第17章

"Do not misunderstand me! whether you be men or women, you will never do anything in the world without courage.It is the greatest quality of the mind--next to honor.It is your king.But the king must always have a good cause.Many a good king has perished in a bad one; and this noblest virtue of courage has perhaps ruined more of us than any other that we possess.You know what character the old kings used always to have at their courts.Ihave told you a great deal about him.It was the Fool.Do you know what personage it is that Courage, the King, is so apt to have in the Court of the Mind? It is the Fool also.Lay these words away; you will understand them better when you are older and you will need to understand them very well.Then also you will know what I mean when I say to you this morning that the battle of the Blue Licks was the work of the Fool, jesting with the King."He had gone to the field himself one Saturday not long before, walking thoughtfully over it.He had had with him two of the Lexington militia who, in the battle, had been near poor Todd, their colonel, while fighting like a lion to the last and bleeding from many wounds.The recollection of it all was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round about.On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by rain and sun; only the more desolate for a few dwarfish cedars and other timber scant and dreary to the eye.Encircling this hill in somewhat the shape of a horseshoe, a deep ravine heavily wooded and rank with grass and underbrush.The Kentuckians, disorderly foot and horse, rushing in foolhardiness to the top of this uncovered expanse of rock; the Indians, twice, thrice, their number, engirdling its base, ringing them round with hidden death.The whole tragedy repossessed his imagination and his emotions.His face had grown pale, his voice took the measure and cadence of an old-time minstrel's chant, his nervous fingers should have been able to reach out and strike the chords of a harp.With uplifted finger he was going on to impress them with another lesson: that in the battles which would be sure to await them, they must be warned by this error of their fathers never to be over-hasty or over-confident, never to go forward without knowing the nature of the ground they were to tread, or throw themselves into a struggle without measuring the force of the enemy.He was doing this when a child came skipping joyously across the common, and pushing her way up to him through the circle of his listeners, handed him a note.He read it, and in an instant the great battle, hills, river, horse, rider, shrieks, groans, all vanished from his mind as silently as a puff of white smoke from a distant cannon.

For a while he stood with his eyes fixed upon the paper, so absorbed as not to note the surprise that had fallen upon the children.At length merely saying, "I shall have to tell you the rest some other day," he walked rapidly across the common in the direction from which the little messenger had come.

A few minutes later he stood at the door of Father Poythress, the Methodist minister, asking for Amy.But she and Kitty had ridden away and would not return till night.Leaving word that he would come to see her in the evening, he turned away.

The children were scattered: there could be no more of the battle that day.

But it was half an hour yet before his duties would recommence at the school.As he walked slowly along debating with himself how he should employ the time, a thought struck him; he hastened to the office of one of many agents for the locating and selling of Kentucky lands, and spent the interval in determining the titles to several tracts near town--an intricate matter in those times.But he found one farm, the part of an older military grant of the French and Indian wars, to which the title was unmistakably direct.

As soon as his school was out, he went to look at this property again, now that he was thinking of buying it.He knew it very well already, his walks having often brought him into its deep majestic woods; and he penetrated at once to an open knoll sloping toward the west and threw himself down on the deep green turf with the freedom of ownership.