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 I ■' riNG SX9 ELBOWS ON THE HEARTH, HE READ FROM THE BIBLE 
 
JOHNNY 
 APPLESEED 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF THE SOWER 
 BY 
 
 Eleanor Atkinson 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 Greyfriars Bobby 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
 
 FRANK T. MERRILL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 Published by Arrangement with Harper & Brothers 
 
COPYRIGHT. 1915. BY HARPER & BROTHERS 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 PUBLISHED MARCH. 1915 
 
 F-Q 
 
TO 
 THE AMERICAN PIONEERS 
 
 NI22123 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. The Frontier Orchard i 
 
 II. The Wilderness Trail 24 
 
 III. Good Samaritans 49 
 
 IV. The Queen of the Fairy Island 75 
 
 V. On "The Bloody Way" 97 
 
 VI. A Vision of Romance 120 
 
 VII. The Home on the Indian Border 146 
 
 VIII. Tragedy 172 
 
 IX. The Savior of the Refugees 198 
 
 X. Fresh Fields 224 
 
 XI. The Winter of the Deep Snow 257 
 
 XII. Undying Love 284 
 
 XIII. The Shining Goal 312 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Resting His Elbows on the Hearth, He Read 
 
 FROM THE BIBLE Frontispiece 
 
 "How Long Must We Wait for Our Orchard?" p age 10 
 
 She Held up the Little Bag of Seeds, to Show 
 
 that She Still had It Safe " 2 1 
 
 "Courage, Comrade!" But the Dazed Savage 
 
 Tried to Draw His Knife " 43 
 
 Rear View of Blennerhasset House .... " 81 
 
 Mrs. Blennerhasset in Flaming Habit and 
 
 Plumed Hat of White Beaver " 85 
 
 Johnny Sagged Forward on the Pony upon 
 
 which the Indian Set Him " 113 
 
 "It's Johnny Appleseed Moon" " 149 
 
 He Blew t Blasts from a Sawed-off Powder- 
 
 Horn that Could be Heard a Mile ... " 193 
 
 "Thought It Was Them Pesky Redskins, Strang- 
 er. Air You that Appleseed Missioner?" " 243 
 
 He Leaped to Get His Hat over the Faithful 
 
 Animal's Eyes " 253 
 
 On These Ski-like Snow-shoes He Sped over 
 
 the Shore Ice " 277 
 
 Swept His Halo of Silver Hair Back from His 
 Face, and, Like any Prophet of Old, De- 
 livered His Burning Message " 323 
 
 His Eyes Still had that Undying Look of His 
 Far-away Youth, as of One Who Sees only 
 the Distant and Splendid Goal .... " 337 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 PPLE-BLOSSOMS that gladdened the 
 hearts, and fruits that brought comfort 
 and pleasure to the rude firesides of 
 the earliest settlers in the Middle West, 
 were the living memorials of an apostle 
 of beauty, peace and social service who 
 is now almost forgotten. 
 Explorer, missionary, fur-trader and conqueror pre- 
 ceded Jonathan Chapman, the nurseryman of Puritan 
 breed, whose identity was lost in the devoted il Johnny 
 Appleseed." His day was that of the pioneers who 
 crossed the Alleghany Mountains; of the river boatmen 
 who navigated the uncharted waterways of the old North- 
 west Territory, and of the Indian-fighters of the last border 
 wars. All of these played their honorable parts in the 
 winning of an empire of forest and prairie. But no one 
 of them labored with greater courage, over such a large 
 region of country, or toiled with the unselfishness and un- 
 tiring zeal of this heroic orchardist. Half mystic, half 
 poet, a lover of nature and of his fellow-men, his long life 
 of solitary and perilous wandering, always in the van 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 of migration, was consecrated to the blossoming of the 
 wilderness. 
 
 Three-quarters of a century ago he was still a loved and 
 revered guest in the cabins of our grandfathers. His or- 
 chards lived after him. Some of his trees may be standing 
 to-day; but the man who planted them has receded to a dim, 
 legendary figure. Let us recover what may be known of 
 him, restore him to his time and place, recall the al- 
 most incredible conditions under which he did his in- 
 spired task. Let us give him again his meed of love and 
 gratitude for a beautiful life of self-sacrifice that asked 
 no reward, and that came, in old age, to some end ob- 
 scure and lonely. 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 
 THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 l||||nOHNNY had known the night 
 before that warm showers would 
 bring out a rosy foam of apple- 
 blossoms, so all through the soft 
 spring darkness he had slept on 
 the bench in the sapling stoop 
 that shaded his cabin door, where he would 
 awake to the incense from the orchard. That 
 surf of bloom, tossing in the wind of dawn 
 and scattering a scented spray of raindrops, 
 was the first thing his eyes rested upon. But 
 he was aroused, as was every one in the fron- 
 tier town of Pittsburg on that April morning 
 in the last year of the eighteenth century, by 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the blowing of bugles from boat-yards, land- 
 ings and ferries along the water-front. 
 
 The rivers had risen in the night. In the 
 days before weather-reports snow melted on 
 the mountains unnoted, and floods fell un- 
 prophesied down the valleys of the Allegheny 
 and Monongahela. If both streams rose at 
 once, at a time when the tide of westward 
 migration was at its height, the bugles blew 
 for the men ox the town to be up and stirring. 
 There was a procession of emigrants to be fer- 
 ried across to Ohio, and river craft, that had 
 lain stranded in back-water since the going 
 down of the last freshet, to be swiftly loaded 
 and set adrift. 
 
 All this bustle of arrival and departure 
 would bring a rush of business to every ware- 
 house, outfitting store and craft-shop along 
 the terraced and gullied banks. Therefore, 
 at the blare of the bugles, the log-and-plank- 
 built town of fifteen hundred people, that was 
 wedged in the muddy fork of the swollen 
 streams, swarmed like an untidy ant-hill. 
 And up on the wooded slopes to the east, 
 men who had been delayed by low water ran 
 out of camps and back again, seeing the 
 need of haste in getting their families, ani- 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 mals and goods down to the boat and ferry- 
 landings. 
 
 To Jonathan Chapman, orchardist, these 
 matters were of small concern. He was, pos- 
 sibly, the only man living in Pittsburg who 
 would not be counting his gains at the end of 
 the day, although no other had such attrac- 
 tive wares to offer as he. But he could not 
 honestly sell young apple-trees that would die 
 on the long, slow journeys into the wilderness 
 of the Northwest Territory, so he was obliged 
 to discourage men from buying. Neverthe- 
 less he would have as busy a day as any, just 
 in being a little brother to wayfaring man and 
 beast. 
 
 His nursery and orchard lay on the main- 
 traveled road, on the brow of Grant's Hill, the 
 very first bit of rising ground eastward of the 
 town. From that green and flowery slope the 
 ancient woods had long since retreated, so 
 from rude doorways below, from forest camps 
 above, and from boats on the flanking, bluff- 
 bordered streams Johnny's blossoming trees 
 were visible that morning as a drift of dawn. 
 To the nearer view of passers-by the nursery- 
 man and his orchard offered a moment of rest 
 and refreshment from the feverish activities 
 
 3 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 of the day. Every traveler stopped at his 
 gate, for in a never-failing spring that bubbled 
 up, cold and clear, in a cobble-lined basin by 
 the roadside, Johnny had "next water" in and 
 out of Pittsburg. 
 
 People who lived in the region cheerfully 
 went a mile out of their way to water their 
 animals at that famous spring and to have the 
 pleasure of passing the time of day with 
 Johnny. Incoming horses found that mossy 
 fountain with their noses as soon as they 
 broke through the forest wall. 
 
 The first team of the morning's procession 
 came down the steep road on the run; and 
 when the horses stopped of their own accord, 
 with mouths plunged deep in the pool, two 
 people looked out of the clumsy covered 
 wagon in delighted surprise. To travelers 
 who had seen nothing for two hundred miles 
 except mountains, forests, brawling streams, 
 and now and then a God-forgotten cabin, the 
 squalid town below seemed incredibly big and 
 friendly and reassuring. But that was a day 
 of fierce independence and land-hunger, when 
 it was the dream of men to hew out homes in 
 the Western wilds. Pittsburg was but the 
 Gateway to the West, a place to be gone 
 
 4 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 through and left behind. This young home- 
 seeker gave but one glance to the town and 
 then turned back to the dream-come-true of 
 Johnny's orchard. It was a heartening thing 
 to find it there, fronting the unbroken woods 
 and unbridled flood. 
 
 "If this don't look for all the world like a 
 farm in Little Old Rhody!" 
 
 The still younger, homesick wife, scared 
 white and thin by weeks of wild travel, cried, 
 "O-o-oh!" clutched her husband's arm, swal- 
 lowed hard, and stared as at a vision. It was 
 a home of long security, of peace and beauty, 
 such as she had not hoped ever to see again. 
 Indeed, the orchards of grudging New Eng- 
 land made no such growth or lavish promises 
 as this that bowered Johnny's little gray-and- 
 brown nest of a mill-slab cabin. And no- 
 where in the East was to be seen such a vast 
 apple-tree, like a forest oak, as flung its blos- 
 somy banners out over picket fence, pool 
 and roadway. 
 
 Before the horses had finished drinking 
 Johnny came whistling down the path. He 
 was extraordinarily happy because he had so 
 much to share. There were seasons when he 
 had nothing besides cold water and a friendly 
 
 5 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 word. But this morning he had a heap of 
 wrinkled, winey apples, brought up from 
 winter pits, at the gate, and his orchard was a 
 thing of breathless beauty to delight the eyes 
 of all comers. 
 
 A slenderly built and beardless young man 
 of twenty-four, in the rough garb of the 
 frontier, Johnny was in no way remarkable 
 except for gentleness of speech and manners, 
 and for sympathetic understanding of other 
 people's difficulties. There was tribute to the 
 courage of these pilgrims in the way he lifted 
 his hat of felted rabbit fur, and offered help 
 in his hand-clasp. He had bought this place, 
 which dated from the days of old Fort Pitt, 
 at the close of the Indian War five years 
 before; and the stream of migration that had 
 flowed by his gate to enter upon a long strug- 
 gle in Ohio was, to him, an inspiring but 
 poignant thing. 
 
 Now a youth who has his feet set in some 
 safe and pleasant way of living must needs be 
 looking for the dear other-self to share it. 
 And where was Johnny to look, in that day 
 when romance set sail from all Eastern ports 
 and voyaged westward, if not in these canvas- 
 spread ships of the mountains? But if he 
 
 6 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 glanced first into the Conestoga wagon, with 
 eyes unconsciously eager, he was, in the next 
 instant, offering the best of the withered fruit 
 and breaking a spray from the great tree. 
 
 "For me!" stammered the young woman. 
 "You are robbing yourself of the harvest." 
 
 "It is a wild tree; my big bouquet. The 
 French officers at old Fort Duquesne brought 
 comforts from Canada, and they had gay 
 picnics on this hillside. The tree must have 
 grown from an apple-core that was thrown 
 away. The fruit is as tough and bitter as a 
 crab-apple of the woods, but the blossoms 
 have a deeper color and richer fragrance than 
 those of the tame trees." 
 
 They all looked up through the branches 
 that were flung in rugged and pink profu- 
 sion against the sky. And neither the half- 
 century-old tree, nor the orchard that was 
 planted when the victory at Yorktown was 
 still good news, looked to be more securely or 
 joyously rooted in that soil than did Johnny. 
 The woman saw that, and something wistful 
 in her face made the man grip her hand and 
 speak with bluff tenderness : 
 
 "We'll have a place in Ohio like this, one 
 of these days, little woman," 
 
 2 7 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "Oh, let's have it now!" she cried. She 
 was so young, and life so long. It stretched 
 before her, down that broad vale, so wild and 
 lonely. 
 
 Johnny was comforting the horses with 
 apples, and trying not to see or hear a plea 
 that tugged at his own heartstrings. It was 
 unlikely that people of this first generation in 
 the backwoods of Ohio would be able to have 
 orchards around their stark and comfortless 
 cabins in the clearings. So many were going 
 out in that vain belief. So many would have 
 the hope kindled in their breasts this morning 
 by the sight of his blossoming trees. A little 
 gray cloud obscured the sun for a moment, 
 dimming the perfect blue and gold of the 
 morning. 
 
 Now and then one of the lion-hearted men 
 who opened the iron trails to the West had a 
 glimpse of what the loved woman suffered; 
 and when he had it his own resolution broke 
 as a tree cracks in the frost. This was not the 
 first emigrant who had turned to Johnny and 
 asked, in a voice gone husky: 
 
 "Is this place for sale?" 
 
 Johnny shook his head. The question was 
 asked almost daily. To a man on horseback 
 
 8 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 he could say, "There isn't enough money in 
 Uncle Sam's treasury to buy my orchard." 
 But to the man in a wagon, with a family, he 
 said, compassionately, "I wish I could give 
 you one just like it." No one ever doubted 
 his sincerity, or ever forgot the look of broth- 
 erly love from his dark -gray, black -lashed 
 eyes when he said it. To the most eager 
 and intelligent he offered a small buckskin 
 bag of seeds, with the plea, " Won't you try 
 to grow some apple-trees for yourself?" 
 
 This man wisely refused the gift. The 
 growing of nursery stock was a business in 
 itself, and he would have all he could do for 
 the next few years to save their souls alive. 
 By the time he could care properly for young 
 fruit-trees he thought there would be nursery- 
 men in Ohio. 
 
 Again Johnny shook his head. "Not for a 
 generation, except perhaps in Marietta and 
 Cincinnati. Really to serve the pioneers 
 scattered and lost in that forty thousand 
 square miles of forest, an orchardist would 
 have to have the courage and zeal of John 
 the Baptist." 
 
 There was a gasping sigh from the woman. 
 She suddenly reached for the little bag of seeds 
 
 9 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 and put it in the bosom of her homespun 
 gown. They drove away slowly, but looking 
 back, as so many did; and, as he so often did, 
 Johnny ran after them. It would be a weary 
 day on'the crowded river-bank. Wouldn't the 
 young wife rather rest under his trees? 
 
 She was over the wheel in a moment, and 
 she never stopped running until she stood, 
 shining-eyed, under that canopy of wondrous 
 bloom. Rustic benches and stools were in 
 the orchard for expected guests, but for this 
 appealing visitor who had special need of 
 ease, Johnny went into the house to fetch a 
 Franklin chair. He had bought it in Phila- 
 delphia for the Puritan grandmother who had 
 come out with him from Boston. Now that 
 she lay under a grassy mound in the orchard, 
 the chair had the air of waiting for another 
 occupant. 
 
 A little, low, splint-bottomed rocker, it was 
 so lightly balanced that a breeze through an 
 opening door set it in motion. Johnny never 
 saw it so without also seeing in it a young wife 
 and mother. She was surely coming to him, 
 as a bird to its nest, perhaps on this very wave 
 of migration that was now breaking over the 
 mountain wall. The fire was laid ready for 
 
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 "how long must we wait for our orchard?" 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 her on the hearth, the house was swept, the 
 cellar stored, the spining-wheel oiled. For 
 her the apple-trees blossomed and fruited, 
 the bees gathered nectar, and a pure and 
 steady flame burned in Johnny's heart. 
 
 He stopped the chair gently as it rocked 
 in the breeze, and when he brought it out his 
 visitor's first musing speech sank into his 
 thoughts as water sinks into the grateful 
 earth : 
 
 "How happy a woman could be here with 
 a brood of little children." She laid her 
 hand in the low crotch of a sprawling tree. 
 "I had one like this to climb into when I 
 was a child. How long must we wait for our 
 orchard?" 
 
 "Not so many years as in New England — 
 if you have luck with your seeds. Don't 
 count upon that too much." 
 
 So many things had happened to trees that 
 he had sold and seeds that he had given away, 
 to disappoint hopes! 
 
 He told her something of the letters that had 
 come back, to him from forest clearings. For 
 a moment of repulsion she leaned her head 
 against the dear tree, with closed eyes and 
 quivering lips. Then she looked up with the 
 
 12 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 bright bravery that in pioneer women was one 
 of God's miracles. 
 
 " Nothing must happen to my seeds. I 
 could not bear it, because — " 
 
 She held up a tiny, unfinished garment of 
 tow linen for him to see. Men and women 
 and children told the secrets of their hearts 
 to Johnny. She began at once to sew, and 
 to hum a lullaby, as she rocked in his little 
 chair. 
 
 Another caravan was at the gate. For 
 three hours Johnny was kept busy stuffing 
 hands and pockets with apples, breaking 
 sprays from the wild tree, swinging the gate 
 wide for those who could stop, waving good- 
 bys to those who must go on, and now and 
 then offering the forlorn hope of a little bag 
 of seeds. 
 
