Chapter 5 - ON "the bloody way"

]HE region that lay between the lower Muskingum and Scioto, into which Johnny disappeared, was much less wild than that traversed by the Great Trail _from Pittsburg to Zanesville. ;;t had been populous even in Indian days, and had its ancient routes of travel. The trail that ran northeast from Belpre to Big Rock, forty miles above Marietta and op- posite the broad meadow of Big Bottom, was an important part of "The Bloody Way," the old warrior's path that ran from Lake Erie to the Gulf. Here red men had leveled the summits of the steepest hills, and piled up embankments where a pony might slip with its rider into eternity. Since the close of the war white settlers had been slowly widening "The Bloody Way" into awagon-road ; and wild animals had long since learned to avoid its ever-fresh odors of gun- powder and passing men. Beside it were safe camping-places that had been used for generations; and the Indians had been care- ful, in their annual burning of forest under- growth, not to destroy the fruits and nuts along the trails. Johnny found berries by the wayside to help out the dry meals that he ate on the road.

A dozen creeks that have disappeared to- day then foamed down the declivities, and their crystal pools swarmed with fish. Along these streams that were crossed by the trail settlers had raised their isolated cabins on the scattered patches of good bottom-land. Johnny often slipped off his moccasins and waded these spring - fed waterways rather than skirt the swamps in the hollows, or struggle through thickets of blossoming laurel on the gravel benches to reach the infre- quent house. From any hilltop he could mark the most sinuous course of a creek by the lines of sycamores, and locate a hidden home by the smoke that curled up through the woods.

It was too late in the season to put in seeds

 and too early. He meant to make friends and to select sites for next year's planting; to penetrate the marshy forests and sunny uplands of the Indian country about the head- waters of the Scioto, and to put in what few seeds he had left along the route of his return to the cider-mills in the autumn.

In a land where every man rode because of the unpeopled distances to be covered, and carried a weapon for his safety and a food- supply, it was a startling thing to see that slender youth appear out of the darkening woods, unmounted, undefended, his straw hat filled with wild berries as a welcome addition to the evening meal.

Until his trees were in bearing he must pay his way by other services in that land of bit- ter toil and privation, so, in return for food and shelter, he lent a hand at whatever work was afoot. Besides, he muse learn how to do everything that new-comers and Indians needed to know in order to conquer their hard circumstances. He helped raise the cabins of green buckeye logs; he took his turn at plow or scythe or ax, and beat out grain with flails on barn floor or buffalo-hide. He brought in news of every deer-lick he dis-covered, where men might drive cattle that were perishing for salt. In the useless angles of rail fences he started patches of briers, for with foraging bears about women and children could not go berrying along the trails. He showed the men how to build ash-hoppers, so the women could make lye hominy and soft soap; and one of his self- imposed tasks was the raising of hog-pen walls so high that wolves could not get in.

And, oh, it seemed afterward that what was remembered longest by boys and girls grown tali was that Johnny taught them simple games, invented rude toys, and told them curious and endearing things of the plant and animal life of the forest. This was in the fire-lit evenings when they were little, scared, wood-imprisoned, resourceless children. Schools were not yet possible, and even free- dom in play was denied. In the stump-lots about stark cabins they often had not a tree to shade their sunburnt heads or to support a grape-vine swing, and beyond the clear- ings little ones could not go. There were stories that made faces go gray as ashes, of exploring babies who had gone just beyond corn-fields, and then, where the little foot-prints stopped in the soft leaf-mold, there were the tracks of huge cats 

When supper was over and the children in bed Johnny read aloud to the elders, many of whom were illiterate. Resting his elbows on the hearth, he read from the Bible or the other book. And he told them why and how he had come into the wilds to plant orchards. The very words awoke the happiest memories of many. And what visions of comfort, what feeling of greater security and companion- ship, he conjured by his warm, familiar talks! The trees of the forest that shut them in were grand, but aloof, living for themselves alone. But apple-trees were tame and friendly, serv- ing men and dependent upon their care like dogs and all gentle domestic animals. As if yearning for the company of the fireside, an orchard nestled about a house, extended the shelter of the roof, made the family feel at ease out of doors, pushed the wilderness back. People listening to such talk looked with something like awe upon his young face of high courage, religious fervor, and burning desire to serve them in this practical but poetic way.

