fourteen.

" I'm as 'f raid as death of Indians." She sud- denly turned a pallid face and wide blue eyes upon him a look that he remembered, when he saw it again in tortured fancy years after- ward in an hour of anguish. "They they killed my father and mother in the mas- sacre  at Big Bottom."

Johnny bared his head. Big Bottom, forty miles up the Muskingum, was now a place of corn and wheat fields, of grazing cattle andpopulous cabins. It had been difficult for him to realize the tragic event there of ten years before, that had ushered in half a dec- ade of savage warfare. Such horrors might happen again; there was a stockade in every settlement, and the government's Fort Har- mer at Marietta. But presently she put the matter out of her mind, showing of what sterling New England stuff she was fashioned.

"I came to find these hepaticas, and to sit by them awhile."

She cleared last year's rusty foliage from a nest of faint-blue blossoms, and then, blush- ing a little, kissed them and left them to nod on their mossy stems. A Puritan maid, she was far too well brought up to ask questions, but she glanced curiously at the small, culti- vated plot, and Johnny held up a handful of shining brown seeds.

"I know what they are  apple-seeds! Dr. True has an apple-tree, and when it blooms it's the wonder of the town. The older peo- ple tell fairy- stories of orchards in the East that bury little homes in blossoms. I wish  ' '

She stopped, for Johnny had flung his arm across his eyes. After a moment he looked at her again. " There will be such orchards

here for every one." His face was so pale, but his smile so grave and sweet, that she fell into a wondering silence. She was not sur- prised to find him here, for in this Mecca of the New West strangers arrived by every boat and over every trail of the forest; but it was an unheard - of thing to see a man planting trees where every other one was at the bitter necessity of chopping them down. By and by she remembered a polite ceremony that had been omitted.

"My name is Betty Stacey. Please, will you tell me yours?"

"Johnny."

It occurred to neither of them that the in- formation lacked anything, and now that they were acquainted she offered shy confidences and hospitality.

"It was Aunt Mary Lake who found me where mother hid me in the woods, and . brought me up. She isn't any relation, but just everybody's Aunt Mary. She must be getting old, for she's sixty; but she's so busy doing things for people that I guess she for- got about it. Won't you come to see her? Please, Johnny."

"To-morrow." He explained that he had 55to make a brush fence across the gully that had been cut in the rim of the cove by the spring, to keep deer and cattle out. Then he must find some one in the town to keep weeds and forest seedlings from choking his nursery.

Betty listened with eager sympathy. Her pretty face had warmed to the blush of the wild rose, and no fox-squirrel had fur of so bright and burnished a brown as the hair that curled on her neck. It was the color that went with black-lashed eyes as darkly blue as the waters of the Muskingum, and sun-kisses across the bridge of a proud little nose that drooped at the tip.

She had meant to go, but Johnny closed his eyes as if in weariness and discomfort, and fell into such an uneasy sleep on the slope below her that she sat as still as any mouse and watched over him with sweet, maternal solici- tude. The sun was shining on a level along the forest aisles when he was awakened by a crash that shook the hill. Betty was on her feet, back toward him, gazing down into the wood.

"Did the cabin fall?" he cried.

"The cabin? It was in the shipyard. A

prop gave way and a pile of timbers tumbled down."

He ran up the slope. Below, on a shadowy bend of the river, a wide swath had been cut in the ranks of trees, and on the grassy ways lay a long hull, like a viking ship of old on a Norse fjord. It was an astonishing thing to see an ocean-sailing vessel of a hundred tons burden nearing its launching on this far- inland stream; but Johnny remembered that the leaders of the Ohio Company were Revo- lutionary officers from the ports of New Eng- land, who had built a second Mayflower at Pittsburg. Ship -building was a habit with men of that breed, and the navigation of un- charted waters a trade.

" There," said Betty, delightedly, as a huge young negro shouldered his way through the crowd of men in the yard. "Kitt Putnam has come from the mill to pile the timbers up again. He's the biggest, strongest, kindest darky in the world. He'll keep the weeds out of your little bits of baby apple-trees for you."