 Of those who gathered under his trees few 
 had anything more palatable to eat than the 
 dry corn dodgers and cold game of the camp. 
 But Johnny had milk and honey, and he 
 built a fire in his out-oven of brick and filled 
 it with potatoes and apples to bake for the 
 noonday meal. 
 
 It was eaten under the trees, where birds 
 flitted about tunefully and bees wandered in 
 
 13 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the labyrinths of bloom. Then those chil- 
 dren crusaders, safe from all alarms, went to 
 sleep on the sun-dappled clover. The women 
 had a social afternoon which, when they had 
 lived long, marooned on islands of clearings 
 twenty miles from a neighbor across a sea 
 of trees, became historic in their memories. 
 With the going down of the sun these pathetic 
 guests would be gone, Johnny reflected, but 
 he would be here to-morrow and the next 
 year, in this safe little Eden. 
 
 His thoughts often ran into some such dis- 
 turbing channel. He was glad to have them 
 interrupted now by a farmer who hailed him 
 from the Allegheny. Running down the 
 grassy terraces above the town, he held the 
 nose of the boat while the man talked. 
 Would Johnny take a note for trees set out 
 in the fall? He had meant to pay for them, 
 but he had not got enough money for a boat- 
 load of potatoes to buy a bushel of New 
 York State salt for his cattle. 
 
 Such were the difficulties of transportation 
 over the mountains, and the scarcity of money 
 in Pittsburg, that produce went begging, and 
 farmers who lived in rude abundance could 
 not pay their debts. Johnny took the note 
 
 14 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 of this honest man to save his pride, and put 
 it into a wallet with a sheaf of other notes 
 that were as little likely ever to be paid, or 
 to be pressed for payment. He wrung the 
 man's hand, shoved the boat into the current, 
 and flung himself on the sloping bank, his 
 thoughts thrust back into the flood of self- 
 questioning by the farmer's last remark: 
 
 "Men out my way are feeding their left- 
 over apples to the hogs." 
 
 Apples, too, were a drug in the market of 
 Pittsburg. Quantities of them were turned 
 into cider, fed to stock, or left to rot on the 
 ground, while a hundred miles to the west 
 they were as unobtainable as though they 
 grew on another planet. 
 
 Johnny turned and lay with his face on his 
 arms. Because it was unsafe and unprofit- 
 able for a nurseryman to venture to serve 
 the wilderness, must a generation of brave 
 men, wistful women and defrauded children 
 miss the comfort and beauty and fond mem- 
 ories of orchards? 
 
 The letters that had come back to him! — 
 letters written on wrapping-paper, on birch 
 bark, on the fly-leaves of precious Bibles and 
 spelling-books; letters posted in hollow trees 
 
 15 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 for hunters, traders, and friendly Indians to 
 find and carry on; letters weeks on the way, 
 and sent with the postage for Johnny to pay 
 out of the always scanty supply of coins in 
 his pocket! 
 
 The people who wrote asked nothing more 
 of him; but, very certain that he would care, 
 they wanted to tell Johnny of the disasters 
 that had overtaken his gifts. Young trees 
 had died or had been swept away in fording 
 streams. Seeds had been lost, mildewed by 
 damp, or planted in improper soils. Plants 
 that had sprouted had been killed by drought, 
 choked by weeds, browsed by deer or cattle, 
 or burned by the Indians in their annual firing 
 of underbrush. How could it be otherwise 
 where men must fell trees, raise cabins, grub 
 stumps, plow corn, fence out wild beasts and 
 hunt against famine? 
 
 In time the wilderness must give way before 
 the souls of such dauntless men. But it would 
 yield to nothing less. It rejected Johnny's 
 gifts of tender seeds and trees long cherished. 
 It would always refuse them unless — he gave 
 himself to their defense. 
 
 As clear as the bugles that began to blow, 
 to announce that the boats were going out, 
 
 16 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 Johnny heard that voiceless call to go and 
 plant orchards in* the wilds. He had no ties 
 or duties to hold him here; no work that a 
 man much older than himself could not do as 
 well. 
 
 But could he give up all the days of his 
 youth — his dream of love and home? In such 
 a lifelong wandering he could not have a 
 cabin and a family. He must sow in soli- 
 tude, and see his harvests gathered to cheer 
 the firesides of other men. He could have 
 no love but that of mankind, no children be- 
 sides the tender seeds of his planting. And at 
 the end he must come to some death obscure 
 and lonely. 
 
 He could not do it. 
 
 Very certain of that he got to his feet, 
 shaken by the spiritual struggle. His guests 
 were already in the bustle and excitement 
 of hurried departure, and there was no time 
 for lingering good-bys or backward looks. 
 Hastily loading them with fruit and blossoms, 
 he helped the smallest children down the 
 steep hill to the town. 
 
 There every able-bodied man was needed. 
 A string of boats had come down from yards 
 farther up the Monongahela, and a hundred 
 
 17 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 unmanageable craft were all in a tangle on 
 the current that was running five miles an 
 hour. There was a pandemonium of shouts 
 and screams from water- washed decks, and 
 from the banks that were crowded with spec- 
 tators, as collisions were threatened, boats 
 grazed rocks or went aground on mud-bars. 
 
 With other men and boys Johnny raced 
 into the flood that covered Water Street, to 
 pull a luckless raft from under the keel of the 
 mail-packet. Lending a hand with pole or oar 
 or rope to boats in trouble, he made his way 
 along shore, scrambling over picket fences of 
 gardens that were under water. When the 
 danger was past he mounted the outside 
 stairs to the upper story of the little, old 
 brick blockhouse of Fort Pitt, that still stood 
 on the first bank above the fork of the rivers. 
 
 An Irish widow lived there in the sixteen- 
 foot-square redoubt of Colonel Boquet, with 
 a progeny as numerous as that of the old 
 woman in the shoe. Children tumbled up 
 and down the muddy steps; pigeons flew in 
 and out of the powder-burned loopholes under 
 the timbered eaves ; and over the great pond 
 below, which filled the approach to Du- 
 quesne Way, thousands of wild ducks made 
 
 18 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 a deafening clamor. But, next to his orchard 
 on the hill, this was the best lookout in the 
 town. Johnny always stood there, if he 
 could get a foothold in the press, to watch 
 the wagons and boats go out. 
 
 For miles the caravans could be seen mov- 
 ing along the northern bank of the Ohio, and 
 the fleet drifting down the flood in a rude 
 pageantry of migration that was epic in its 
 proportions and daring. To the depths of 
 him it stirred Johnny. Out on that horizon 
 of brooding woods and uncharted waters lay 
 the task of the time, and these were the people 
 who, with any tool or skill, crude strength 
 or sheer courage they possessed, leaped to the 
 doing of it. There would be small reward 
 for these of the vanguard, no return in glory. 
 It had the thrill of heroic adventure, the 
 splendor of self-sacrifice, the tragic mischances 
 of battle. Johnny burned with shame as he 
 remembered how he had been counting the 
 cost. While the boats went by he stood un- 
 covered. 
 
 His earliest guests of the morning passed 
 the fork with another family on a clumsy flat- 
 boat. The woman was leaning on the board- 
 ed-up stern, looking up to the orchard on the 
 
 19 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 hillcrest. When she saw Johnny she waved 
 a branch of apple-blossoms, and held up the 
 little bag of seeds, to show that she still had 
 it safe. A lurch of the raft, as it swung into 
 the current of the Ohio, threw her off her 
 balance. The seeds were wrenched from her 
 hold and flung into the flood. 
 
 For a long moment she stood motionless 
 and stared into the swirl of turbid water in 
 the wake of the boat, in frightened disbelief 
 that they were gone. Johnny, too, gazed at 
 the spot where they went down, remember- 
 ing what she had said in the morning: 
 
 " Nothing must happen to my seeds. I 
 could not bear it, because — " 
 
 The pity of it ! All those little promises of 
 beautiful and fruitful years; all those happy 
 times and memories for the child unborn, 
 drowned in the river's slime. For a moment 
 she gripped the rail and smiled back at 
 Johnny her brightest and bravest, as if to 
 reassure him that she meant to bear what she 
 could not. But suddenly she crumpled up on 
 the deck and flung her arms out in piteous 
 appeal. 
 
 It was a prayer ! Countless backward looks 
 and letters were translated. For five years 
 
 20 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 the wilderness had been flinging his futile 
 gifts in his face and besieging his spirit with 
 prayer. 
 
 SHE HELD UP THE LITTLE BAG OF SEEDS, TO SHOW THAT SHE 
 STILL HAD IT SAFE 
 
 Above the noises on the river he could not 
 make her hear a consoling word even if, in his 
 
 21 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 confusion, he could find one to say; but he 
 stood there with bent head until the sun, too, 
 dropped into the flood and the boats dis- 
 appeared in the twilight behind the islands. 
 
 Hill-slope and orchard lay in the radiance 
 of a high moon when Johnny went up through 
 the town. As he opened the cabin door the 
 silvery light filled the dear, familiar home and 
 the breeze set the little chair into a ghostly 
 rocking. A gust of emotion swept over him. 
 But after a moment he stopped the chair, as 
 one closes the eyes of the beloved dead, and 
 put it back against the wall where it could 
 rock no more. 
 
 All night he lay on the bench in the sap- 
 ling stoop, like one of his own trees uprooted. 
 The birds sang their mating songs in a dawn 
 of rose and pearl. Then the orchard was a 
 surf of bloom that, to Johnny's enlarged spir- 
 itual vision, had a rarer loveliness than that 
 of color and perfume. 
 
 Apple-blossoms were the year's first assur- 
 ance of a fruitful autumn, and men were as 
 trees walking. His gift for planting and nur- 
 turing, his poetic feeling, his fellowship for 
 men and his yearning desire to serve them, 
 had been nothing more than the brief blush 
 
 22 
 
THE FRONTIER ORCHARD 
 
 and fragrance of the wild tree that ripened 
 only to a harvest of bitter disappointment. 
 
 God helping him, he would bring these 
 blossoms of his soul to the good fruits of a 
 thousand orchards in the wilderness. 
 
II 
 
 THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 AD his fields been in corn, 
 Johnny could have sold or aban- 
 doned them and journeyed west- 
 ward on the crest of that ex- 
 alted mood. But with a nursery 
 a man must keep faith from sea- 
 son to season, and hold his plantation in trust 
 for the community he serves. He could not 
 sell to the first or highest bidder, but only 
 to the man who was best fitted to continue 
 his work in Pittsburg. Then he had to tarry 
 until autumn for the ripening of seeds ; spend 
 the winter in gleaning them at scattered farm 
 cider-mills, and delay his going until the 
 frost was coming out of the ground. But the 
 orchardist must know how to wait, for other 
 sowers reap ten times before he gathers his 
 first harvest. Blossom-time had almost come 
 
 24 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 'round again before Johnny was off on his 
 lifelong mission in the wilderness. 
 
 It was not until fall that he parted with his 
 little Eden for a sum that would barely out- 
 fit him for travel — that would buy him a good 
 horse and saddle, leather saddle-bags to hold 
 safe and dry quite a bushel of apple-seeds, 
 a blanket and a rifle. Of food he meant to 
 carry only a small bag of meal and a lump 
 of salt. Gun and fishing-tackle must sup- 
 ply his needs. For the rest, he had the light 
 hoe, rake and hatchet that had grown to 
 his hand, a coil of rope and a hunting-knife. 
 Flint and steel for fire-building were in his 
 pouch with his Bible and the small sum of 
 money that he had collected on his notes. 
 
 About money Johnny was in no way con- 
 cerned. It would be of less use to him than 
 courage and resource, and the co-operation 
 and faith of the many people, both around 
 Pittsburg and in Ohio, to whom he must look 
 for help. Seeds were his first necessity — 
 seeds in quantity limited only by his ability 
 to gather, carry and plant them, and for as 
 many years as the West might require to 
 grow its own supply. 
 
 The task he had set himself was appalling, 
 
 25 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 but the result was assured. He had but to 
 sow a hundred seeds for one to survive to the 
 transplanting; set out ten trees to bring one 
 to the age of bearing, and grow an uncertain 
 number of those to secure one of value. Most 
 of his seedling trees, he knew, would revert 
 to their wild ancestry. Only now and then 
 would one come true to its variety or develop 
 some rare perfection of its own. And budding 
 and grafting must long be as impossible in 
 the backwoods as they were for the Pil- 
 grims of the Mayflower. But it was thus 
 that, in spite of stony ground, bitter cli- 
 mate and Indian wars, orchards blushed 
 and fruited within a generation in every col- 
 ony of New England. The West must re- 
 ward his devotion much more quickly and 
 generously. 
 
 Since the best investment he could make 
 of his walletful of notes was to put them 
 into men's good -will, Johnny tucked them 
 under the front logs of glowing fireplaces be- 
 fore the eyes of the poor farmers who had 
 given them. And to men who protested that 
 they still owed him, he said: 
 
 " You owe orchards to pioneers in the back- 
 woods. Let me collect the debt in seeds and 
 
 26 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 in a winter night's lodging now and then for 
 the next twenty years or so." 
 
 With that he went whistling to the heap of 
 fermenting or frozen pomace with an iron 
 soap-kettle of warm water to wash out the 
 seeds. There, in an open pole shack or under 
 the bare trees, he worked in wind or rain, 
 snow or bitter cold. At nightfall he brought 
 in a small measure of sorted seed, for he saved 
 only the brightest and plumpest, and spread 
 them on the chimney-shelf to dry. 
 
 One place exhausted, he shouldered his bag 
 and tramped to the next. Now and then he 
 lay out among the hills to harden himself to 
 danger and exposure, or in times of spiritual 
 stress to keep a vigil with the stars. In that 
 first winter of wandering in the sparsely set- 
 tled and drift -filled valleys about Pittsburg 
 he grew lean and long of stride, and his eyes 
 took on the look of one who sees no hard or 
 hindering circumstance, but only the distant 
 and splendid goal. 
 
 Except in moments of excitement, Johnny 
 was a man of brief and diffident speech. It 
 was only by accident that he fully revealed 
 his unworldly and perilous scheme of life, and 
 won the approval of more prudent friends. 
 
 27 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 In reading of the miracle of the loaves and 
 fishes to an illiterate family, about a fire where 
 apples sputtered in a spicy row, he had a 
 vision of his orchard multiplied. Then his 
 dark-gray eyes went black and luminous. 
 Words tumbled out in one of those cataracts 
 of eloquence with which he now and then 
 swept away three generations of men on floods 
 of poetic and religious feeling for his self- 
 imposed task. Until far into the night he 
 talked of his mission. God and one man were 
 going to bring about that miracle, and feed 
 the multitude in the wilderness with comfort 
 and beauty. 
 
 At mill and store, and wherever people 
 hailed one another on land and water high- 
 way, the story was repeated. With surprising 
 rapidity and accuracy of report it spread over 
 the region and touched the imagination and so- 
 cial conscience of all manner of men. Here was 
 a thing to which the right thinking must lend 
 a hand. So, even before he had started on 
 his first journey, Johnny had become a matter 
 of public pride and concern, a beloved figure 
 about whom a legend had begun to grow. 
 
 But there was no one to see him off, and the 
 world was stripped to the elements of bleak 
 
 28 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 weather, bare woods and leaden waters, on 
 the dark winter morning when Johnny rode 
 down to the ferry landing to meet the star- 
 route post-rider. It had been urged upon 
 him as safest to cover the first stage of the 
 journey with the mail-carrier, who, in the last 
 year, had been making the round trip once 
 a week to the new settlement of a blacksmith 
 shop and floating mill at Zanesville. Thence 
 he could drop, from one cluster of cabins to 
 another, down the Muskingum. 
 
 To have the longest planting season possible 
 he was obliged to go out thus, ahead of the 
 spring tide of migration, for the red maple 
 often blossomed late in February at Marietta, 
 and the Judas-tree in March. By traveling 
 fast and working his way on the flatboats of 
 home-seekers, and on the freight-pirogues that 
 carried salt and gunpowder to the remotest 
 clearings on the larger tributaries, he could 
 put in seeds near most of the white settle- 
 ments in Ohio. The red tribes still held the 
 Northwest and, in winter, ranged their an- 
 cient hunting-grounds in the eastern foot-hills 
 within a day's ride out of Pittsburg. 
 