It was a wonderful thing for a pioneer family, that had all but lost its social instinct and capacity for pleasure, to stop toil for the day and range the summer woods with Johnny, to search out some lovely, guarded nook in which he could hide and defend a nursery. In hearts benumbed the hope was revived that life might be lifted above this lonely and sordid struggle  the burden be lightened by brotherly love such as this.

The country was still very thinly settled, the clearings few and miles apart, but he was directed from one cabin to the next, and sel- dom lacked food and shelter at night. And when his moccasins were worn out they were replaced by cowhide boots of a farmer's rough cobbling, and his linsey shirt by an- other of some woman's weaving. Gaunt pioneers wrung his hand at parting and pro- tested at his refusal of a spare gun. Women washed his clothes, refilled his food-pouch, and watched and waved from doorways until he had disappeared. Children followed him to the very edges of clearings, climbed to the tops of rail fences, and cried after him: " Good-by, Johnny. You'll come back?" "Oh yes, I'll come back next spring. Good- by, good-by!"

The confident smile made every one be- lieve it until he was gone. But afterward, whenever the howling of wolves or the foot- falls of panthers on clapboarded roofs made men rise in the night to replenish fires, women lay wide-eyed in the dark and thought of Johnny.

At Big Rock, opposite Big Bottom, he struck the Muskingum Trail. On this he continued along the west bank of the river up to the Great Crossing. Here there was a junction of trails that shot out across the wooded highlands like the spokes of a wheel. To the north and west were main-traveled roads which led to the valleys of the Cuyahoga and the Scioto; but he turned, instead, into a narrow trace that ran northwestward for one hundred miles to a Shawnee village below Sandusky.

As this was only a hunters bridle-path the clearings disappeared at once. He was obliged now to camp in some cave-like exca- vation of a hillside, against the opening of a hollow tree, or under the natural tent of a fox- grape vine, which he strengthened with stakes and his coil of hemp rope. With protection at the back, a fire in front, and a camper'selevated bed of posts, cross-poles and pine boughs to lift himself above creeping reptiles, he was safe enough even from panthers, whose yellow eyes often watched him across the flames. In summer wolves were not driven by hunger and did not hunt in packs, and bears were intent upon keeping out of the way and finding food for their cubs.

Orchards would not be needed in this region for years, so Johnny traveled fast. He found the world a simpler place to live in since it was stripped of anxieties and fears. If he could not kill animals of evil intentions, he could at least avoid them and give them no cause for offense. And in solitude he was no long- er lonely. Trees had become to him sen- tient and beneficent things, drawing their life from the same mother earth that supported himself, and reaching up with love and trust to the same kind sky. So, although birds flitted about in shabby coats, silent and un- seen, and animals fed in secret places on nature's abundance, he was companioned on the day march and the night watch by the trees, statuesque and serene.

Every hour brought its thrill of fresh won- der. The climate of Ohio a hundred yearsago had no such extremes as it has to-day, or as Johnny experienced before his task was done. Winter frosts and gales, and summer suns, were tempered by the forests, and snow sank deep to bubble up in springs. Even in August there were cooling showers almost daily, and the ground, lush with greenery, was never quite dry except along the wind- swept ridges. And from storm there was shel- ter. In the columned and canopied woods rain reached the turf only by running down mossy trunks, or after being shattered to spray on the leaf -thatching above. It was sweet to tread the valleys in the green gloom and noon- day hush of the year  to splash across tum- bling brooks, to scramble up oozy banks, to mount the slopes of giant hardwoods to the music of chuckling springs, and to come up, at last, into a grove of oaks and pines and look out over an emerald sea of trees.

