第15章

Or, when the boys would become men with contests of running and pitching quoits and wrestling, the girls would play wives and have a quilting, in a house of green alder-bushes, or be capped and wrinkled grandmothers sitting beside imaginary spinning-wheels and smoking imaginary pipes.

Sometimes it was not Indian warfare but civil strife.One morning as many as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at once there was a dreadful fight to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel.

This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be: the one, Simon Kenton; the other, General George Rogers Clark.

And there was another game of history--more practical in its bearings--which he had not taught them, but which they had taught him; they had played it with him that very morning.

When he had stepped across the open to the school, he found that the older boys, having formed themselves into a garrison for the defence of the smaller boys and girls, had barricaded the door and barred and manned the wooden windows: the schoolhouse had suddenly become a frontier station; they were the pioneers; he was the invading Indians--let him attack them if he dared! He did dare and that at once; for he knew that otherwise there would be no school that day or as long as the white race on the inside remained unconquered.So had ensued a rough-and-tumble scrimmage for fifteen minutes, during which the babies within wailed aloud with real terror of the battle, and he received some real knocks and whacks and punches through the loop-holes of the stockade: the end being arrived at when the schoolhouse door, by a terrible wrench from the outside, was torn entirely off its wooden hinges; and the victory being attributed--as an Indian victory always was in those days--to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.

With such an opening of the day, the academic influence over childhood may soon be restored to forcible supremacy but will awaken little zest.Gray was glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks.Thirteen years before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken place; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons, many widows who still dreamed of their young husbands, fallen that beautiful, fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars, or floating down the red-dyed river.All the morning he could see the expectation of this story in their faces: a pair of distant, clearest eyes would be furtively lifted to his, then quickly dropped; or another pair more steadily directed at him through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers.

At noon, then, having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess, he was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others--bareheaded under the brilliant sky of May.He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork, where it crossed the common, as a place in which he should be freest from interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well understood.This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel; but then it flashed broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and cornfields and patches of cane.

It was a hazardous experiment with the rough jewels of those little minds.

They were still rather like diamonds rolling about on the bottom of barbarian rivers than steadily set and mounted for the uses of civilization.

He fixed his eyes upon a lad in his fifteenth year, the commandant of the fort of the morning, who now stood at the water edge, watching him with breathless attention.A brave, sunny face;--a big shaggy head holding a mind in it as clear as a sphere of rock-crystal; already heated with vast ambition--a leader in the school, afterwards to be a leader in the nation--Richard Johnson.

"Listen!" he cried; and when he spoke in, that tone he reduced everything turbulent to peace."I have brought you here to tell you of the battle of the Blue Licks not because it was the last time, as you know, that an Indian army ever invaded Kentucky; not because a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now other school-boys and other teachers will be talking of it still; not because the Kentuckians will some day assemble on the field and set up a monument to their forefathers, your fathers and brothers; but because there is a lesson in it for you to learn now while you are children.

A few years more and some of you boys will be old enough to fight for Kentucky or for your country.Some of you will be common soldiers who will have to obey the orders of your generals; some of you may be generals with soldiers under you at the mercy of your commands.It may be worth your own lives, it may save the lives of your soldiers, to heed this lesson now and to remember it then.And all of you--whether you go into battles of that sort or not--will have others; for the world has many kinds of fighting to be done in it and each of you will have to do his share.And whatever that share may be, you will need the same character, the same virtues, to encounter it victorious; for all battles are won in the same way, all conquerors are alike.This lesson, then, will help each of you to win, none of you to lose.

"Do you know what it was that brought about the awful massacre of the Blue Licks? It was the folly of one officer.