 During the summer, when no planting could 
 be done, Johnny meant to search out scat- 
 
 29 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 tered clearings along the smaller waterways 
 and trails to the Indian border. In October 
 and November he would put in what seeds 
 he had left along the route of his return for 
 a new supply. The winter months he must 
 spend among the cider-mills, and late Feb- 
 ruary must see him on the wilderness trail. 
 Until there were orchards in the new West 
 he might not see blossoming or fruiting apple- 
 trees again. 
 
 There had been a thaw and then a freeze. 
 Gales had swept the hilltops bare, but snow 
 still lay in the forest and in shrinking patches 
 in the hollows. Once across the Allegheny, 
 where the ferry nosed its way through floating 
 ice and muddy slush, the rough-shod horses 
 picked their way over the iron ruts and around 
 the shivering pools of the Great Trail. 
 
 The cutting of this military road through 
 a hundred miles of unbroken woods, for a 
 forced march of kilted Highlanders to the 
 meadows of the Muskingum, was a wonder 
 tale of the breaking of the power of Pontiac. 
 Unused for thirty years and obliterated by 
 new growth, it had been reopened, after 
 Wayne's victory in 1794, by a peaceful army 
 of home-seekers only five years before Johnny 
 
 30 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 began his mission. It was still, with the ex- 
 ception of the larger waterways, the only way 
 of travel in the forests west of Pittsburg of 
 which eagles were aware. 
 
 To the mouth of Beaver Creek it defiled 
 along the north bank of the river. There 
 the Ohio dropped away to the south, while 
 the road ran westward along the watershed. 
 Travel over it was nearly all in one direction. 
 Its only purpose was to cleave a way to the 
 first navigable stream in the heart of a wil- 
 derness that had engulfed forty thousand 
 unreturning pioneers. There were no settle- 
 ments or even isolated cabins along this road 
 that was walled by wild flood and gigantic 
 trees. No alien sound was heard by the 
 travelers besides the occasional crack of the 
 red man's rifle in the hills. 
 
 All day the horses scrambled up and down 
 the rough ridges ; plunged into the black mold 
 and dense thickets of tangled gullies; stum- 
 bled around splintered and root-buttressed 
 stumps; struggled across corduroyed bogs; 
 raced trembling over thawing quicksands, 'and 
 splashed through creeks that foamed and 
 chuckled under the marble-white arches of 
 leafless sycamores. Fording-places were un- 
 
 31 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 certain, for after every freshet mud-bars 
 shifted up or down stream. When one could 
 not be found the crossing had to be made 
 at a riffle, often with a precipitous approach, 
 where the horses were in danger of pitching 
 their riders headlong or of breaking their own 
 legs. 
 
 At nightfall the travelers camped in one of 
 those oases of the forest — a natural "opening " 
 that sloped to a creek-bank and was girdled 
 by tall trees. The horses were belled and 
 turned loose to feed on the scant growth of 
 grass and buffalo clover that had sprung up 
 in the late thaw. Then, while the post-rider 
 went hunting, Johnny built a fire of drift- 
 wood and found a dry cache for the mail and 
 seed bags in a hollow tree. It was a half- 
 hour after the report of the gun before the 
 man returned to camp with a brace of venison 
 steaks and the freshly flayed skin of a buck. 
 
 "You killed a deer to make a meal for two 
 men?" asked Johnny. He was willing to 
 take what life he must to sustain his own, 
 but he hated to see any living thing de- 
 stroyed needlessly, or any useful thing wasted. 
 
 The mail-carrier laughed and slapped his 
 thigh in huge enjoyment. "Say, Johnny, 
 
 3 2 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 didn't you know it was a public duty to 
 make game scarce along this road? Travel 
 will be safer when them thieving redskins 
 are obliged to leave this neck of the woods. 
 Yep, there'll be trouble, you bet. Indians al- 
 ways fight before they move west." He lit his 
 pipe and considered Johnny with affectionate 
 concern. "See here, Johnny, you don't want 
 to have anything to do with them red devils." 
 
 Johnny said nothing, but he could not eat 
 of the venison. He caught a fish in the creek 
 and baked a hoe-cake. Long after the other 
 man slept he lay thinking how he and his 
 mission were involved in the wrongs and hos- 
 tilities that had imperiled life and work on 
 every American frontier. And when he was 
 awakened in the night by the snarling of 
 wolves over the dead buck, this wild way over 
 which he must journey year after year be- 
 came a place of pitiless betrayal of peaceful 
 things that asked only to go about their 
 business unmolested. This year's leaves might 
 well drift over him, and he and his dream of 
 service to his generation lie slain and for- 
 gotten on the leaf-mold, the ancient death- 
 bed of the woods. 
 
 In the morning his horse was gone. The 
 
 33 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 bell and the shapeless prints of moccasined 
 feet were found in the wet moss of that charm- 
 ing glade, where the first venturesome robin 
 hopped and chirped in the pale winter sun- 
 shine. This was a calamity that he had not 
 foreseen. 
 
 The mail-carrier was in one of those flaming 
 rages of retaliation that, in white men and 
 red, have started every border war. "It's 
 murder to steal a man's horse in these woods. 
 If it was mine I'd get it back if I had to fol- 
 low the dirty thief to his village at Sandusky 
 or Piqua and fill his copper-colored hide with 
 buckshot." 
 
 "I have no quarrel with any man," said 
 Johnny. 
 
 "O Lord!" He shrugged his shoulders in 
 disgust. "The first time you get a shot from 
 behind a tree you'll change your mind about 
 that. Well, camp here. I'll be back in four 
 days. We'll cache all the plunder but the 
 mail, and you can ride double with me to 
 Pittsburg and get another horse." 
 
 Johnny could not consider this. "My 
 seeds would mildew if they were buried a week 
 or so. And I haven't enough money to buy 
 a horse." 
 
 34 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 "Then you'll have to wait for a caravan to 
 pick you up. The first emigrants will be 
 along in a couple of weeks." 
 
 "I must be in Marietta by that time. 
 Good-by, and better luck to you." 
 
 "You talk like a fool!" The man leaped 
 to the saddle angrily, mounted to the trail, 
 and rode away. The United States mail 
 could not be delayed; and he reflected that, 
 with a horse-load of baggage, Johnny had no 
 choice but to stay where he was. But a mile 
 up the road he recalled the something in 
 Johnny's look that had alarmed him, and 
 came pounding back. 
 
 "Johnny, you've got to camp here. There 
 are more Indians farther west. I didn't know 
 there was a redskin near here, or I wouldn't 'a' 
 killed that buck. I done you a bad turn." 
 
 Johnny looked up at him with a glow of 
 warm feeling as he remembered the many 
 stories of this man's bravery, resourcefulness 
 and faithfulness to duty. In spite of storm 
 and flood, accidents to horses, treachery of 
 Indians and encounters with wild animals, he 
 had always brought the mail-bag through. 
 
 "Then you'll do me a good turn and take 
 my seeds to Zanesville. You know Isaac 
 
 35 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Stadden, the German farmer who went out 
 from Pittsburg last year. His clearing is near 
 the mouth of the Licking River. Leave the 
 saddle-bags with him, and tell him I will be 
 there within a week to plant the first nursery 
 in the Northwest Territory on his farm." 
 
 The man went white. "Why, good Heav- 
 ens, Johnny, this road kills horses! There are 
 wolf -packs, and the first band of Indians you 
 met would strip you to your shirt and lose 
 you in the woods." 
 
 "I'll get through somehow. Good -by!" 
 There was in Johnny's look the pale exalta- 
 tion of the fanatic who is not to be turned 
 from his purpose. He smiled and waved his 
 coonskin cap as long as the slowly departing 
 rider was in view. 
 
 He had begun to make a drag-litter which 
 he could pull, after the manner of an Indian 
 pony, and use to raft his baggage across 
 streams. But now, lightened of his seeds, 
 he made up his tools, his food-pouch and his 
 blanket into a compact bundle with the rope. 
 Shouldering his gun and his pack, he climbed 
 to the trail. 
 
 All day he toiled up innumerable ridges, 
 and then ran down, for this foot-hill country 
 
 36 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 of the Alleghanies was a storm-furrowed and 
 petrified ocean. The road that labored up 
 to rocky crests and dropped into sodden wal- 
 lows of troughs, was one upon which a sea- 
 soned saddle-horse could not safely be driven 
 more than thirty miles a day. Indians crossed 
 it in many places, but they never traveled on 
 it for any distance. They followed the easier 
 grades of the old north and south hunting- 
 trails that wound along the bluffs. Yet from 
 late dawn until early dusk Johnny walked, 
 with brief pauses for rest on hilltops. How 
 many days he could keep up this pace he did 
 not permit himself to think. His feet winged 
 with purpose he had, as yet, little sense of 
 fatigue. 
 
 But he went warily, for the way was one of 
 pitfalls, and to a man alone and afoot the 
 difficult miles were ambushed. In that co- 
 lossal forest the rough-hewn road was but a 
 rift, a crevice between cliffs of trees, and fifty 
 yards on either side every columned vista 
 ended in gloom. The crack of rifles became 
 louder and more frequent. Stretches of soft 
 earth showed the tracks of animals, large and 
 small. The wayside was strewn with the 
 skulls and scattered bones of horses and cat- 
 
 37 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 tie which, having strayed or been injured, 
 had been abandoned by hurrying emigrants. 
 There were mounds with rude headboards. 
 One had been torn open — a gash in the soft 
 bosom of mother earth. Johnny stopped to 
 draw a covering of soil into the trench and 
 to say a prayer. 
 
 He was afraid of but two things — of being 
 molested and delayed by man or beast, and 
 of losing the trail. Once he slipped farther 
 into a thicket than he had intended while a 
 band of Indian hunters went by overhead, 
 and in coming out again he lost his sense of 
 direction. It was a half -hour before, through 
 a maze of brush-grown glens, he found his 
 way back to the road. 
 
 At night he made his camp in a little cave 
 on a steep slope twenty feet below the trail. 
 From the quantity of small bones in it and 
 the vile smell, it was probably an old fox-den. 
 He raked the refuse out, cut a hole for the 
 escape of smoke, and sweetened the air with 
 fire. As noiselessly as any foraging and de- 
 fenseless animal he slipped about, catching a 
 fish in a pool of the creek below, and setting 
 loop -traps in a rabbit -run. When he had 
 eaten his supper he put out the fire and spread 
 
 38 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 his blanket. On either side the entrance, 
 which was concealed by bushes, he drove 
 stout stakes and wove his rope across. Then 
 he knotted a kerchief to the screen. As long 
 as the faint moonlight penetrated the leafless 
 web of the forest it would flutter there, a pale 
 flame that would make prowling animals 
 pause. 
 
 In spite of the pain in his bruised and 
 swollen feet and legs, and such cramped quar- 
 ters that he could not stretch at full length, 
 Johnny fell, almost at once, into the sleep of 
 exhaustion. It was toward morning, when 
 the wind went down with the moon, that he 
 woke with a start in darkness and silence and 
 to the fetid breath of a wolf. At the hissing 
 flash and acrid smoke of a little train of gun- 
 powder that he fired with flint and steel, the 
 creature fled, crashing through undergrowth. 
 Overhead a panther screamed and leaped 
 away across the tree-tops. 
 
 Johnny slept no more. For that night he 
 was safe enough, but a cave w r as not always 
 to be found. A fire in the open was a man's 
 natural home in the woods, and a rifle his 
 defense. But the glow of flames or the sound 
 of a shot here might summon the Indians, and 
 
 4 39 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 them he must avoid until opportunity offered 
 to commend himself. Now and then a white 
 man — a trapper with a wild strain in him, a 
 trader with a finer sense of fair play, or a mis- 
 sionary with only the love of God and the 
 brotherhood of man in his heart, did make 
 his own terms of peace with them. He must 
 do that, be able to join their bands of hunters 
 for safe travel, be welcome in their camps, 
 turn this peril into a protection, or see his 
 mission perish. 
 
 Dawn came in as a diffused light, cold and 
 gray. After an hour on the road Johnny was 
 obliged to take shelter in the burned-out hol- 
 low of an enormous tree, while a smother of 
 soft snow blotted out the world. The storm 
 died away to a drizzling rain that veiled the 
 woods and mired the road. At every step 
 his clogged feet slipped. At the bottom of 
 every ravine ran a swollen creek where he had 
 to put his pack, his gun and his clothing on 
 his head and wade in icy water, sometimes 
 plunging into sink-holes up to his shoulders. 
 
 It was mid-afternoon when he came to a 
 broader stream that poured down a torrent 
 of mud, melting snow and driftwood. He 
 could not swim it with his baggage, and any 
 
 40 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 raft that he could build and man would be 
 swept away. Up-stream he scrambled, along 
 steep and crumbling banks, to where the 
 channel narrowed so that the limbs of syca- 
 mores were interlaced above a foaming riffle. 
 Pulling his pack up into a tree, he swung it at 
 the end of the rope like a pendulum and landed 
 it on the farther bank. Then he leaped, 
 caught a branch that broke under his weight, 
 fell ten feet to another, and hung there until 
 he could make his way to the ground. Through 
 two miles of tangled bog he struggled back to 
 the trail. 
 
 In rounding a bend half-way up the next long 
 slope, he almost ran into a timber- wolf which 
 was squatted on its haunches in the roadway, 
 muzzle up, as if keeping some ghoulish watch. 
 Gaunt from a hard winter, it held its ground 
 and showed its fangs when Johnny struck it 
 with a stone. He shot it as it opened its jaws 
 to howl for the pack ; and he raced up the slip- 
 pery rise in such haste to be beyond the range 
 of the echoing report, that he stumbled over 
 an Indian who had fallen on his face across 
 the road. 
 
 In a moment he had turned the brave on 
 his back, felt the faint heart-beat, shook and 
 
 41 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 shouted him into semi - consciousness, and 
 learned his first Shawnese word from the dry 
 lips that begged for water. 
 
 "Courage, comrade!" Johnny knew that 
 all Indians learned enough English to keep 
 from being cheated in the fur -trading. He 
 asked brief questions about this man's com- 
 panions and the location of his camp, but 
 the dazed savage only stared in a bewildered 
 way, tried to draw his knife, and muttered 
 unintelligibly. 
 
 Blood was trickling from a gunshot wound 
 in a leg. Johnny cut the soaked legging away, 
 washed the ragged furrow, and made ban- 
 dages of the linsey shirt that he wore under 
 his buckskins. Then he dragged the senseless 
 giant to the shelter of the trees, bathed his 
 scratched and mud-stained face, and covered 
 him with his own blanket. He found no gun 
 near, and hastily loaded his own that had 
 been discharged. 
 
 Every consideration of prudence urged him 
 to run, not to become involved in this obscure 
 tragedy. No doubt this hunter would be 
 missed, and men of his tribe might appear 
 at any moment. The rain had ceased and 
 night was coming on, sharp and still. He 
 
 42 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 stood on such an elevation, which dropped 
 away so steeply that he could look out over 
 
 "courage, comrade!" but the dazed savage tried to 
 
 draw his knife 
 
 43 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 gray billows of tree-tops to purple banks of 
 sunset. 
 
 There he built a great fire — a beacon that 
 shone across the heaving ocean of woods. 
 At intervals he fired his rifle to guide the 
 searchers. Making a hasty meal of the 
 parched corn and jerked venison in the In- 
 dian's pouch, he hurried to gather fuel for 
 the night. Then he cut two poles from sas- 
 safras saplings, and a quantity of brush and 
 slender grape-vines as flexible as ropes. These 
 he spent the early hours of the night in weav- 
 ing into a litter, so there would be no delay 
 or discomfort in getting the wounded man 
 to camp. It was near midnight when three 
 Indians with pine-knot torches and bristling 
 with weapons, slipped like apparitions out of 
 the forest. Johnny stood up, unarmed, and 
 met their dark looks with candor and sym- 
 pathy. 
 
 "Your brother lives. He knew nothing 
 when I found him here, but may be able to 
 tell you about his mishap in the morning. 
 I would not wake him now. He has lost 
 much blood and is in a fevered sleep." 
 
 Johnny turned from them to test the 
 strength of the litter. Without taking their 
 
 44 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 eyes from him, they went to look at the sleep- 
 ing brave and to inspect the neat bandages. 
 Then they drew their blankets about them 
 and lay down by the fire. Johnny read a 
 chapter in his Bible by the flare, said good 
 night, and stretched himself beside the wound- 
 ed man to share the covering. If this in- 
 jured hunter could give no account of himself 
 in the morning, or if he mistook Johnny for 
 his assailant, there might be a swift reckon- 
 ing. But he would not think of that. He 
 was so exhausted by the day's march and the 
 night's anxious watch that he was sound 
 asleep in five minutes. 
 