Down the hill she sped in happy excite- ment and crossed a freshly plowed stump- lot. Johnny called to her to wait for himwhen she paused on the edge of a drainage ditch, looking down ruefully at her pretty, yellow moccasins, but Kitt ran and set her across. He was not a river negro from Ken- tucky, but a freedman who had been the body-servant of old Gen. Israel Putnam in the East. Brought out by Colonel Israel, he was a universal favorite in Marietta and Belpre because of his good manners, his prowess in sports, and the cheerful willingness with which he served every one with his phenomenal strength and dexterity.

Before she disappeared in the thin belt of forest that hid the town, the gay and tender child turned and waved to him again. Al- ready ties of interest and affection were be- ginning to bind Johnny to the New West. He was no hermit of the woods. It was the pathos of his solitary and wandering life that people touched his imagination and twined about his heart.

Twilight was darkening in the cove when he came up from the deserted shipyard with fuel for his fire. For easier carriage the seeds had been transferred to a bag made of can- vas from a caravan cover. With them he shared his brush bed and a corner of his

blanket to protect them from the damp. Unable to eat anything, he lay down at once under a canopy of unfurling leaves so sketchy that he could consider the heavens. He knew only the polar stars, by which mariners and hunters have steered their way since time began, but he was beginning to take note of other groups and planets that bloomed night- ly on the dark. And it was by such reverent and poetic watchers that the sky was mapped and peopled.

Even in his dreaming dozes Johnny was conscious of throbbing head and burning skin. Twice he got up to replenish the fire; and in a dawn turned suddenly bleak he was aroused by the desolate cries of geese winging their way northward. Then he fell into a pro- found sleep, and while he slept the fire was quenched by rising vapors. Fog filled the green bowl to the brim, and he woke in a chill that gripped his heart.

When the sun rose and pulled the earth cloud up into the blue, and all the undergrowth sparkled and dripped as with rain, he wrap- ped his blanket about the seeds and dragged himself to the sunniest slope. There he lay in a frozen agony that was unbelievable.

Soon waves of warmth ran over him, then flashes of heat, then consuming fires. Hear- ing the sounds of saws and hammers in the shipyard, he cried aloud for water, but could not make himself heard. He found the spring and, having drunk, fell in the cold, saturated moss and slept away the fever. It was in the white void of fog that he woke again, in a chill that was like the rigor of death.

With the return of the fever his mind wan- dered, so that he babbled of senseless things. But even then subconsciousness was in the grip of dark anxiety for what he must guard with his life. He groped his way blindly and flung his arms wide across the bag of seeds. Hours later he was dimly conscious of light, flying footsteps, a pulsing pillow under his head, and warm drops on his face. Then great arms lifted him into the canoe and he drifted down into darkness and oblivion.

Betty had run on before, and Mary Lake had her one four-poster bed out from the wall and spread with tow-linen sheets, when Kitt Putnam "toted" Johnny up from the river and into her good house within Marietta's old garrison inclosure of Campus Martius. When

she had stripped off his wet buckskins and got him into one of her own long gowns, he lay in a restless moaning that was a piteous thing to see and hear.

Mary Lake's clear, gray eyes had seen a variety of things in many ports of the world in the forty-odd years since Captain Lake of a Newfoundland fishing fleet shipped a bride at Bristol, England. For one thing, as a nurse in Washington's camp at Fishkill, she had seen young men as ill of remittent fever as Johnny get well. The first thing to do was to have as few people underfoot as pos- sible; so when Kitt had gone for Dr. True she shut her door against anxious and willing neighbors and pulled the latch -string in. Then she spoke to the grief and terror stricken child who clung to the foot-rail of Johnny's bed.

"Sit by him, my lass, if it will comfort 'ee, and fan him with a turkey wing." She still had a bit of her girlhood dialect, and she might have been born in her straight gray gown and snowy cap. Without haste or noise or litter, she was making papery medicine wafers in a camp spider at the huge stone fireplace when Dr. True came in.