Long before he reached the Indian country his last bit of dry food was gone. Bears were in every blackberry thicket and declined to share their feast. Some days he found nothing to eat besides half -ripe plums, and wild oats in patches that were full of the soft whistling of quail. He had difficulty in locating safe camping-places and, foot-sore and half fam- ished, made slow progress up and down the interminable hills.

One night he found shelter in a salt-maker's camp, where a brine well had been sunk through an old deer-lick. The iron kettles, bubbling under a rude shed, the smoke and steam and noxious odors, and the unkempt workers who slept by shifts in a cave and lived almost wholly by the chase, made a mythical labor of punishment. But with salt eight dollars a bushel and all but unobtain- able, no work of the backwoods was more necessary or truly heroic, and Johnny was glad to hear that a better field had been found down on the Scioto. There these men could have their families, build up a farm vil- lage, and live like human beings. He made a note of the new location to which they intended to move in the spring, and prom- ised to put in a nursery there. But from a place that reeked with slaughter he departed hungry.

As he neared the top of the watershed the undulations of the land became broader and shallower. But traveling was not easier, for large rivers had their head-waters in the lakes and streams that spread and wandered over wide, marshy valleys.

It was near sunset one day when he saw in such a wet, wooded depression a cabin that had seemingly been abandoned before it was finished. A skin curtain flapped in the open- ing, but there was no smoke from the stick- and-clay chimney which stopped short of the ridge-pole in a hole that a wolf could leap through. But corn had been planted, and here was food if bears had not stripped the stalks of ears. So near starvation that he staggered as he ran, Johnny splashed up the creek-bed and skirted the swamp below the clearing.

A woman whose hair blew loose about a dis- tracted face was crouched with a frightened child in the darkest corner of a hovel that was a trap rather than a shelter. She had screamed and fled when she heard the running man, but when she saw Johnny's face she sobbed out excuses in the dear, broken German that had welcomed him at many a comfortable fireside in Pennsylvania:

"All voods! It vas schust so vild here I go crazy.

She sat there talking in a dreary monotone.

The husband was a blacksmith and had no farm or building tools, and others who had bought land here had not come. The house furnishings had been lost by an upset in a stream. The cow had wandered away. The baby had died. There was a little grave  heaped above her heart. Her husband had gone to trade the horse for meal and powder. Then the fire had gone out in the night and she could not build another. There had been nothing to eat all day, but that would not matter if she could just see smoke by some- body's house. So lonely! So homesick!

"We'll have some smoke from our house, and that will be more friendly," Johnny said, reassuringly. He had seen people in desper- ate situations, but no such wretchedness as this. Here was a soul defeated and flickering into darkness.

He whistled a martial old hymn tune that should have put backbone into an angleworm as he whittled shavings from a pine branch. Then he poured a spoonful of the powder, that he carried for quick fire - building, on the hearth and struck a spark from flint and steel. With a little explosion cheerful flames leaped up the chimney. The corn was neitherripe nor in the milk, but Johnny set the wom- an to scoring the hardening grains and press- ing out the pulp. Cakes salted from the black and bitter lump given him at the camp were wrapped in husks and put to bake in hot ashes. And then the hovel was furnished forth with the laughter of a child and with a good woman's tears  natural tears, now  that she had nothing better to give this heaven-sent guest to eat.

It was in the evening of the next day that the husband and father literally fell into the cabin under the weight of a hundred pounds of meal that he had carried forty miles. But he had good news. Two families were com- ing  farmers. There would be neighbors, and work that he could do. Before he slept he began with frantic haste to set up the rust- ing fittings of a smithy.

Johnny did not leave this place until the new-comers were in their half-faced camps, axes were ringing in the timber, and hinges and cranes were being beaten out of old horse- shoes and wagon tires on the anvil. A crop of turnips could still be grown, nuts gathered, a bee-tree felled, and forage cut in woodland glades. He cleared and fenced a well-drainedand sheltered slope for the nursery that he promised to plant six weeks later. It was thus that he helped, in the beginning, at many a clearing or forlorn little settlement that sprang up and lived precariously all along the border for the next dozen years, and then bore the first shock of savage war.