 He woke with such stiff and aching limbs 
 that the thought of the wild leagues that lay 
 before him filled him with sick misgivings. 
 The Indians already had their injured tribes- 
 man on the litter and they had his story. 
 He had shot himself accidentally when he 
 slipped in the mud and tripped over washed- 
 out roots, a mile back on the bluff trail, and 
 had dragged himself to the road. They had 
 found his gun where he had dropped it in the 
 path, and the dead wolf on the slope. But 
 for this white wayfarer the bones of this 
 young warrior would have been stripped, and 
 
 45 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 wolves did not wait until a helpless man was 
 dead. 
 
 "All men should be brothers in these 
 woods," said Johnny. 
 
 The Indians were silent, but they shared 
 their food with him, and watched curiously 
 as he hobbled about. They had been so 
 taken up with their own trouble that they had 
 not speculated on his presence there alone, 
 in the heart of the wilderness. But now they 
 noticed his lameness and his torn and mired 
 boots, and one asked, bluntly: 
 
 "Where is your horse?" 
 
 "I had a horse." Johnny's level look was 
 fearless, but it did not accuse them. It was, 
 indeed, full of infinite understanding and 
 compassion. "Let us say no more about 
 that." He held out his hand in friendly 
 parting and began to tie up his pack. 
 
 They made haste to say that they knew 
 
 nothing about his horse, but they would keep 
 
 a lookout for the thief. And word of how he 
 
 had stood by this wounded brave should go 
 
 over every trail of the forest. No Shawnee 
 
 would ever rob him again. And if he would 
 
 follow them to their camp they would see him 
 
 safe to his journey's end. 
 
 4 6 
 
THE WILDERNESS TRAIL 
 
 Johnny's heart leaped in his breast. "Will 
 you lend me a pony and a guide to the Great 
 Crossing, and a canoe to Marietta?" 
 
 "Come!" They took up the litter and 
 turned into the bluff trail. Without an in- 
 stant's hesitation Johnny shouldered his gun 
 and his pack and followed these Ishmaels of 
 the forest whose tribal name was a synonym 
 for restless wandering, for ferocity and treach- 
 ery. The foot-path worn deep in the soil, the 
 undergrowth arching overhead, the narrow 
 trace was no more than a human rabbit-run in 
 the woods. 
 
 Two days later he was set afloat in a beau- 
 tiful painted canoe on the winding current 
 of the Muskingum. Paddling swiftly down 
 to Zanesville, he left the mill, the stockade, 
 and scattered cabins behind, after shouting 
 to the blacksmith that he would return, and 
 upon what errand. It was near sundown 
 when he breasted the spring-flood sweep of 
 the Licking. 
 
 The wild geese were coming north. Frogs 
 piped in the swamps. Does were bringing 
 their spotted fawns down to drink. The ice 
 was all out, and streams were bank-full from 
 melting snow. Sap was running, and squaws 
 
 47 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 were boiling sugar in the maple groves. 
 Miasmic vapors rose from the marshes. Up 
 all the foot-hill valleys of the western slope 
 spring was hurrying, as if on the wings of 
 song. The black soil of the Ohio bottoms was 
 warming for Johnny's seeds. The river, lying 
 in the track of the sun, was a stream of glory 
 when he beached his canoe, climbed the rail 
 fence and ran across a clearing that was a 
 mere window on the sky, to Isaac Stadden's 
 cabin. 
 
Ill 
 
 GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 OWN the Muskingum Johnny 
 dropped so rapidly, stopping 
 \1 only for a day or two at each 
 ~ cluster of cabins to put in 
 a small nursery, that he ran 
 ahead of rumor. Below Big 
 Bottom and Fort Frye the current slack- 
 ened, and his approach to Marietta was in- 
 dicated when the stream widened to two 
 hundred yards and the spectral sycamores 
 that marched with its banks were no longer 
 able to meet in high arches overhead. But 
 even there he was still in the wilds, his water 
 highway girt by steep hills, hemmed in by 
 tall timber, and fed by countless little singing 
 creeks. A clearing at which he asked per- 
 mission to use any bit of waste land suitable 
 for his purpose, and the pleasant tinkle of 
 cow-bells in the woods, were signs that he 
 
 49 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 was on the outskirts of the dauntless town 
 which, only a dozen years before, had been 
 the first to front the flood of the River 
 Beautiful. 
 
 Then there were sounds of hammers, the 
 zipping wail of a saw in hard wood, and the 
 clatter of a fallen plank that sent birds and 
 squirrels skurrying to cover. Another man 
 in his place, after three weeks in the wilder- 
 ness, would have dipped the paddle briskly 
 to round the next bend where, no doubt, lay 
 a floating mill, and some such ambitious and 
 social business as putting proper floors and 
 doors in a cabin was afoot. But Johnny 
 nosed his canoe into a clump of willows on 
 the eastern bank, jumped out, and broke 
 through the tasseling screen into a hill and 
 tree-rimmed cove. 
 
 It was just such a place as he looked for 
 everywhere — a sheltered nook overgrown with 
 all the flowering vines and shrubs of the forest. 
 To lovely and neglected spots like this song- 
 birds retreated before the devastation of white 
 men, and later generations of children found 
 the thorny thickets of wild-apple blossonis 
 that were a beautiful by-product of John- 
 ny's labors. Not large enough for fields, too 
 
 50 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 steeply walled for safe pastures, they were long 
 left undisturbed to the slow-growing seeds of 
 his planting. 
 
 Johnny lost no time in getting to work. 
 From soil as soft and loose as an ash-heap he 
 pulled forest seedlings and weed -stalks by 
 hand. Tough bushes, briers and saplings he 
 cut down with his hatchet, and grubbed out 
 the roots; and with his hoe he destroyed the 
 innumerable cones of annuals that, pushing 
 through the blanket of drifted leaves, ran up 
 every rise in flickers of pale-green fire. The 
 ground cleared over a fraction of an acre on 
 the well-drained slope that faced westward 
 toward the river, he raked it free of clods, 
 opened orderly rows of trenches, and put in 
 and covered up his seeds. 
 
 He was used to working thus all day, often 
 eating a noon snack of rude fare on his feet, 
 and not stopping until he had marked the 
 plot and closed any opening in the protecting 
 wall with a stout barrier of stakes and brush. 
 But for several nights now, whether in the 
 open or on a cabin hearth, he had slept ill and 
 had wakened shivering in the cold dawns 
 when fog sheeted the marshy bottom-lands. 
 In the middle of the afternoon he cooled his 
 
 51 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 hot face and hands at a spring and lay down 
 on a patch of buffalo clover. 
 
 Scarcely a murmur of the world without 
 penetrated the little greening hollow that 
 distilled the earliest incense of spring. The 
 sounds of tools, so loud on the river, were soft- 
 ened here to the drumming of woodpeckers, 
 chattering of squirrels and songs of birds. 
 In his swift travel, where he bespoke men 
 only in passing, Johnny was coming to find 
 companionship in his furred and feathered 
 neighbors, noting their nest-building, court- 
 ship-caroling, and busy foraging. His glance, 
 roving up to a crow that cawed from the top 
 of a Cottonwood, fell to a fluttering patch of 
 the discreetly warm color of the tea-roses that 
 had bloomed beside his grandmother's cot- 
 tage door in Boston. Then there was a laugh 
 that bubbled up from the heart of a child. 
 "Oh! I thought you were an Indian!" 
 Johnny scrambled to his moccasined feet, 
 for he had discarded his torturing boots in 
 the Shawnee camp, and took off his fur 
 cap to the little maid above him. Her full- 
 skirted gown of linsey, that blew in the breeze 
 about her ankles, and the folded kerchief, 
 were of a fashion that went out when the un- 
 
 52 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 happy queen for whom Marietta was named 
 laid her lovely head on the block. The colof 
 of the gown was but temporary — a spring 
 blossoming, as it were, due to experimental 
 steeping in sassafras tea. 
 
 " There are no Indians about here," Johnny 
 reassured her, gravely; but she nodded posi- 
 tively. 
 
 "They always come down the bluff trail 
 along the west bank to sell their furs when 
 the geese fly north." She seated herself on 
 the buttressing roots of a beech-tree, on the 
 rim of his horizon, and took her knitting 
 from her belt. Girls were obliged to grow up 
 early in that day and place. At sixteen most 
 of them were married, and idleness was sin 
 in a maid of fourteen. 
 
 " I'm as 'f raid as death of Indians." She sud- 
 denly turned a pallid face and wide blue eyes 
 upon him— a look that he remembered, when 
 he saw it again in tortured fancy years after- 
 ward in an hour of anguish. "They— they 
 killed— my father and mother— in the mas- 
 sacre — at Big Bottom." 
 
 Johnny bared his head. Big Bottom, forty 
 miles up the Muskingum, was now a place 
 of corn and wheat fields, of grazing cattle and 
 
 53 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 populous cabins. It had been difficult for 
 him to realize the tragic event there of ten 
 years before, that had ushered in half a dec- 
 ade of savage warfare. Such horrors might 
 happen again; there was a stockade in every 
 settlement, and the government's Fort Har- 
 mer at Marietta. But presently she put the 
 matter out of her mind, showing of what 
 sterling New England stuff she was fashioned. 
 
 "I came to find these hepaticas, and to sit 
 by them awhile." 
 
 She cleared last year's rusty foliage from 
 a nest of faint-blue blossoms, and then, blush- 
 ing a little, kissed them and left them to nod 
 on their mossy stems. A Puritan maid, she 
 was far too well brought up to ask questions, 
 but she glanced curiously at the small, culti- 
 vated plot, and Johnny held up a handful of 
 shining brown seeds. 
 
 "I know what they are — apple-seeds! Dr. 
 True has an apple-tree, and when it blooms 
 it's the wonder of the town. The older peo- 
 ple tell fairy- stories of orchards in the East 
 that bury little homes in blossoms. I wish — ' ' 
 
 She stopped, for Johnny had flung his arm 
 across his eyes. After a moment he looked 
 at her again. " There will be such orchards 
 
 54 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 here for every one." His face was so pale, 
 but his smile so grave and sweet, that she fell 
 into a wondering silence. She was not sur- 
 prised to find him here, for in this Mecca 
 of the New West strangers arrived by every 
 boat and over every trail of the forest; but 
 it was an unheard - of thing to see a man 
 planting trees where every other one was at 
 the bitter necessity of chopping them down. 
 By and by she remembered a polite ceremony 
 that had been omitted. 
 
 "My name is Betty Stacey. Please, will 
 you tell me yours?" 
 
 "Johnny." 
 
 It occurred to neither of them that the in- 
 formation lacked anything, and now that they 
 were acquainted she offered shy confidences 
 and hospitality. 
 
 "It was Aunt Mary Lake who found me 
 where mother hid me in the woods, and 
 . brought me up. She isn't any relation, but 
 just everybody's Aunt Mary. She must be 
 getting old, for she's sixty; but she's so busy 
 doing things for people that I guess she for- 
 got about it. Won't you come to see her? 
 Please, Johnny." 
 
 "To-morrow." He explained that he had 
 5 55 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 to make a brush fence across the gully that 
 had been cut in the rim of the cove by the 
 spring, to keep deer and cattle out. Then 
 he must find some one in the town to keep 
 weeds and forest seedlings from choking his 
 nursery. 
 
 Betty listened with eager sympathy. Her 
 pretty face had warmed to the blush of the 
 wild rose, and no fox-squirrel had fur of so 
 bright and burnished a brown as the hair 
 that curled on her neck. It was the color 
 that went with black-lashed eyes as darkly 
 blue as the waters of the Muskingum, and 
 sun-kisses across the bridge of a proud little 
 nose that drooped at the tip. 
 
 She had meant to go, but Johnny closed his 
 eyes as if in weariness and discomfort, and fell 
 into such an uneasy sleep on the slope below 
 her that she sat as still as any mouse and 
 watched over him with sweet, maternal solici- 
 tude. The sun was shining on a level along 
 the forest aisles when he was awakened by 
 a crash that shook the hill. Betty was on 
 her feet, back toward him, gazing down into 
 the wood. 
 
 "Did the cabin fall?" he cried. 
 
 "The cabin? It was in the shipyard. A 
 
 56 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 prop gave way and a pile of timbers tumbled 
 down." 
 
 He ran up the slope. Below, on a shadowy 
 bend of the river, a wide swath had been cut 
 in the ranks of trees, and on the grassy ways 
 lay a long hull, like a viking ship of old on 
 a Norse fjord. It was an astonishing thing 
 to see an ocean-sailing vessel of a hundred 
 tons burden nearing its launching on this far- 
 inland stream; but Johnny remembered that 
 the leaders of the Ohio Company were Revo- 
 lutionary officers from the ports of New Eng- 
 land, who had built a second Mayflower at 
 Pittsburg. Ship -building was a habit with 
 men of that breed, and the navigation of un- 
 charted waters a trade. 
 
 " There," said Betty, delightedly, as a huge 
 young negro shouldered his way through the 
 crowd of men in the yard. "Kitt Putnam 
 has come from the mill to pile the timbers up 
 again. He's the biggest, strongest, kindest 
 darky in the world. He'll keep the weeds 
 out of your little bits of baby apple-trees for 
 you." 
 
 Down the hill she sped in happy excite- 
 ment and crossed a freshly plowed stump- 
 lot. Johnny called to her to wait for him 
 
 57 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 when she paused on the edge of a drainage 
 ditch, looking down ruefully at her pretty, 
 yellow moccasins, but Kitt ran and set her 
 across. He was not a river negro from Ken- 
 tucky, but a freedman who had been the 
 body-servant of old Gen. Israel Putnam in the 
 East. Brought out by Colonel Israel, he was 
 a universal favorite in Marietta and Belpre 
 because of his good manners, his prowess in 
 sports, and the cheerful willingness with which 
 he served every one with his phenomenal 
 strength and dexterity. 
 
 Before she disappeared in the thin belt of 
 forest that hid the town, the gay and tender 
 child turned and waved to him again. Al- 
 ready ties of interest and affection were be- 
 ginning to bind Johnny to the New West. 
 He was no hermit of the woods. It was the 
 pathos of his solitary and wandering life that 
 people touched his imagination and twined 
 about his heart. 
 
 Twilight was darkening in the cove when 
 he came up from the deserted shipyard with 
 fuel for his fire. For easier carriage the seeds 
 had been transferred to a bag made of can- 
 vas from a caravan cover. With them he 
 shared his brush bed and a corner of his 
 
 58 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 blanket to protect them from the damp. 
 Unable to eat anything, he lay down at once 
 under a canopy of unfurling leaves so sketchy 
 that he could consider the heavens. He 
 knew only the polar stars, by which mariners 
 and hunters have steered their way since time 
 began, but he was beginning to take note of 
 other groups and planets that bloomed night- 
 ly on the dark. And it was by such reverent 
 and poetic watchers that the sky was mapped 
 and peopled. 
 
 Even in his dreaming dozes Johnny was 
 conscious of throbbing head and burning skin. 
 Twice he got up to replenish the fire; and in 
 a dawn turned suddenly bleak he was aroused 
 by the desolate cries of geese winging their 
 way northward. Then he fell into a pro- 
 found sleep, and while he slept the fire was 
 quenched by rising vapors. Fog filled the 
 green bowl to the brim, and he woke in a chill 
 that gripped his heart. 
 
 When the sun rose and pulled the earth 
 cloud up into the blue, and all the undergrowth 
 sparkled and dripped as with rain, he wrap- 
 ped his blanket about the seeds and dragged 
 himself to the sunniest slope. There he lay 
 in a frozen agony that was unbelievable. 
 
 59 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Soon waves of warmth ran over him, then 
 flashes of heat, then consuming fires. Hear- 
 ing the sounds of saws and hammers in the 
 shipyard, he cried aloud for water, but could 
 not make himself heard. He found the 
 spring and, having drunk, fell in the cold, 
 saturated moss and slept away the fever. It 
 was in the white void of fog that he woke 
 again, in a chill that was like the rigor of 
 death. 
 
 With the return of the fever his mind wan- 
 dered, so that he babbled of senseless things. 
 But even then subconsciousness was in the 
 grip of dark anxiety for what he must guard 
 with his life. He groped his way blindly and 
 flung his arms wide across the bag of seeds. 
 Hours later he was dimly conscious of light, 
 flying footsteps, a pulsing pillow under his 
 head, and warm drops on his face. Then 
 great arms lifted him into the canoe and he 
 drifted down into darkness and oblivion. 
 