"Oh, doctor," faltered Betty, "I think he wants water.' ' Tears hung on her eyelashes, for even the children of that day knew that water was poison to one sick of a fever. But Dr. True was a medical heretic. And, in- deed, he had been chosen by the Ohio Com- pany to care for the health of this frontier settlement, where orthodox remedies were often not to be had, just because of his ability and willingness to lean back hard on Mother Nature and Mary Lake.

"Wants water, does he? That's reason- able. Give me such a temperature and I'd jump into the garrison well."

Johnny drank and drank and drank. The doctor flung the covers back impatiently and bade Kitt open the "port -holes," his hu- morous name for the small, hinged windows which were sunk in the walls of six-inch-thick, whip-sawed poplar planks. Later houses were much ruder, but the very first ones built in Marietta were dove-tailed together like the drawers of a wardrobe chest, and had proper fittings of glass and hardware.

"There, that's better. The man was gasp- ing like a fish. Hm  hm! this is quite a conflagration. I happen to be out of that 



Guess we'll have to put this fire out with water, Mary."

Betty was set to washing Johnny's earth- stained face and hands while Mary Lake bathed the burning body under the sheet. The doctor asked no questions about his pa- tient, for he was at the free call of every stranger within the gates; and Mary Lake's house was a hospital, in time of need, main- tained by the Ohio Company. But the young face on the pillow interested and puzzled him, for it was of a type not often seen in the ruthless business of pioneering. An Ichabod Crane of a middle-aged bachelor, he sat with one long, thin leg dangling over the other, peering around his big nose with the one eye that was of any use to him, and switching back the hair that he still wore in a ribboned cue, in the inconvenient fashion of an earlier day.

By the dim light of deer-tallow candles the two toiled over Johnny. The doctor kept a finger on the small, hard, racing pulse, and three times during the night-watch he gave a dose of some remedy which he managed never to be without.

"He's holding his own  the heart rallies. "

The medicine - man looked encouragement across to his white-haired comrade of many a victory over death since they two lifted the siege of smallpox from this garrison, in the first, hard year of occupation. They were still toiling when a cock crew.

"The turn is coming. Be ready, Mary. We shall have to be getting this man warm,soon/'

The opening of Mary Lake's door was a signal for help, and the giving of it a public duty. Night-capped heads looked out of half the twenty plank houses that faced one an- other from the four sides of the square.

Boil corn, and keep the kettles hot against Kitt's coming. Some one milk a cow, and I'm giving my lassie leave to rob any nest of a fresh egg." She roused the negro, who had slept on a buffalo robe on the hearth. "Kitt, do 'ee get into Mr. Woodbridge's store on The Point; aye, lad, if ye have to break in, and fetch a jug of whisky."

The fever went suddenly, leaving Johnny collapsed, all but senseless, and drenched with icy sweat. Only the black knight of emer- gencies had the swift and easy strength to rub the warming alcohol in hard and fast

enough, and then to truss the patient up into that primitive hot pack, the "corn sweat. " Milk and eggs and the broth of wild ducks fed the flickering fires of life and helped break the rigors of a chill that was without tremors ; and perspiration checked the rising tempera- ture. Then the fight began again, for this se- verest form of malaria that struck down the imprudent new-comer along the undrained waterways of the West, ran its course in a vicious circle that gave the victim no rest.

Kitt had brought all of Johnny's belongings up from the cove; so when, in his delirium, he cried out for his seeds, Betty dragged the heavy bag to the bedside. "Here they are, Johnny, all safe," and she guided his search- ing hand.

"Why, what Who's this?" The fruit and flower loving doctor, who had helped Major Doughty bring up peach -seeds with army stores from the Potomac, and plant them about Fort Harmer and in the settle- ment, drew out a handful of the astonishing contents of the bag. "A nurseryman!"

"He planted a big patch on Commodore Whipple's farm above the shipyard, and he said there would be orchards here for everyone, as if he meant  meant to give his little apple-trees away."

