United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Kincaid's knees. He would not permit Bobby to touch it, however. When the old white horse had struggled over the grade and into the stump-dotted country, Mr. Kincaid hitched him to the fence, and, followed closely by the excited Bobby, climbed into a field. From his pocket, quite deliberately, he produced a small paper target and a dozen tacks wrapped in a bit of paper.
The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way.
Among the turbulent and jarring elements tossed into wild confusion by the shock of the contact between savages and the rude vanguard of civilization, surrounded and threatened by the painted warriors of the woods no less than by the lawless white riflemen who lived on the stump-dotted clearings, there dwelt a group of peaceful beings who were destined to suffer a dire fate in the most lamentable and pitiable of all the tragedies which were played out in the heart of this great wilderness.
Shem stepped lightly to a corner of the cabin and brought forth a rifle and began reloading it afresh from a box of shells. A wavering figure crept across the small stump-dotted "dead'ning" Anse Dugmore was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of a crippled snake.
The extreme greenness of the October landscape was what struck them first, and the wonderfully orderly and trim aspect of the country, with no ragged, stump-dotted fields or reaches of wild untended woods. Late in October as it was, the hedgerows and meadows were still almost summer-like in color, though the trees were leafless.
The trail led him first across a stretch of stump-dotted wet land with pools and rounded rises, green new grass, and trickling streamlets of recently melted snow.
Sevier and Shelby sent word to Campbell to rouse the men of his own district and come without delay, and they sent messengers to and fro in their own neighborhood to summon the settlers from their log huts on the stump-dotted clearings and the hunters from their smoky cabins in the deep woods. The meeting-place was at the Sycamore Shoals.
"There's Burr's," he would say, "and O'Hara's and Williamson's," marking the cabins set amongst the stump-dotted corn-fields. "And thar," sweeping his hand at a blackened heap of logs lying on the stones, "thar's whar Nell Tyler and her baby was sculped." "Poor Nell," said Polly Ann, the tears coming into her eyes as she turned away. "And Jim Tyler was killed gittin' to the fort.
All at once the stump-dotted, rocky hillside became clamorous and animated. From the little shacks sheathed with tarred paper, from the sodded huts, from burrows sunk into the hillside men suddenly came popping out with shrill cries. Three men, shouldering surveying instruments, stopped in their tracks on the freshly-heaped soil of a new railroad embankment, and gazed up at the hillside.
The days of the early pioneers, of the men who did the hardest and roughest work, were over; farms were being laid out and towns were growing up among the felled forests from which the game and the Indians had alike been driven. There was still plenty of room for the rude cabin and stump-dotted clearing of the ordinary frontier settler, the wood-chopper and game hunter.
Word Of The Day