 Betty had run on before, and Mary Lake 
 had her one four-poster bed out from the wall 
 and spread with tow-linen sheets, when Kitt 
 Putnam "toted" Johnny up from the river 
 and into her good house within Marietta's old 
 garrison inclosure of Campus Martius. When 
 
 60 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 she had stripped off his wet buckskins and 
 got him into one of her own long gowns, he 
 lay in a restless moaning that was a piteous 
 thing to see and hear. 
 
 Mary Lake's clear, gray eyes had seen a 
 variety of things in many ports of the world 
 in the forty-odd years since Captain Lake of 
 a Newfoundland fishing fleet shipped a bride 
 at Bristol, England. For one thing, as a 
 nurse in Washington's camp at Fishkill, she 
 had seen young men as ill of remittent fever 
 as Johnny get well. The first thing to do 
 was to have as few people underfoot as pos- 
 sible; so when Kitt had gone for Dr. True 
 she shut her door against anxious and willing 
 neighbors and pulled the latch -string in. 
 Then she spoke to the grief and terror stricken 
 child who clung to the foot-rail of Johnny's 
 bed. 
 
 "Sit by him, my lass, if it will comfort 'ee, 
 and fan him with a turkey wing." She still 
 had a bit of her girlhood dialect, and she 
 might have been born in her straight gray 
 gown and snowy cap. Without haste or noise 
 or litter, she was making papery medicine 
 wafers in a camp spider at the huge stone 
 fireplace when Dr. True came in. 
 
 61 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "Oh, doctor," faltered Betty, "I think he 
 wants water.' ' Tears hung on her eyelashes, 
 for even the children of that day knew that 
 water was poison to one sick of a fever. But 
 Dr. True was a medical heretic. And, in- 
 deed, he had been chosen by the Ohio Com- 
 pany to care for the health of this frontier 
 settlement, where orthodox remedies were 
 often not to be had, just because of his ability 
 and willingness to lean back hard on Mother 
 Nature and Mary Lake. 
 
 "Wants water, does he? That's reason- 
 able. Give me such a temperature and I'd 
 jump into the garrison well." 
 
 Johnny drank and drank and drank. The 
 doctor flung the covers back impatiently and 
 bade Kitt open the "port -holes," his hu- 
 morous name for the small, hinged windows 
 which were sunk in the walls of six-inch-thick, 
 whip-sawed poplar planks. Later houses were 
 much ruder, but the very first ones built in 
 Marietta were dove-tailed together like the 
 drawers of a wardrobe chest, and had proper 
 fittings of glass and hardware. 
 
 "There, that's better. The man was gasp- 
 ing like a fish. Hm — hm! this is quite a 
 conflagration. I happen to be out of that — 
 
 62 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 Guess we'll have to put this fire out with 
 water, Mary." 
 
 Betty was set to washing Johnny's earth- 
 stained face and hands while Mary Lake 
 bathed the burning body under the sheet. 
 The doctor asked no questions about his pa- 
 tient, for he was at the free call of every 
 stranger within the gates; and Mary Lake's 
 house was a hospital, in time of need, main- 
 tained by the Ohio Company. But the young 
 face on the pillow interested and puzzled 
 him, for it was of a type not often seen in the 
 ruthless business of pioneering. An Ichabod 
 Crane of a middle-aged bachelor, he sat with 
 one long, thin leg dangling over the other, 
 peering around his big nose with the one eye 
 that was of any use to him, and switching 
 back the hair that he still wore in a ribboned 
 cue, in the inconvenient fashion of an earlier 
 day. 
 
 By the dim light of deer-tallow candles the 
 two toiled over Johnny. The doctor kept a 
 finger on the small, hard, racing pulse, and 
 three times during the night-watch he gave 
 a dose of some remedy which he managed 
 never to be without. 
 
 "He's holding his own — the heart rallies. " 
 
 63 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 The medicine - man looked encouragement 
 across to his white-haired comrade of many 
 a victory over death since they two lifted the 
 siege of smallpox from this garrison, in the 
 first, hard year of occupation. They were 
 still toiling when a cock crew. 
 
 "The turn is coming. Be ready, Mary. 
 We shall have to be getting this man warm, 
 
 soon/' 
 
 The opening of Mary Lake's door was a 
 signal for help, and the giving of it a public 
 duty. Night-capped heads looked out of half 
 the twenty plank houses that faced one an- 
 other from the four sides of the square. 
 
 11 Boil corn, and keep the kettles hot against 
 Kitt's coming. Some one milk a cow, and 
 I'm giving my lassie leave to rob any nest of 
 a fresh egg." She roused the negro, who had 
 slept on a buffalo robe on the hearth. "Kitt, 
 do 'ee get into Mr. Woodbridge's store on 
 The Point; aye, lad, if ye have to break in, 
 and fetch a jug of whisky." 
 
 The fever went suddenly, leaving Johnny 
 collapsed, all but senseless, and drenched with 
 icy sweat. Only the black knight of emer- 
 gencies had the swift and easy strength to 
 rub the warming alcohol in hard and fast 
 
 64 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 enough, and then to truss the patient up into 
 that primitive hot pack, the "corn sweat. " 
 Milk and eggs and the broth of wild ducks 
 fed the flickering fires of life and helped break 
 the rigors of a chill that was without tremors ; 
 and perspiration checked the rising tempera- 
 ture. Then the fight began again, for this se- 
 verest form of malaria that struck down the 
 imprudent new-comer along the undrained 
 waterways of the West, ran its course in a 
 vicious circle that gave the victim no rest. 
 
 Kitt had brought all of Johnny's belongings 
 up from the cove; so when, in his delirium, 
 he cried out for his seeds, Betty dragged the 
 heavy bag to the bedside. "Here they are, 
 Johnny, all safe," and she guided his search- 
 ing hand. 
 
 "Why, what— Who's this?" The fruit 
 and flower loving doctor, who had helped 
 Major Doughty bring up peach -seeds with 
 army stores from the Potomac, and plant 
 them about Fort Harmer and in the settle- 
 ment, drew out a handful of the astonishing 
 contents of the bag. "A nurseryman!" 
 
 "He planted a big patch on Commodore 
 Whipple's farm above the shipyard, and he 
 said there would be orchards here for every 
 
 65 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 one, as if he meant — meant to give his little 
 apple-trees away." 
 
 The doctor put the precious seeds back, 
 and tied the string securely, so that not one 
 should fall on the stony ground of Mary 
 Lake's scoured maple floor. And when he 
 found the initials " J. C." rudely splashed in 
 butternut dye on the canvas, he dropped to 
 his seat. 
 
 "It's Jonathan Chapman, that good — 
 good Samaritan of Pittsburg, come to settle 
 in Marietta. Praise God, from whom all 
 blessings flow!" 
 
 The first things of which Johnny was clear- 
 ly conscious were the hum of Betty's flax- 
 wheel and the pleasant vision of Mary Lake 
 at her loom. Then a little boy stood in the 
 doorway, rubbing the dusty toes of one foot 
 against the other ankle, and staring at a man 
 in bed on a sunny day. 
 
 "Do 'ee get him a cooky, my lass." 
 
 The wheel whirred to a stop, and Betty, 
 going to a built-in corner cupboard, took a 
 crisp cake from a covered jar of brown crock- 
 ery. She gave it to the child with an affec- 
 tionate pinch of the red cheek, and he was 
 gone in a flash. Afterward Johnny heard 
 
 66 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 the wonder-story of the cooky-jar that Mary 
 Lake had bought in Bristol on her wedding- 
 day, and kept filled with unaccustomed sweets 
 for the bridegroom captain and the crew of 
 the Mary Bird all the way to the Grand 
 Banks of Newfoundland. By miracles of re- 
 sourcefulness, and a loving-kindness that had 
 never failed, it had been replenished for the 
 pleasure of a forty-year-long procession of 
 children of her own and other households. 
 
 Now the flax- wheel hummed again, and 
 by open doors spring flowed like a healing 
 stream through the little home of love and 
 peace. It was moments before the soft air 
 and the smell of peach-blossoms in General 
 Varnum's garden made Johnny realize with 
 a shock the mischance that had lost him 
 weeks of the season's sowing. 
 
 To gain strength for his journey he began 
 to dig and plant in the flower-beds of every 
 tiny front dooryard in Campus Martius, as 
 soon as he could crawl out into the sunshine. 
 By such friendly services in picket-fenced 
 gardens he made his way across the strag- 
 gling town. The houses had been hastily built 
 of logs and of planks from broken-up flat- 
 boats, it is true but the muddy, stump- 
 
 67 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 strewn roads were as broad and straight, and 
 as pleasantly shaded with forest hardwoods, 
 as any village of New England. The settle- 
 ment had its classic learning from Harvard 
 and Dartmouth, its Yankee energy and Revo- 
 lutionary courage. But the South faced it 
 across the Ohio; the red tribes were sinister 
 neighbors on a border that they crossed at 
 will; and from stormy France a wave had 
 swept its human wreckage to these far shores. 
 So Marietta was losing its down-east speech 
 and rigid Puritan code, and getting a view- 
 point and vernacular of its own. 
 
 In less than a week Johnny started, one 
 afternoon, to walk out to Dr. True's farm, 
 east of the town, to see the famous apple-tree. 
 The way lay along Sacra Via, the mounting 
 road that had been cut through dense woods 
 to the Big Mound — earthworks of a vanished 
 race, now dotted with the white man's neatly 
 lettered headboards. 
 
 At this time his orchard in Pittsburg would 
 be in bud. It was too early to expect — and 
 then he stopped, thinking that yearning mem- 
 ory was playing him a trick. But in another 
 moment he saw the small, well- cultivated 
 farm, forest-girt, that lay up a hillside and 
 
 68 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 looked out to the broad sweep of the river 
 and the Virginia mountains. The symmetri- 
 cal bouquet of pink and pearl was lifted above 
 the rustic cabin and a thrifty plantation of 
 young peach-trees which had dropped their 
 blossoms. The doctor called to him from a 
 tilted chair under the boughs. 
 
 "If anybody's sick, don't tell me, Johnny. 
 People can be ill any time, but my apple- 
 tree blooms but once a year." 
 
 Exhausted by the two-mile tramp, Johnny 
 dropped to the grass and lay looking up with 
 such a smile of gentle sweetness and happi- 
 ness as this medical man had never seen. 
 He was steeping his soul in the loveliness and 
 promise of the tree. What orchards he could 
 make grow in the mild climate and virgin soil 
 of the New West ! The doctor had bought it 
 of Johnny's predecessor in Pittsburg only 
 seven years before, and fetched it down in 
 the cabin of the mail-packet. New England 
 could not have grown it in twenty years, and 
 then would have toughened and dwarfed and 
 twisted it into some half-wild, defiant thing. 
 This had sprung up straight and round-headed 
 as a sugar maple, bright-barked as a rose cane. 
 A queen of beauty of a thousand generations 
 
 69 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 of gentle ancestry, it reigned over that wild 
 landscape, and it had its court of honey-bees. 
 
 "Are the apples good?" 
 
 The doctor could scarcely contain his pride. 
 "It is not in full bearing yet, but it's a Sum- 
 mer Sweeting." 
 
 "It has a more important work to do than 
 bearing you a crop of apples. You are going 
 to strip it, every season, of its choicest buds, 
 so every household for miles around can have 
 a tree of Summer Sweetings." Johnny had 
 lifted himself to his elbow, and his cavernous 
 eyes darkened and glowed in a face wasted 
 by fever. "I must teach you the art of 
 budding and grafting." 
 
 "We are all willing to work and to make 
 sacrifices here for the common good." The 
 tilted chair came down, and with his hands on 
 his knees the doctor leaned forward. Rumor 
 had overtaken this heroic and inspired youth 
 while he lay unconscious, and if it had not Dr. 
 True could have read his loving purpose in the 
 eyes that burned with zeal and compassion. 
 
 "Ill take charge of your nursery here — 
 keep an eye on Kitt's work. Young fruit- 
 trees are like babies. They pine away and 
 die if they are not mothered by some one who 
 
 70 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 loves them. Johnny, I thought I had heard 
 of all the ways there were to serve God." 
 His single eye watered, and to hide his emo- 
 tion he began to scold: " Don't be so foolish 
 as to get sick again. There are not three 
 doctors nor two Mary Lakes in Ohio. And 
 don't try to live on locusts and wild honey. 
 I am often obliged to go fifty miles by canoe, 
 or on horseback, when a man lets a tree fall 
 on him or is clawed by a wildcat, but I sleep 
 in a cabin and eat civilized food when I can. 
 And when I can't I camp along the upland 
 trails as the Indians do, and not in the bot- 
 tom of a fog- well. I'll make up some Peru- 
 vian-bark powders to nip malaria in the bud." 
 
 He was coming out of the house with the 
 packet when a man ran from the woods with 
 incoherent cries. He had brought his young 
 wife all the way from Big Bottom in a canoe, 
 and she was at Mary Lake's, in the terrors 
 and pains of first childbirth. 
 
 The doctor chuckled over his own good luck 
 in having Johnny thrown on his hospital i 
 "That turns you out. Mary's got another 
 lame dog to mend, and no room for you. 
 You'll have to live with me until you arc well 
 enough to travel." 
 
 6 71 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "I'm going to-morrow. Good-by!" He 
 got to his feet and held out his hand. When 
 the doctor was gone he had to fight against 
 a weakness and lassitude that dismayed him, 
 and against an aching desire to sleep there in 
 the scented night and in the balmy wind 
 which blew all the way from the Gulf. The 
 tree had a pearly radiance in the dusk when 
 he turned his back upon it and went swiftly 
 down to the crowded and noisy settlement. 
 
 The spring flood -tide of migration had 
 backed up at Marietta. For a week every sort 
 of water craft had been making fast to the 
 trees, for the honor of being at the launching of 
 the St. Clair, the first sailing-vessel on Western 
 waters to attempt the voyage to New Orleans. 
 Pine torches flared from boats and landings, 
 and from the five bastions of the pentago- 
 nal fortifications of Port Harmer, across the 
 Muskingum. Lower Muskingum Street, the 
 merchants' row that ran along the bank to 
 The Point, flared with these smoking lights 
 and swarmed with emigrants, traders, French 
 rowers, Negro polemen and Indians. 
 
 Through this press Johnny pushed his 
 way. He had given half his money to the 
 doctor, who needed all he could get "to buy 
 
 72 
 
GOOD SAMARITANS 
 
 medicines for poor folks." Now he spent the 
 other half. He paid the captain of the mail- 
 packet to fetch the little rocking-chair to 
 Mary Lake, on his next trip from Pittsburg; 
 and he bought a basket of maple sugar of a 
 Shawnee squaw to help keep the cooky- jar 
 
 filled. 
 
 Then for hours he stood before the door 
 of the Ohio Company's land-office, waylaying 
 men, inquiring their destination, marking the 
 most energetic and public-spirited, learning 
 that many were going to Cincinnati or to the 
 new settlements of Chillicothe and Dayton. 
 Was he going up the Scioto and Miami to put 
 in his nurseries? 
 
 "lam going to the Indian border, all the 
 way from Dayton to Cleveland," he reassured 
 
 them. 
 
 It was after midnight when the crowds dis- 
 persed and the torches were extinguished. 
 At once the illimitable leagues of woods and 
 hills and waters went black and closed in on 
 the sleeping town. In pitch-darkness Johnny 
 went up the steep path to Campus Martius 
 to leave the basket of sugar on Alary Lake's 
 door-step. Then he descended the bluff to 
 the bank of the Muskingum. He had a key 
 
 73 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 to the boat and warehouse where his canoe 
 was stored. The foul odors of skins, fish ref- 
 use, tar and hemp ropes sickened him; but 
 he meant to sleep there, with his bag of seeds 
 for a pillow, and to be away at dawn. 
 
IV 
 
 THE QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 ^JOHNNY got away so very early 
 the next morning that the blue 
 wood -smoke had not begim 
 to curl up from the chimn. 
 of the town. He was storing 
 things away compactly in the 
 canoe when Betty ran down the bluff and 
 sat upon a rocky shelf above him. She w 
 of that breed of New England women who, 
 from beach and wharf and decked house- 
 top, watch their men go down to the sea in 
 ships, and do what weeping they must in the 
 night-watches. Now she gave Johnny a 
 straw hat of her own deft and patient bra: 
 ing, and then sat talking to him as he work 
 
 "Won't you stay for the launching? Plea . 
 Johnny! Such crowds and fun! And I want 
 you to see our Queen of the Fain- Island, 
 Mrs. Blennerhasset. She lives in a big white 
 
 75 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 palace on Isle le Beau, across from Belpre, 
 and she's the most beautiful lady in the world. 
 She'll ride up through the woods to-day on 
 a black-satin horse, and wear her scarlet habit 
 of British army cloth. Her father was Gen- 
 eral Agnew of the English army, and she's so 
 proud of it that she wears his colors." 
 