The doctor put the precious seeds back, and tied the string securely, so that not one should fall on the stony ground of Mary Lake's scoured maple floor. And when he found the initials " J. C." rudely splashed in butternut dye on the canvas, he dropped to his seat.

"It's Jonathan Chapman, that good  good Samaritan of Pittsburg, come to settle in Marietta. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!"

The first things of which Johnny was clear- ly conscious were the hum of Betty's flax- wheel and the pleasant vision of Mary Lake at her loom. Then a little boy stood in the doorway, rubbing the dusty toes of one foot against the other ankle, and staring at a man in bed on a sunny day.

"Do 'ee get him a cooky, my lass."

The wheel whirred to a stop, and Betty, going to a built-in corner cupboard, took a crisp cake from a covered jar of brown crock- ery. She gave it to the child with an affec- tionate pinch of the red cheek, and he was gone in a flash. Afterward Johnny heard

the wonder-story of the cooky-jar that Mary Lake had bought in Bristol on her wedding- day, and kept filled with unaccustomed sweets for the bridegroom captain and the crew of the Mary Bird all the way to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. By miracles of re- sourcefulness, and a loving-kindness that had never failed, it had been replenished for the pleasure of a forty-year-long procession of children of her own and other households.

Now the flax- wheel hummed again, and by open doors spring flowed like a healing stream through the little home of love and peace. It was moments before the soft air and the smell of peach-blossoms in General Varnum's garden made Johnny realize with a shock the mischance that had lost him weeks of the season's sowing.

To gain strength for his journey he began to dig and plant in the flower-beds of every tiny front dooryard in Campus Martius, as soon as he could crawl out into the sunshine. By such friendly services in picket-fenced gardens he made his way across the strag- gling town. The houses had been hastily built of logs and of planks from broken-up flat- boats, it is true but the muddy, stump-strewn roads were as broad and straight, and as pleasantly shaded with forest hardwoods, as any village of New England. The settle- ment had its classic learning from Harvard and Dartmouth, its Yankee energy and Revo- lutionary courage. But the South faced it across the Ohio; the red tribes were sinister neighbors on a border that they crossed at will; and from stormy France a wave had swept its human wreckage to these far shores. So Marietta was losing its down-east speech and rigid Puritan code, and getting a view- point and vernacular of its own.

In less than a week Johnny started, one afternoon, to walk out to Dr. True's farm, east of the town, to see the famous apple-tree. The way lay along Sacra Via, the mounting road that had been cut through dense woods to the Big Mound  earthworks of a vanished race, now dotted with the white man's neatly lettered headboards.

At this time his orchard in Pittsburg would be in bud. It was too early to expect  and then he stopped, thinking that yearning mem- ory was playing him a trick. But in another moment he saw the small, well- cultivated farm, forest-girt, that lay up a hillside and

looked out to the broad sweep of the river and the Virginia mountains. The symmetri- cal bouquet of pink and pearl was lifted above the rustic cabin and a thrifty plantation of young peach-trees which had dropped their blossoms. The doctor called to him from a tilted chair under the boughs.

"If anybody's sick, don't tell me, Johnny. People can be ill any time, but my apple- tree blooms but once a year."

Exhausted by the two-mile tramp, Johnny dropped to the grass and lay looking up with such a smile of gentle sweetness and happi- ness as this medical man had never seen. He was steeping his soul in the loveliness and promise of the tree. What orchards he could make grow in the mild climate and virgin soil of the New West ! The doctor had bought it of Johnny's predecessor in Pittsburg only seven years before, and fetched it down in the cabin of the mail-packet. New England could not have grown it in twenty years, and then would have toughened and dwarfed and twisted it into some half-wild, defiant thing. This had sprung up straight and round-headed as a sugar maple, bright-barked as a rose cane. A queen of beauty of a thousand generationsof gentle ancestry, it reigned over that wild landscape, and it had its court of honey-bees.

"Are the apples good?"

