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A slim young lieutenant appeared to be in command, and we counted twenty in the advance body as they slowly passed and disappeared into the denser gloom below. Following them appeared the wagons, huge Conestogas, heavily laden, creaking dismally in the night silence, and lurching along the rutty road.
Foremost in time marched the sturdy pack-horsemen, blazing the way for the heavier forces quietly biding their time in the rear the Conestogas, the steamboat, the canal boat, and, last and greatest of them all, the locomotive.
The fact that the Alleghany pack-horses and Conestogas were transporting freight to supply the Spanish towns on the Mississippi River in the first year of the nineteenth century seems proved beyond a doubt by these reports from Fort Massac.
After a while they will find it, and after another while they will find that the chief of the Conestogas and his white brother and the maiden have gone up the stream, and they will come after us. But that will not be until after the full sun power, and by then we must be far from here." "It is good," said Landless briefly. "Monakatocka has the wisdom of the woods."
"His secret is my secret." "Are you, too, then, so lonely?" asked Landless, touched by his tone. "Listen," said the Indian, leaning his back against a great oak. "I will tell my brother who I am.... Many years ago the Conestogas, they whom the palefaces call the Susquehannocks, came down the great bay and fought with the palefaces. Monakatocka was then but a lad on his first warpath.
There will the maidens and the young men welcome Monakatocka with song and dance, and my brother shall be welcome also and shall become a great chief and shall take the warpath against the Algonquin and against the paleface at the side of Monakatocka. In the Blue Mountains is Death. Let us go to the pleasant river, to the hunting grounds of the Conestogas." Landless shook his head.
And my brother will be welcome to the Conestogas, and he shall be made one of them, and become a great warrior, and both he and Monakatocka will forget the evil days when they were slaves until they meet a paleface from the great water. My brother has but to speak." "If these hills in front of us," said Landless with gloomy emphasis, "were higher than the Alps, I would climb them.
We passed all this at last, only to discover the narrow road congested by long trains of commissary and ammunition wagons, every sort of vehicle one could imagine pressed hastily into service huge Conestogas, great farm wagons, creaking horribly, light carts, even family carriages loaded to their tops, drawn by straining horses, mules, or oxen, their drivers swearing fiercely.
Like an island in the midst of the vast Algonquin territory was the region occupied by the Huron-Iroquois family. In thrift, intelligence, skill in fortification, and daring in war, this stock stands preëminent among all native Americans. It included the Eries and Hurons, in Canada; the Susquehannocks, on the Susquehanna; and the Conestogas, also in Pennsylvania.
Some have long rifles of Daniel Boone's time, not fired for thirty years. And the impedimenta are a sight. Open wagons and conestogas and carryalls and buggies, and even barouches, weighted down with frying-pans and chairs and feather beds. But we've got spirit, and we can whip Lyon's Dutchmen and Yankees just as we are.
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