 Johnny smiled and shook his head at the 
 eager child. He must be off at once and make 
 the most of the shortened season. But he 
 meant to stop at Isle le Beau, where he was 
 sure of quick sympathy and intelligent co- 
 operation. The Blennerhassets, with their 
 fabulous wealth, luxurious style of living, and 
 the magnificent estate that they were build- 
 ing up on an island in the Ohio, made a tale 
 of Arabian Nights' enchantment to the poor 
 and struggling people of the river settlements. 
 And they did not hold themselves aloof. The 
 mistress of the mansion lavished on these 
 wilds accomplishments that had graced the 
 courts of Europe, and the master backed ev- 
 ery forward movement. It was he who was 
 financing this ship-building venture. With 
 the English love for gardening and a knowl- 
 edge of botany they had made a velvet lawn, 
 imported rare flowers, trained peach and pear 
 
 76 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 trees flat against sunny walls, and were ex- 
 perimenting with the taming of fox-grapes 
 and the wild berries of the forest. 
 
 "Mrs. Blennerhasset just loves Aunt Mary 
 and she hates everything mean and cruel. 
 One day, in Muskingum Street, she struck a 
 man across the face with her riding-whip for 
 beating a little colored boy. Then she wiped 
 the whip with her lace handkerchief and rode 
 away as scornful as a queen." 
 
 "That was fine!" 
 
 "And, Johnny, she does the kindest, sweet- 
 est things that no one else can do. She's to 
 give a May party just to amuse people. I'm 
 to be queen. She's making me an Empire 
 gown of India muslin and a stockinet veil 
 that I'm to keep for my wedding-day." She 
 blushed prettily. "You know I'm fourteen. 
 At sixteen I shall have to marry some one ' ' — 
 her blue eyes clouded with trouble — "and 
 perhaps go away back in the woods to live, 
 and—" 
 
 She caught his look of brooding tenderness 
 for one of those pioneer mothers, of whom 
 life took such fearful toll in child-bearing, 
 hardship and danger. 
 
 "Oh, I won't mind the work, and I'd love 
 
 77 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 to have a dozen little bits of babies; but 
 there's sure to be another Indian war, and 
 Johnny, I couldn't bear to — to leave little 
 children as my mother left me." 
 
 "I'll look after those babies, Betty. The 
 Indians are friendly with me," he said, with 
 grave gentleness. She had taken in these 
 fears with the milk from a martyred mother's 
 breast, and they were not groundless, even 
 now. 
 
 She watched him wistfully as he pushed 
 off, waved to him from the bluff, and con- 
 tinued to wave until his canoe passed Fort 
 Harmer and disappeared under the arching 
 sycamores that all but hid the mouth of the 
 Muskingum. 
 
 The River Beautiful was a silver veil, fall- 
 ing from some unmarked horizon in the east; 
 but when the sun came up over the mountains 
 it was a narrow sea that was all one wrinkled 
 sparkle from shore to shore. The world was 
 merry and sweet, with dancing water, high- 
 flying clouds, and the blowing foliage of full- 
 leafed forests. Johnny had only to use his 
 paddle for a rudder, for the light craft floated 
 like a cork on the current. 
 
 From the Ohio shore the land rolled up in 
 
 78 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 soft, wooded billows. For miles the water 
 was edged with sand or pebbled beaches, and 
 in places the forest was pushed back by al- 
 luvial bottoms. Ten miles down he passed 
 the cluster of cabins at Stone's Landing, and 
 from the many boats headed up-stream and 
 the people w T ho were riding along the edge of 
 the woods he knew there must be clearings 
 up the creeks. It was still in the early hours 
 of the morning when he ran his boat up the 
 crescent sand beach of Belpre, the very pret- 
 tiest little settlement on the river. 
 
 An offshoot of Puritan Marietta, it had a 
 French name for its wide, terraced meadow; 
 and it was built like a French farm village — 
 every good house of hewn timbers facing the 
 river on a forty-rod front, and the narrow 
 farms marching in line back and up to a 
 forest of oaks and hickories. At the east end 
 of the mile-long street the stockade and block- 
 houses of Farmers' Castle guarded the town 
 like a baron's chateau, and at the west the 
 woods ran to the river's edge, where a grove 
 of cedars crowned a hundred-foot bluff. 
 Johnny marked that dry lookout for a 
 camp. 
 
 The landing for the settlement and the 
 
 79 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 crossing to the head of Isle le Beau was at 
 the foot of the bluff. From there he saw the 
 white, mansard-roofed mansion, its colon- 
 naded wings curving in a wide ellipse at the 
 top of a sloping lawn that was shaded by a 
 score of forest trees. Fronting the near 
 mountains and the parted flood, and flanked 
 by all but unbroken woods, its ordered beauty 
 was nothing less than that of a fairy palace. 
 
 The town looked to be deserted, but as 
 Johnny was beaching the canoe a muscular 
 man of fifty, with the fine military bearing 
 so common in the region, came out of a house 
 and introduced himself as Colonel Cushing 
 with the ease of one born to the best society 
 of New England. 
 
 "I was to leave this canoe with you for 
 Black Arrow, a Shawnee brave who will call 
 for it," Johnny explained. 
 
 Together they got the handsome specimen 
 of Indian craftsmanship into the boat-house. 
 With keen black eyes the Colonel studied 
 this worn and shabby young man who had 
 been intrusted with such valuable property 
 by an Indian. It was not until Johnny asked 
 if there was a bit of unoccupied and de- 
 fensible land near by, in which he might plant 
 
 80 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 a nursery for the community, that he was 
 recognized. 
 
 "Whoop -ee! If it isn't Johnny! Ex- 
 cuse me if I shake your arm off. You're the 
 best news we've heard since the treaty of 
 
 REAR VIEW OF BLENXERHASSET HOUSE 
 
 Greenville. Colonel Israel Putnam and Mr. 
 Blennerhasset meant to kidnap you from 
 Marietta to-day. We have plots cleared for 
 you, here and on the island, and fenced in 
 according to instructions from Dr. True." 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Johnny filled his pockets with seeds, shoul- 
 dered his tools, and was making off through 
 a kitchen garden when his host overtook him 
 with a pair of huge, cowhide boots. 
 
 "Snakes in a swamp you have to cross — 
 big, bad rattlers and copperheads that could 
 take bites out of a scythe. You'd better 
 wrap your legs with marsh-grass, too. I'll 
 blow the dinner-horn, but it's pot-luck to- 
 day, with your humble servant for cook. 
 The family piled into boats and on to every- 
 thing with four legs, and went to the launch- 
 ing. Yes, I have a full quiver, God bless 
 'em! and a boy and a girl orphaned by the 
 war that we are bringing up. There's always 
 room for one or two more in a big family." 
 
 It was a dozen years before that "room for 
 one or two more" had any personal bearing 
 for Johnny, but he remarked now how the 
 people here obeyed the Biblical injunction 
 concerning the hungry and naked, the sick 
 and the fatherless. The Colonel laughed. 
 
 "I'll get my pay out of you, Johnny, the 
 first time I see my youngsters set their little 
 teeth in juicy apples. The children born out 
 here never saw an apple, and that's some- 
 thing you can't describe." 
 
 82 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 "No." 
 
 They exchanged a long look that held boy- 
 hood memories of gnarly old New England 
 orchards and the winey bins of dark cellars. 
 
 Johnny went whistling up that sloping mile 
 of mellow furrows and through a belt of woods 
 that was honey-sweet with blossoming tulip- 
 trees. Blackbirds skurried up from the rank 
 growth of the swamp that was knee-deep in 
 ooze, and blue heron swung low over acres 
 of budding flags and lily-pads. He saw no 
 reptiles, but while he was putting in his seeds 
 on the drained and sheltered bank, a doe 
 came down to a spring to drink and an In- 
 dian paddled out to open water to shoot 
 ducks. In the five years since the close of 
 the war the river settlements had not been 
 able to push back the wilderness more than 
 two miles. 
 
 After dinner Johnny started to return to 
 Stone's Landing. He had scarcely passed 
 beneath the shadow of the forest when he 
 heard a piteous whinnying from the way- 
 side. A horse lay there in the undergrowlh, 
 his head in a little space of cropped clover. 
 
 By dint of much encouragement Johnny 
 got the animal to his feet and down the bank 
 
 83 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 into the water. But after the horse had 
 drunk he stood so drooping and trembling, 
 lifting one foot after the other, that Johnny, 
 fearing he might fall and drown, got him back 
 to the sand. Help was needed, but his shouts 
 were not heard in Belpre. He was standing 
 at the horse's head when the gay cavalcade 
 came riding down from Marietta under the 
 green foliage of the woods. 
 
 Mrs. Blennerhasset, in naming habit and 
 plumed hat of white beaver, was in front with 
 her husband, and a negro groom in livery, 
 and the youth of Belpre followed in her train. 
 With her beauty and her high-bred grace and 
 charm she might have appeared so among the 
 canvases of a castle gallery or in the pages 
 of old romance. She knew Johnny at once. 
 Dropping from the saddle, she ran across the 
 beach and gave her hand and the smile that 
 won all hearts. 
 
 "What is the trouble?" Her black-lashed 
 blue eyes looked straight into his, and, seeing 
 the pity and perplexity there, she turned and 
 stroked the horse's nose with her gauntleted 
 hand. 
 
 Johnny's jaw was set and he swallowed hard. 
 "He has cast his shoes and been overdriven. 
 
 84 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 The heels are cracked, and the tendons so 
 sore that — I think he has been beaten 
 across the legs, and when he dropped he was 
 left in the woods to starve." 
 
 MRS. BLENNERHASSET IN FLAMING HABIT AND PLUMED HAT OF 
 
 WHITE BEAVER 
 
 She flung her arms around the horse's neck. 
 "The man who did this should be found and 
 tied to the whipping-post in Marietta." 
 
 8< 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "Don't be too hard on him, Margaret. 
 These poor devils of emigrants are in desper- 
 ate plights sometimes." In his buff small- 
 clothes and silk stockings Mr. Blennerhasset 
 was down in the sand beside the groom. The 
 love of domestic animals and the intelligent 
 care of them were in the blood of this Irish 
 gentleman. He remarked the slender legs 
 and neck and fine coat of the saddle-horse. 
 "Yes," he replied to his wife's appeal, "we'll 
 get him over to the island. Send the poleman 
 back with the ferry. Ransom, go out and 
 help Johnny hold up that horse." 
 
 The suffering animal had hobbled back into 
 the water for the grateful coolness about his 
 feet. Johnny and the negro stood at his 
 head on either side and Mr. Blennerhasset 
 fed him with handsful of forage from the 
 woods. 
 
 They were there when the St. Clair went 
 by, scudding over the white-capped waves. 
 It had a cargo, not only of flour and pork for 
 New Orleans or Havana, but of hopes. The 
 river would never see those homespun sails 
 of flax and hemp again, for the vessel could 
 not be brought back, and months must pass 
 before this doughty Commodore Whipple, 
 
 86 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 who had sunk the Gaspe in '72, could return 
 over the mountains with the proceeds of the 
 St. Clair's sale in Philadelphia. So every 
 sort of water craft known on Western waters 
 was in its escort down to Louisville, where 
 hearts would stand still until it was safely 
 warped over the falls. Now it was ringed 
 about with the music of Revolutionary fifes 
 and drums, boat bugles, and French violins. 
 
 When the pageant had gone by, the silence 
 of the wilderness fell again — a stillness that 
 was woven through and through with water 
 ripple and leaf rustle, then the song of a 
 wood-thrush, wild and sweet. 
 
 It was an hour before the horse was got 
 over to the island and into a grassy paddock 
 in the pasture. There he was groomed, and 
 bedded on bright straw, with his feet cleaned 
 and poulticed and his legs bandaged. His 
 bay coat shone in the sun, and he had his 
 head up, giving promise of a beautiful arch 
 to the neck, when Mrs. Blennerhasset ap- 
 peared at the bars with her brood of sturdy 
 little children. They were all in the rough 
 ,garb of the country, ready for a tramp. 
 
 "You will have a fine, gentle horse, Johnny, 
 when he is cured of his lameness," she said. 
 7 87 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "No, he is yours. A horse like that could 
 not go where I am going." 
 
 "What he needs is a tough little Indian 
 pony that can scramble over these murderous 
 hills like a goat and live on underbrush,' ' Mr. 
 Blennerhasset observed. Neither of them 
 knew that Johnny had not a penny in the 
 world, and to him the fact was immaterial. 
 
 They all went to the open glade in the forest, 
 where a plot had been prepared for his plant- 
 ing. The place was girdled with enormous 
 trees, draped with woodbines and honey- 
 suckles, and the sunny close, open to the sky, 
 was musical with bird song. Isle le Beau lay 
 in the track of travel of birds and men. The 
 red tribes and the feathered made their sea- 
 sonal journeys over the river and up and 
 down the western base of the mountains. 
 The trail known as "The Bloody Way," 
 which ran unbroken from Lake Erie to the 
 Gulf, crossed the Ohio at Belpre. Indians 
 were always passing the head of the island, 
 but they seldom stopped, because there was 
 no large game for the hunter. So this green 
 canoe of land, moored in the flood, had be- 
 come an island of refuge for everything 
 small and defenseless. Mr. Blennerhasset 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 told these things to Johnny as he worked, 
 and added: 
 
 "When war comes, your nursery at Belpre 
 may be destroyed, but this is not likely to be 
 molested." 
 
 Johnny suddenly stood up. "You think 
 there will be war?" 
 
 Mr. Blennerhasset shrugged his shoulders 
 in the old shooting- jacket in which he felt 
 most comfortable. "Nothing is being done 
 to prevent it. When the game is gone and 
 we begin to crowd the Indians there will be 
 trouble. We should be trying to understand 
 their difficulties and to help them. A few 
 of their leaders are educated and far-seeing 
 men. As a boy Logan, the young chief of the 
 Shawnees at Piqua, was a hostage in the home 
 of Captain Logan of Kentucky, and was 
 brought up with the sons of the house. He is 
 living in a good cabin and cultivating a farm 
 — trying to get his own tribe and others to 
 adopt the white man's w T ay of living. When 
 war comes who could estimate the human 
 value of one civilized and prosperous tribe on 
 the border? Logan is working against tre- 
 mendous odds, and his time is limited. He 
 needs help." 
 
 89 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "He shall have it." 
 
 Johnny felt himself and his mission swept 
 into the stream of large and tragic events. 
 His host reminded him that white men went 
 into the Indian country at their own risk. 
 Arrangements could be made for him to meet 
 Logan on the river. He came down to Ma- 
 rietta and Belpre every year, at uncertain 
 times, to learn what he could of building, 
 farming and stock-raising. 
 
 Johnny shook his head. His own move- 
 ments would be uncertain, and he could wait 
 on no man. He would seek the Indians in 
 their own territory. Mrs. Blennerhasset sud- 
 denly flung out her hands in protest. 
 
 "You would perish, and we cannot spare 
 you." Then her proud head, with its coronet 
 of chestnut braids, went up. She had soldier 
 blood in her to meet undaunted the incredible 
 misfortune which waited in her future. Be- 
 cause of their idealism, generosity and trust 
 in their friends, the Blennerhassets were in- 
 volved to their ruin in the traitorous schem- 
 ing of Aaron Burr. "But it is worth dying 
 for. This concerns all the Northwest Terri- 
 tory. And remember, Johnny, here is your 
 island of refuge from every mischance of life." 
 
 90 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 After that it was so still in the sunny glade 
 that the birds, thinking themselves alone, 
 burst into song. Johnny remarked, pres- 
 ently : 
 
 " There will be trees here not worth trans- 
 planting. We can leave them to make a grove 
 of wild apples for the birds." 
 
 "Harman, I sometimes think there are such 
 groves in heaven." The emphasis was on the 
 "are," as if the subject had been discussed 
 before. 
 
 Johnny looked up in quick sympathy with 
 the thought, to see Mr. Blennerhasset shake 
 a playful finger at his wife. 
 
 "You've been reading that fantastic vis- 
 ionary, Swedenborg, again, Margaret." 
 
 She admitted it with a smile of pensive 
 sweetness. They stood there hand in hand, 
 breathing the incense of the wood and listen- 
 ing to Johnny talking to the children about 
 tucking the seeds in soft, warm beds as 
 though they were babies. Dominic, the lit- 
 tle son and heir of the house, was cuddling a 
 seed in his brown hand. 
 