The doctor could scarcely contain his pride. "It is not in full bearing yet, but it's a Sum- mer Sweeting."

"It has a more important work to do than bearing you a crop of apples. You are going to strip it, every season, of its choicest buds, so every household for miles around can have a tree of Summer Sweetings." Johnny had lifted himself to his elbow, and his cavernous eyes darkened and glowed in a face wasted by fever. "I must teach you the art of budding and grafting."

"We are all willing to work and to make sacrifices here for the common good." The tilted chair came down, and with his hands on his knees the doctor leaned forward. Rumor had overtaken this heroic and inspired youth while he lay unconscious, and if it had not Dr. True could have read his loving purpose in the eyes that burned with zeal and compassion.

"Ill take charge of your nursery here  keep an eye on Kitt's work. Young fruit- trees are like babies. They pine away and die if they are not mothered by some one who

loves them. Johnny, I thought I had heard of all the ways there were to serve God." His single eye watered, and to hide his emo- tion he began to scold: " Don't be so foolish as to get sick again. There are not three doctors nor two Mary Lakes in Ohio. And don't try to live on locusts and wild honey. I am often obliged to go fifty miles by canoe, or on horseback, when a man lets a tree fall on him or is clawed by a wildcat, but I sleep in a cabin and eat civilized food when I can. And when I can't I camp along the upland trails as the Indians do, and not in the bot- tom of a fog- well. I'll make up some Peru- vian-bark powders to nip malaria in the bud."

He was coming out of the house with the packet when a man ran from the woods with incoherent cries. He had brought his young wife all the way from Big Bottom in a canoe, and she was at Mary Lake's, in the terrors and pains of first childbirth.

The doctor chuckled over his own good luck in having Johnny thrown on his hospital i "That turns you out. Mary's got another lame dog to mend, and no room for you. You'll have to live with me until you arc well enough to travel."

"I'm going to-morrow. Good-by!" He got to his feet and held out his hand. When the doctor was gone he had to fight against a weakness and lassitude that dismayed him, and against an aching desire to sleep there in the scented night and in the balmy wind which blew all the way from the Gulf. The tree had a pearly radiance in the dusk when he turned his back upon it and went swiftly down to the crowded and noisy settlement.

The spring flood -tide of migration had backed up at Marietta. For a week every sort of water craft had been making fast to the trees, for the honor of being at the launching of the St. Clair, the first sailing-vessel on Western waters to attempt the voyage to New Orleans. Pine torches flared from boats and landings, and from the five bastions of the pentago- nal fortifications of Port Harmer, across the Muskingum. Lower Muskingum Street, the merchants' row that ran along the bank to The Point, flared with these smoking lights and swarmed with emigrants, traders, French rowers, Negro polemen and Indians.

Through this press Johnny pushed his way. He had given half his money to the doctor, who needed all he could get "to buy

medicines for poor folks." Now he spent the other half. He paid the captain of the mail- packet to fetch the little rocking-chair to Mary Lake, on his next trip from Pittsburg; and he bought a basket of maple sugar of a Shawnee squaw to help keep the cooky- jarfilled.

Then for hours he stood before the door of the Ohio Company's land-office, waylaying men, inquiring their destination, marking the most energetic and public-spirited, learning that many were going to Cincinnati or to the new settlements of Chillicothe and Dayton. Was he going up the Scioto and Miami to put in his nurseries?

"lam going to the Indian border, all the way from Dayton to Cleveland," he reassuredthem.

It was after midnight when the crowds dis- persed and the torches were extinguished. At once the illimitable leagues of woods and hills and waters went black and closed in on the sleeping town. In pitch-darkness Johnny went up the steep path to Campus Martius to leave the basket of sugar on Alary Lake's door-step. Then he descended the bluff to the bank of the Muskingum. He had a keyto the boat and warehouse where his canoe was stored. The foul odors of skins, fish ref- use, tar and hemp ropes sickened him; but he meant to sleep there, with his bag of seeds for a pillow, and to be away at dawn.