He had not walked a mile along the trace before he was aware of a violet haze as of Indian summer. The tribes, he knew, did not burn the forest undergrowth until the windless days that came after a sharp frost. It was then that they journeyed with the creeping fires, which they herded carefully, to the hunting-grounds in the East. Some set- tler in the next valley must be burning brush. He turned back at once to warn the good peo- ple he had just left not to set the woods on fire when burning their brush, and not to kill the bears and deer as long as they were run- ning with their young. Those practices were destructive of game and serious offenses to the Indians. They must keep the peace with their red neighbors.

For two hours he walked in growing appre- hension, for the western sky was darkening with a bank of drifting smoke. This mingled not with storm-clouds which boiled up in the southwest and spread a pall over the forest. As he topped a rise the slope of burning trees lay below him, beyond a wide, marshy creek. A man watched it from the door of a cabin. The fire had been working slowly down the side of the clearing, in small swamp timber, but now it flared up, turned and raced with the wind.

Johnny ran down into the water, 'and, heed- less of what venomous things might lurk there, struggled across the bog, tripping in wire-like tangles of wild pea-vines and morn- ing-glories. He shouted to the man to shoot his gun or blow a horn. The Shawnee village must be near enough for the Indians to hear an alarm. They would run to help put that fire out before it gained headway.

"You mind your own business! I started that fire  easier than chopping down trees!" When Johnny stopped, too shocked to speak, he shouted, angrily: "What's the matter with you? Them trees are mine, ain't they?"

"They're God's trees! Look! You've loosed a devil of destruction that no one can stop!"

The fellow did turn pale, for the wind had in whipped around and risen to a gale that swept the flames up the hillside in a moan- ing sigh. Forest giants shriveled before they were engulfed by that billow of fire. On the crest a pine-tree flashed into a torch.

Then flying creatures made for water  deer bounding away; a singed wolf running and howling like a tortured dog; a bear shambling out and woof-woofing for her cubs. Johnny ran up through the corn into the burning wood and headed the clumsy, near- grown babies toward their mother. Hearing cries of agony, smelling scorching fur, seeing a flight of wood-pigeons drop like shot into that furnace, Johnny stumbled out and threw his arm up to protect his eyes from flying sparks. Amid all that horror he heard the crack of a rifle. The she-bear lay dead on the marsh, and the cubs turned back into the blazing forest. The man dodged into the cabin.

On the farther bank of the creek a young Indian brave who had an eagle feather in his beaded head-band, but who wore the green shirt and buckskin breeches of the white hunter, stood with his rifle aimed at the cabin door. As Johnny ran toward him, calling out,

JOHNNY SAGGED FORWARD ON THE PONY UPON WHICH THE INDIAN SET HIMin what little Shawnese he knew, not to do murder and start a border war, there were two reports almost together. Then the door clattered shut.

It was the Indian who saw the blood that streamed down Johnny's hand. In surly si- lence he cut away the soaked sleeve and knot- ted it above the wound in the arm. Then he rushed him up under a beech-tree, the safest woodland shelter in the thunder-storm which suddenly fell upon them.

In a half-hour the summer tempest was over. The sun sank through banks of splen- dor, behind the ruin on the hillside. Johnny sagged forward on the pony upon which the Indian set him with his pack and tools, as he rode past the tract of blasted trees. And he stood in the Shawnee village, when the story was told, involved in this fresh crime of one of his own race against the law of the forest. This was a different band from the one he had met in friendly ways in the East, the faces all strange. Besides hatred and sus- picion they showed a frank contempt for this ragged white stripling in whose thin face the dark eyes shone unnaturally large and bright.

The brave who had brought him in ap-peared to be a distinguished visitor from another tribe. He spoke to Johnny briefly and in as good English as his own. Because he had had no hand in that fire they would dress his wound and set him in safety across the border in the morning. Seeing that he had neither horse nor gun, he could not have far to go.

"That bullet was meant for me. It must be cut out."