 "May I keep this one, Johnny?" 
 
 "To plant?" 
 
 "No. I want to see the little tree in it." 
 
 91 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "You can't see it. It's too small." 
 
 Johnny had found the germs and watched 
 the wonderful processes of germination in the 
 larger seeds of field and garden, but the apple- 
 seed with its tough case and tiny seed-leaves 
 had baffled him. 
 
 "It can be seen under the solar micro- 
 scope, ' ' Mr. Blennerhasset assured him. Then, 
 humorously: "Don't be alarmed at the wis- 
 dom of my young hopefuls. I've forgotten 
 all I knew at their age, and am having to 
 begin with them where I left off." 
 
 It was in the little laboratory, set up in an 
 alcove of a library of belles-lettres by this grad- 
 uate from Dublin University, who had a bent 
 for the natural sciences, that Johnny split 
 the brown shell, parted the seed-leaves on a 
 piercing needle, and fixed the seed under the 
 magic lens. There, hidden away in its in- 
 most heart, was the spark of life breathed in 
 by the Creator— the pearly dot that held the 
 impulse, the longing, to burst its bonds and 
 lift itself up to sun and rain and bird song, 
 and realize itself in blossom, fruit and ripened 
 
 seed. 
 
 To Johnny it was the soul of the apple- 
 tree. He could not talk about it. He had 
 
 92 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 meant to stop at Isle le Beau for the night, 
 but a home-seeker's flatboat tied up at Bel- 
 pre would be off at sunrise, and on that he 
 hoped he could arrange to work his passage 
 down to the French grant at Galliopolis. 
 So he asked to be set across at once. Mrs. 
 Blennerhasset ran down to the landing with 
 the gift of a pocket compass and a book that 
 he could carry in his food -pouch with his 
 Bible. 
 
 "This will interest you, Johnny. It was 
 written by a great natural scientist who came 
 so to know and reverence animal and plant 
 life that he made a new kind of heaven to 
 take in all we love on earth." 
 
 It was six weeks before he returned from 
 the West for the portion of the seeds that he 
 had left with Colonel Cushing. Bit by bit, 
 by fire or candle light, or in brief intervals of 
 rest, he had read the burning message of the 
 little book — Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell. 
 
 It is difficult for us to realize that the 
 brotherhood of man with the lower orders, 
 which is a part of the moral law of to-day, 
 was the new, religious doctrine of a century 
 ago. To people of the gentle feeling and cul- 
 tivated mind of Mrs. Blennerhasset it had 
 
 93 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 its poetic and humane appeal without dis- 
 turbing orthodoxy. But to many it was 
 nothing less than a divine revelation, and a 
 few like Johnny accepted it as the only rule 
 of life. Loving all living things as he did, 
 it was easy for him to see, in every flower and 
 bird, creeping worm and aspiring tree, the 
 Indwelling Spirit, and to see them all, in 
 death, translated to the skies in supernal 
 beauty and dwelling with angels in the Gar- 
 den of God. There it was, the faith that, in 
 every age and clime, and for countless 
 creeds, has fired the souls of men to do im- 
 possible and imperishable deeds. 
 
 It was a waste of time and energy to com- 
 bat opposition, so he said nothing of his in- 
 tentions. Supper had been eaten at the long 
 and laden board, where there was "room 
 for one or two more,'' when Colonel Cush- 
 ing began to talk of the earliest years of 
 Belpre. 
 
 "One winter we had famine, pestilence and 
 savage war. Shut up in Farmers' Castle we 
 lived on fish without salt; then on maple- 
 sap porridge and boiled nettles. The dogs 
 that lived through it ate green corn when 
 it came in. It's as bad as that to-day, in 
 
 94 
 
QUEEN OF THE FAIRY ISLAND 
 
 the back clearings, when a man has a crop 
 failure and gets out of ammunition." 
 
 He gave Johnny a hunter's homespun suit, 
 dyed forest green for greater safety in sum- 
 mer, and a package of warrior's bread — 
 parched corn meal and maple sugar — for 
 emergencies, and cautioned him: 
 
 "Take plenty of powder and shot, Johnny. 
 There are more wildcats than cabins in these 
 woods, and very little to eat except what runs 
 or flies." 
 
 It was late when he went up on the bluff 
 to camp under the cedars, between the river's 
 murmuring flow and the silent stream of stars 
 in the sky, and to take counsel of his soul. In 
 the tender light of a half-moon of pearl the 
 shadows of the bare tree-trunks had the 
 density of black velvet on the dry and odor- 
 ous bed of needles. Once a keel-boat went 
 by, its long shape slipping through the silver 
 current like a swimming otter. From the 
 next bend below the note of its bugle came 
 back, mellowed by distance and darkness into 
 some ineffable call. Uplifted, Johnny lay in 
 a shining solitude and peace that was like a 
 benediction on his purpose. 
 
 The sun was on the water and the dew on 
 
 95 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the lawn when he rowed across to Isle le Beau. 
 The house was as silent as the palace of the 
 Sleeping Beauty. No one was in the French 
 drawing-room, nor in the wainscoted hall, 
 with its fireplace filled with feathery greens, 
 its gun-rack and antlered heads. In a mo- 
 ment the master and mistress would descend 
 to the breakfast-room, which was open to 
 the fresh June morning, and happy children 
 would come sliding down the only broad 
 banister in the Northwest Territory. Mrs. 
 Blennerhasset's garden hat and gloves, rose- 
 basket and shears, were on the hall table. 
 Johnny left his gun beside them, and a note 
 in the basket: 
 
 You will understand that I can no longer kill my 
 little brothers of the earth and air. Thank you for 
 this news straight from Heaven. 
 
 In the cedar grove he changed to the green 
 suit, and on the edge of the bluff he shouldered 
 his tools and lightened pack. Looking across 
 to the island, he saw Mrs. Blennerhasset run- 
 ning down the lawn to the landing, as if she 
 must overtake him. Waving his hat to the 
 blowing white draperies at the head of Isle 
 le Beau, Johnny was gone, defenseless, into 
 the wilds. 
 
V 
 
 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 a 
 
 97 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 wagon-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 
 
 98 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 — 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- 
 
 99 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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- 
 
 IOO 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 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 
 
 IOI 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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!" 
 
 102 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 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's 
 
 8 103 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 elevated 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 years 
 
 104 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 ago 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 
 
 105 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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 
 
 106 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 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 
 
 1 1 
 
 go crazy. 
 
 She sat there talking in a dreary monotone. 
 
 107 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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 neither 
 
 1 08 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 ripe 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-drained 
 
 109 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 and 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 
 
 no 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 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 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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, 
 
 112 
 
JOHNNY SAGGED FORWARD ON THE PONY UPON WHICH 
 THE INDIAN SET HIM 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 in 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- 
 
 114 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 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 
 
 115 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 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 
 
 116 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY 
 
 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 and 
 
 117 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 sparkling 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 traveled 
 
 118 
 
ON "THE BLOODY WAY" 
 
 faster 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. 
 
 9 
 
VI 
 
 A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 |HEN Betty Stacey married at 
 seventeen, and went away back 
 in the woods to live on a little 
 creek that ran singing to the 
 Scioto, Johnny planted his first 
 orchard near the Indian border 
 about the new home. 
 
 The year before he had arrived at Marietta 
 early in March, when the red maples were 
 dropping their crimson blossoms on the last 
 patches of snow. Along the Muskingum he 
 had found some of his nurseries overrun by 
 deer or choked by weeds. In none of them, 
 indeed, except at Zanesville and Big Bottom, 
 were there more than a few trees worth 
 transplanting. But those few, set out by 
 cabin doors, and Johnny's undaunted spirit, 
 stimulated hope and stiffened determina- 
 tion in the sparsely settled districts. He 
 
 I20 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 cleared the plantations again, strengthened 
 the broken barriers, replanted the plots, and 
 gave them to the care of the best men to be 
 found. And he told people not to be dis- 
 couraged. This was just a beginning, and 
 he was young and life long. Better luck 
 next time. 
 
 But here in Marietta, with a town full of 
 vigilant people on guard, and Dr. True in 
 authority over Kitt Putnam, everything had 
 prospered. The happy day of toil that he 
 spent in the hollow above the shipyard be- 
 gan with a rush of wings. From long jour- 
 neys little bundles of feathers and bursts of 
 song fell from the sky. On the morrow he 
 meant to have here a gathering of the heads 
 of households for the first distribution of 
 trees, and for instruction in the setting out 
 and care of them. 
 
 First he thinned the rows, with a swift cer- 
 tainty of eye and hand discarding all plants 
 of feeble growth. A few tough little twisted 
 witches, that could be trusted to put out 
 defensive thorns and hold their own in the 
 wilds he planted among the hawthorns, dog- 
 wood and Judas -trees in the edges of the 
 forest, for their beauty of blossom. Then 
 
 121 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 he carefully lifted the trees that had shot up 
 almost to his own height, with stout, straight 
 trunks, bright bark, healthy buds and low, 
 symmetrical branching. These he pruned 
 back, trimmed the roots neatly, and banked 
 in a trench all ready for transplanting. Stock 
 of good trunk and root growth, but with un- 
 promising tops, he cut off to a point near the 
 ground and replanted in one row for grafting 
 with buds from Dr. True's Summer Sweet- 
 ing. He meant to rob that noble tree of 
 more buds, wrap them in wet moss and carry 
 them down to Belpre and Isle le Beau, even 
 to Galliopolis, if possible, where bewildered 
 exiles mourned the lost orchards and gar- 
 dens of their dear France. 
 
 It was late in the afternoon before the 
 plantation was denuded. He had begun to 
 prepare the ground for new seeds when a 
 little boy appeared from the shipyard, where 
 four vessels lay on the ways and there was 
 much thrilling adventure to be had scrambling 
 over the rigging. To any child it was fas- 
 cinating play to help Johnny in his work, 
 and he was never too busy to listen to shy 
 confidences or to answer endless questions. 
 This boy asked if it was true, as Dominic 
 
 122 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 Blennerhasset said, that the littlest thread- 
 roots of trees were hollow and had mouths 
 for drinking water. 
 
 Johnny did not know, but he thought it 
 very likely. Sugar maples must drink like 
 river pike. Children with sharp ears could 
 hear the sap run up. He would look through 
 the microscope at Isle le Beau, and find out 
 about that. And here his thought was off 
 on the wings of wonder and joy, that the 
 world was so ordered in use and beauty that 
 rain from the sky was miraculously turned 
 to winey juice in the glowing chalices of 
 apples. 
 
 The child had been in the cove an hour 
 before he began to tell the news of the town: 
 "Dr. True stays at Aunt Mary Lake's nearly 
 all the time, and Betty comes to our house 
 when she wants to cry." 
 
 Johnny dropped his hoe and stared. "Why 
 does the doctor— Why does Betty want to 
 
 cry?" 
 
 "I guess it's because Aunt Mary's been aw- 
 ful sick a long time. She don't get out of bed 
 
 at all." 
 
 Mary Lake dying! No, nothing died! 
 For Johnny not a flower drooped on its stalk, 
 
 123 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 nor a sparrow fell, whose perfume and song 
 had not their lovelier counterparts on the 
 other shore. But Mary Lake fading from 
 the eyes that dwelt on her, the hearts that 
 loved her, on earth ! And this was not a time 
 of death, but of resurrection. Countless pale 
 but pulsing things were coming up out of 
 winter tombs. The bluebird trilled to his 
 mate; and Johnny had been conscious of 
 strange stirrings in himself, an eagerness of 
 foot and eye, a bubbling up of all the springs 
 of youth. 
 
 In the garrison inclosure of Campus Mar- 
 tius it was so very still — only a group of silent 
 women drawing water for the evening meal 
 at the well, and children hushed at play — 
 that he could hear the purple martins taking 
 their last wheeling flights in the dusk. Dr. 
 True sat outside the door, his hickory chair 
 tilted against the wall, every line of his lank 
 figure confessing sadness and defeat. 
 
 "I'd have had Mary Lake well in no time, 
 Johnny, if she had been up to help me," he 
 said, his humor whimsical even in his grief. 
 
 A neighbor woman was bending over the 
 bed. She had had to fetch her young baby, 
 and Betty was sitting with it in Johnny's low 
 
 124 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 rocking-chair, her bright hair burnished by 
 the firelight. At sixteen she had grown tall 
 and fair, and was now so tenderly maternal 
 as she looked down upon the little bit of a 
 darling thing in her arms. Johnny had come 
 in so softly that she did not hear him, and 
 his heart seemed to stop beating as memories 
 of old dreams crowded back upon him. It 
 was as if he had just come in from the orchard 
 at Pittsburg, and the breeze from the opening 
 door had set the little chair, with its haunting 
 vision of all that was meant by love and home, 
 in motion. The strangest thing about it was 
 that he knew — When Betty lifted her eyes 
 to his he saw the sweet, sweet face for which 
 he had looked under the hoods of a thousand 
 caravans. 
 
 He gripped the door-post and had himself 
 in hand by the time she had laid the baby 
 down and run to him. She stretched out her 
 hands in glad welcome, but her lips were 
 tremulous with trouble and her blue eyes were 
 suddenly flooded. 
 
 "It's not for Aunt Mary, Johnny," she 
 said. "She has no pain, now, and is so 
 happy. It's just that, when she's gone, there 
 will be no one in the world belonging to me." 
 
 125 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Unconscious of the nature or the power 
 of that appeal to him, she went away pres- 
 ently with the neighbor, and remained to 
 cry her heart out where it would not dis- 
 tress Aunt Mary, while Johnny watched by 
 the bed. 
 
 That wood-nest of a low-ceiled, quiet room 
 seemed thronged with grateful spirits. How 
 many lives had been ushered in there ! How 
 often had death been turned from that door! 
 Johnny waited until Mary Lake stirred at the 
 note of a distant bugle, a sound that he never 
 could hear without a thrill. Her dim eyes 
 rested upon him with the vision of those who 
 look back from the parting veil. Did she 
 foresee the long journey of life that lay before 
 him, and have the tender wish that it might 
 not be uncompanioned? 
 
 "Dear lad — you would be — the core of the 
 heart — of the woman — who loved you." 
 
 He thought only of Betty. "Aunt Mary," 
 he asked, gently, not to call her too far back, 
 "what is to become of Betty?" 
 
 There was the faintest, untroubled smile. 
 "Do 'ee think — the pretty maid — will not 
 marry?" 
 
 His voice choked on the answer: "Yes, she 
 
 126 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 will marry — early. But does — does she love 
 any one now?" 
 
 It was moments before Mary Lake replied. 
 She gazed at Johnny wistfully, and then 
 around the dear, familiar room, as if she 
 would see another family of her own heart's 
 choosing sheltered there. "A young maid — 
 does not love any one — enough — until she is 
 asked. Do 'ee — " 
 
 At that moment Betty returned. A tiny 
 girl in a linsey slip followed her and stood 
 expectantly within the doorway. The shy 
 little figure could have been no more than a 
 shadow to those failing eyes, and the lisping 
 "pleathe" could not have reached her ears, 
 but Mary Lake knew. She was dying, but 
 so busy doing things for the least of these little 
 ones that she just forgot about it. 
 
 "Do 'ee — give her — a cooky — my dear." 
 
 The child was gone, sucking the sweet as 
 blissfully, as unthinking of the source of that 
 bounty, as a butterfly on a flower. Then on 
 the closed room there fell such a silence that 
 the swallows could be heard settling in their 
 nests about the eaves. Johnny still knelt, 
 and Betty was in a desolate heap at his feet, 
 the cooky- jar tilted on her lap and spilling 
 
 127 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 its treasure on the floor. The overflow was 
 a part of the loving - kindness that now 
 streamed down from the sky. 
 
 No one had gone out of the house, but in a 
 moment it was as if a messenger had been 
 abroad. The doctor was in the room, neigh- 
 bors, and weeping young girls who had the 
 dear privilege of putting their arms around 
 and comforting Betty. But in an hour the 
 face of death was covered and the routine of 
 life taken up again. Some one mended the 
 fire and hung the kettle. The doctor was 
 called away, and one by one the women de- 
 parted to attend to their own household 
 duties. With that hourly responsibility for 
 the physical needs of others which left pioneer 
 women little time for grief, Betty laid the table 
 and turned on Johnny a look of affectionate 
 concern. 
 
 "You've had a long day's work. Won't 
 you try to eat a little supper? Please, 
 Johnny." 
 