Johnny extended his arm at once, and stood as steady as a rock while a knife explored the furrow and turned out the ball. The Indian put the bullet in his pocket for a future use that was unmistakable. He watched Johnny curiously while the wound was being washed and the ragged edges trimmed.

"A brave would burn it, and then cure the burn."

Johnny himself laid on the searing - iron. To the red man the stoic endurance of torture is the supreme test. When the wound had been spread with a healing ointment and bandaged, the Indian led Johnny to his own guest-lodge and bade a squaw fetch him a bowl of corn soup.

Then at once he seemed to forget that

Johnny was there. A noble figure of a man, he stood in deep abstraction, with his head bent and his fists clenched at his sides. After- ward Johnny learned that he was of a his- toric line of warriors  a nephew of Tecumseh and The Prophet  but one who led his people into the paths of industry and peace. After a time he took the blood-stained bullet from his pocket, looked at it reflectively as if weighing many things, and then stooped de- liberately and pushed it into the earth. As if relieved of that burden of revenge, the whole i man relaxed, and he turned a grave and not unfriendly look on Johnny.

"You were right. He is an evil man. But it would profit us nothing to kill him. We must learn to live like white men. But give us time  give us time!" His voice shook with passion. "When I see a white savage like that destroying the food and shelter of my poor people I am all Indian."

"Logan!" Johnny whispered. "Is it Chief Logan?"

After a wonderful hour he lay alone on his bed of soft skins. The flap of the lodge was tied back. He could see the circle of braves squatted about the council fire, and hear

Logan's pica for his mission of love, which was meant to help lift the red tribes above the tragic chances of the chase. At midnight the young chief lay down beside him, threw his arm across, and in the darkness and si- lence spoke the eloquent word: "Brother!"

Johnny's arm was still useless, and Logan had gone back to Piqua with a buckskin pouch of apple-seeds and minute instructions con- cerning them, when he put in the first of the few nurseries that he was encouraged to plant in the Indian country. It was in a little hol- low of the hills which was full of the burning bushes of sumach and the flickering fires of sassafras. Squaws cleared and broke up the ground and wove the stout barrier across the open side, and papooses carried his tools and seeds, and fetched kettles of water. They all promised to watch in the spring for the rows of bright-barked twigs, and to keep the soil loose and free from weeds until his return.

He journeyed eastward with the hunters. From every height the autumn landscape rolled away in colors of sunset. On sharp mornings there were hoar frosts as thick andsparkling as snow, and into every sylvan camp the light was sifted through a vast, jeweled lantern. Leaves drifted down, nuts pattered, squirrels scrambled to get in their winter stores, birds took their last feast of seeds, flocks of bronze turkeys fattened in the amber chestnut groves. The creeping fires in the forest undergrowth mingled their smoke with the still air of Indian summer, making a pungent atmosphere as silvery a blue as the fringed gentians. It brooded over the primeval world like a tender memory of all the years that had died in just such splendid tranquillity and the faith of spring.

Spring was hurrying up the foot-hill valleys of the western slope again when Johnny re- appeared in a camp on the Great Trail. Al- though their ponies were loaded with furs, jerked venison and bears' grease, the Indians managed to get his apple-seeds to the Great Crossing. There he lashed two borrowed canoes together and floated down the Mus- kingum, stopping to put his nurseries in order and to replant those that had not survived.

Leaving half his seeds at Isle le Beau, he went by the route of the summer before up to the Shawnee village. But he traveledfaster now, on relays of horses furnished by white settlers, and then on a pony, for a band of Indians came far down the trace to meet him. Along the Scioto he put in a nursery at the new salt-maker's camp, and wherever there was the floating mill and blacksmith shop that made the nucleus of a settlement. Over the old Scioto-Beaver trail he crossed to the Muskingum.

It was June when he returned to Marietta, to find Kitt Putnam hoeing and weeding in the flowery cove above the shipyard, and to find rows and rows of apple-twigs, bright- barked as rose - canes, tall enough for boys' switches and showing sturdy bunches of fuzzy, gray-green foliage.