 He patted her hand gently, and, sitting down 
 with her in the intimacy of sorrow ate a bowl 
 of mush and milk. But it was almost more 
 than he could bear. When others came in to 
 watch, and Betty slept, still sobbing in her 
 
 128 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 sleep, Johnny went out into a night that glit- 
 tered with frosty stars. Between the tall 
 shafts of leafless trees he went up Sacra Via 
 to the Big Mound, and lay among the scat- 
 tered headboards of God's Acre, alone with 
 his temptation. 
 
 From a heart that had long lain dormant 
 love had quickened in the fires of spring to 
 vivid and insistent life. Without seeking, 
 and to his profound dismay, he had found 
 her, and alone, bereft, unprotected. He must 
 stay with her, win her, defend her in these 
 perilous wilds that lay under the gathering 
 clouds of war, wear her on his breast. He 
 knew that he could protect her better than 
 most men in that region. How would it be 
 with him if he left her and she perished? 
 
 Even his work had shaped itself as if to 
 this end of personal happiness. Only near 
 the few large settlements did it seem prob- 
 able that his nurseries could flourish, or any 
 great number of people be served. To a 
 dozen such places along the river westward 
 to Vincennes he could make semi-annual 
 journeys by the mail - packet and freight- 
 pirogues. Enough money could be got for 
 his trees to employ help to care for them and 
 
 129 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 to pay men to wash out seeds at the cider- 
 mills. Here in Marietta he could have the 
 farm that had been offered him by the Ohio 
 Company, build up such another home as he 
 had had in Pittsburg, and provide for a 
 family within the safe shelter of the guns of 
 Fort Harmer. And by and by, when the 
 wilder beasts were gone, and the Indians had 
 become civilized or, — when the Indians, too, 
 were gone, so that Betty would not be afraid, 
 they could have a green little home in a bower- 
 ing orchard in the forest. 
 
 He need only give up that part of his 
 mission which took him into the backwoods — 
 say that the task could not be done, and men 
 would believe him. But he knew that he had 
 been taking something more than the prom- 
 ise of orchards into the wilds — himself, 
 brotherly love, unselfish service, the hope of 
 better days. And in a dozen years, a tree 
 like Dr. True's here and there would begin 
 to leaven the bare clearings. He would know 
 that the task was not impossible, and that 
 knowledge would poison all his relations with 
 men, with wife and child and God. And the 
 nurseries he had planted and abandoned 
 would blush for him in thorny thickets every 
 
 130 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 spring, a reminder of one man's broken prom- 
 ise undermining the faith of men. 
 
 He had made his covenant. The work to 
 which he had consecrated himself would fill 
 the measure of his years to the brim, and need 
 all the passion that burned within him. 
 
 After the funeral and the distribution of 
 trees Johnny went down to Belpre and Isle 
 le Beau in the Blennerhassets' big canoe with 
 six negro rowers, leaving Betty to make a 
 home temporarily for Dr. True, heart-free and 
 for another man's wooing. And this was the 
 spring of the year and the mating season in 
 his soul, when the courtship -caroling of blue- 
 bird, wood-thrush, and oriole pierced the 
 heart of youth with their sweetness. 
 
 That summer he went up through Cin- 
 cinnati and Dayton to Piqua. There for a 
 month he lay ill from a snake - bite, and 
 was cared for in the good log house of Chief 
 Logan. It was a heartening thing to find, 
 on the bank of the Miami, even this one small 
 band bravely struggling to learn the difficult 
 habits and arts of a rude civilization. A num- 
 ber of cabins, barns and corn-cribs had been 
 built; fields were being tilled with wooden 
 
 13 1 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 mold-board plows, and cattle tended in fenced 
 pastures. Squaws heckled flax and worked 
 at wheel and loom. In the autumn the trees 
 of a flourishing nursery could be set out. 
 Before he left the village Johnny planted a 
 little apple-tree for the braves, and gave them 
 brief instructions as to the proper care of an 
 orchard to bring it to its greatest use and 
 beauty. 
 
 When able to travel he was given a pony 
 for the season, provided with food, and set 
 upon the cross-country trail that ran from 
 the Miami to the Scioto. It was on the 
 moraine where the hills had been rounded 
 and the valleys filled with fine drift by the 
 ancient ice-cap. There were few boulders, 
 but every crystal-clear stream rippled over a 
 bed of pebbles, and enormous hardwood trees 
 were rooted deep in clean, gravelly loam. 
 
 One evening late in August, as he topped 
 a steep rise after fording a creek, he looked 
 down into such a sylvan retreat as he had 
 imagined for that green little home in the 
 forest with Betty. Noble trees, set far apart 
 and with little undergrowth, stepped down 
 the turfed terraces of a natural amphitheater 
 to an open glade where deer had long been 
 
 132 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 accustomed to graze. Across the front of this 
 the creek had turned and widened in peace- 
 ful flow toward the Scioto. Willows fringed 
 the banks, and from the grassy slopes wood- 
 lilies lifted their chalices of flame and painted 
 moccasin-flowers danced on every breeze. 
 
 He stopped for no more than a moment to 
 look down from the trail, and was riding on 
 when he saw, at one side of the glade, a 
 smoldering log in front of a new-comer's half- 
 faced camp. Then he heard a hallooing from 
 the woods, and was dragged from the pony 
 by young David Varnum of Marietta. 
 
 "Whoopee, Johnny! If this isn't luck! 
 I'm so almighty glad to see you I could sa- 
 lute you like those fool parley vous at Gal- 
 liopolis." 
 
 Johnny smiled. "If you did I would turn 
 the other cheek, David. My name is Jona- 
 than." There was healing for sick fancy in 
 this warm comradeship with one of his own 
 age and of the New England breed. 
 
 "Well, I'll admit it. I'm as pleased as 
 pie. Been a hermit of the woods here for a 
 month, and losing my wits and pride for 
 lonesomeness." 
 
 To find him here alone, grubbing out brush, 
 
 133 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 felling trees, and girdling the buckeye-trees 
 that were used for cabin-building, could mean 
 but one thing. It was thus that an edu- 
 cated and God-fearing Puritan youth carved 
 out a place to stand on in the backwoods 
 of the Northwest Territory, brought his Bi- 
 ble and his wife, defended his own, served 
 his country in camp and court, and by 
 and by built school-houses, churches, roads 
 and bridges. Such men peopled and con- 
 quered every American frontier, were loved 
 by their families, honored by their neighbors, 
 and held fast their broad acres for their chil- 
 dren's rich inheritance. But from Plymouth 
 Rock to the Golden Gate very few of them 
 ever took the hand of a red man in friendship, 
 spared a harmless animal, or a tree for its 
 age and beauty, or stopped to listen to the 
 song of a meadow-lark. 
 
 While stirring a pot of mush over the fire 
 Johnny speculated on David's choice, hoping 
 it might be some maid of Spartan courage 
 who was coming to such a sparsely settled 
 region so far up near the border. Then 
 the soft whistling died on his lips as he re- 
 membered David's tender concern for Betty 
 at Mary Lake's funeral. He did not wait. 
 
 134 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 When David came up from the creek with a 
 fish Johnny laid on the searing-iron that was 
 to cure the wound in his heart. 
 
 "Is it Betty Stacey, David?" 
 
 "It's Betty. The Lord has been mighty 
 good to me." 
 
 Johnny held out his hand in yearning friend- 
 ship to Betty's lover. "When?" 
 
 "Next spring. It will take me all winter 
 here to get ready for her." 
 
 "She — she must love you a great deal. 
 You know about her mother? Betty is afraid 
 of the Indians." 
 
 David's smile was grim. "I'll take par- 
 ticularly good care that the Indians are afraid 
 of me." 
 
 "Oh, make friends with them. It would 
 be safer and happier for Betty." 
 
 David shrugged his broad shoulders. "You 
 can't make friends with wildcats and rat- 
 tlesnakes." Something in Johnny's troubled 
 look made him add: "Why, bless your good 
 heart, Johnny, I'll take care of Betty!" 
 
 His self-confidence was pathetic. His un- 
 compromising and contemptuous attitude tow- 
 ard the ten thousand warriors whom he would 
 have as neighbors could not but increase 
 
 ic 135 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the peril of everything that belonged to him. 
 Johnny remembered the pallid face and 
 wide eyes that Betty had turned on him in 
 the cove, and her apprehension on the bluff 
 below Campus Martius. Then he had re- 
 assured her: "The Indians are friendly with 
 me. I'll look after those babies, Betty." 
 David must listen to him, must let him help 
 take care of Betty. 
 
 After an unhappy night which was dis- 
 turbed by wild alarms, he woke to an August 
 morning that was one vast bubble of blue and 
 gold. At the bottom of that dazzling im- 
 mensity lay this dewy glade, bordered by 
 brown water and guarded by such kind 
 brothers of great trees as must shade the 
 banks of the River of Life. 
 
 And here was this conqueror of the wilder- 
 ness, in the flush of his youthful strength and 
 successful love, talking eagerly of his plans. 
 He meant to put the cabin here, in this natural 
 opening, and then clear the land about it up 
 to the curving trail. 
 
 As if he had not heard, Johnny continued 
 to gaze out across the creek and over miles 
 of softly rolling wooded hills and flashes of 
 bright water. 
 
 136 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 "Your home will be as beautiful as Isle le 
 Beau." 
 
 David smiled. "It takes money to live 
 like that. The house is a mansion, as fine 
 as any on the Potomac." 
 
 "But they have left the out-of-doors much 
 as God made it. Every pioneer, just by leav- 
 ing some things alone, could have his own 
 little island of beauty, comfort and safety 
 for his family and domestic animals." 
 
 Johnny's look had rested on David wist- 
 fully, but now his gray eyes darkened and 
 blazed with indignation. 
 
 "The Lord has been good to you in giving 
 you Betty Stacey, but how will you be good 
 to her? I wonder that you dare bring her 
 here at all. And you would turn her beauti- 
 ful home into a scar on creation, and shut her 
 in, a life prisoner in a hideous, snake-fenced 
 corn-patch? She'll come to you singing like 
 a thrush, and in a year she'll scream if a 
 shadow falls across the door or a tree cracks 
 in the frost." 
 
 "Like those — I've seen such women in 
 the back clearings — thought they were bad- 
 tempered or half crazy." 
 
 Johnny shook his head. "Just scared to 
 
 137 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 death, starved for beauty and company, 
 broken-hearted. Men have errands — trust 
 them for dropping work for a day and seeking 
 the society of other men. You have been 
 here alone for only a month, and 'losing your 
 wits and pride for lonesomeness.' But wom- 
 en must stay at home. Their task is never 
 done; little clinging fingers never loose their 
 hold. They are left, wherever and whenever 
 it pleases men to leave them — world without 
 end." 
 
 "I might have done that to Betty !" David 
 listened in eagerness and humility to Johnny's 
 plan to fence in this depression, except along 
 the water-front, with puncheon pickets close- 
 set and ten feet high, leaving the crest of the 
 ridge and the trees on the sky-line. When 
 that fence was screened with forest vines and 
 shrubs there would be a little green and flower- 
 walled world of several acres of lawn and gar- 
 den, bowering orchard and pleasant pasture; 
 and to the sunny south one lovely and limit- 
 less view. 
 
 David threw up his hands in mock despair. 
 "This is the best grain land of the whole 
 section." 
 
 Then it's none too good for a home. If 
 
 138 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 Adam had been an American pioneer he'd 
 have asked for an ax and a gun to improve 
 on Eden. And make it your first business 
 to get some neighbors, so Betty can 'see 
 smoke by somebody's house."' And Johnny 
 told that story. 
 
 Before noon he was gone to the tender nur- 
 series that called to him all along the border, 
 the upper reaches of the Scioto, and the lake 
 shore from the Wyandot village at Sandusky 
 to the struggling settlement at Cleveland. 
 His was but the pause of a bird of passage 
 in that wildwood glade, but because of its 
 timeliness Betty found her island of refuge 
 on the border. 
 
 After a rapid journey down the Muskingum 
 and Ohio in the next spring, to distribute 
 trees and put in new seed, Johnny went up 
 to David's clearing. The cabin of logs was up, 
 and the fence — a labor of Hercules, for every 
 tall picket had been split by hand out of black 
 walnut, and secured by hickory pegs driven in 
 auger-holes. The chimney was a great bay 
 of field stones on the gable end, and a low, 
 rock spring-house dairy was snuggled under 
 a sycamore above a pool on the creek bank. 
 A clearing had been made and furrows turned 
 
 139 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 for corn, wheat and flax down the water- 
 way, and the bridegroom had gone away to 
 Marietta. 
 
 Johnny had brought up young apple-trees 
 in a canoe from his nursery at Chillicothe, and 
 Betty was to fetch roots and shrubs, bulbs 
 and seeds from the wonderful gardens at Isle 
 le Beau. From rough hillsides and rich wood- 
 land nooks he transplanted hawthorn, dog- 
 wood, redbud, laurel, elderberry, hazel, wild- 
 roses and brier - berries around the fence. 
 Before the puncheon door he set up a tiny 
 stoop of sassafras saplings, and planted wild 
 honeysuckle to clamber over it. Up the 
 gables of the log barn he trained fox-grapes 
 and trumpet-vines. Then down the sloping 
 lawn he made a gravel path to the spring- 
 house, and opened bordering beds for flower- 
 ing annuals. 
 
 Here and there he put in his apple-trees, 
 without any regularity but with a view to 
 effect that would have appeared to a landscape 
 gardener. Not for a generation or more would 
 there be a market for apples in this region, 
 but a settler of the unusual resources and 
 qualities of leadership of David Varnum 
 must make generous provision for less fortu- 
 
 140 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 nate neighbors, for Indians whose friendship 
 was to be won by hospitality, and for the way- 
 farers whose numbers would increase with the 
 seasons. And in a region where land was 
 cheap and life dear, it mattered not at all 
 whether a tree paid for the room it occupied. 
 Many of Johnny's trees were planted and 
 cherished for their beauty. 
 
 A butternut-tree shaded the well. Across 
 from it he put in a one-sided apple-tree that 
 would unfurl a banner of bloom over the pent- 
 house of white oak. Two trees he set near 
 together to make a tent of boughs above a 
 rustic seat. Separating the kitchen garden 
 from the lawn was one straight row to shelter 
 a colony of beehives. A tree with bent twigs 
 that promised a low, roomy crotch he placed 
 in full view of the front door, where the littlest 
 baby could climb into it under the mother's 
 watchful eye. 
 
 In that porous forest soil apple-trees needed 
 no fertilizer and but little cultivation. To 
 plant a tree Johnny dug a big hole and spread 
 the trimmed roots in it. Then he sifted in 
 the moist earth, and pressed it down into a 
 firm bed without using any water. Frequent 
 showers could be depended upon. He tucked 
 
 141 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the grass and clover sod snugly about the 
 trunk to protect the roots, removed every 
 sucker, pruned the branches back to lower 
 and spread the head, and presently this tame 
 foster-child of the wilderness was putting out 
 new branches and fuzzy bunches of foliage. 
 
 Johnny was aware that news of what he 
 was doing would soon be abroad. The place 
 lay on the trail to Piqua, and near a great 
 junction of those "threads of the soil" that 
 met at the terminal of the Scioto - Beaver 
 trail from the east. And he kept a plume 
 of smoke curling up by day and flames glow- 
 ing by night so that many travelers, white 
 and red, found him out. He meant Betty's 
 home to be the little leaven that should leaven 
 the solitude, hostility and privation of the 
 wilds, a place of physical, social and spiritual 
 refreshment. 
 
 He would not have had the house better 
 than it was. The poorest pioneer could have 
 such a shelter. The door was hung on leather 
 hinges; the hearth would be swept with a 
 corn-husk broom. The puncheon floor was 
 so rough that the task of keeping it scoured 
 might well prove discouraging, so Johnny 
 smoothed that as best he might with hatchet 
 
 142 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 and draw-knife. Then he laid the fire— 
 back-log, front-log, dry sticks, pine knots, 
 splinters — ready for lighting with flint and 
 steel and bit of tow-string. The empty shell 
 of a place was as rustic as one of the bark 
 nests he had cunningly set like a knot-hole 
 in the butternut-tree for bluebirds to move 
 into. But Betty was one of those gifted 
 women who could make a cozy home in a 
 cave. 
 
 All the birds were nesting, and night after 
 sleepless April night Johnny followed that 
 migrating human pair in tortured fancy from 
 the gay and tender wedding in Marietta. 
 They would come to Chillicothe by freight- 
 pirogue. There David had left his horses 
 and bought a cow, and there he would hire 
 a covered wagon for the journey up the river 
 trail. 
 
 That wedding journey through this un- 
 spoiled wilderness! By night they would 
 camp in the caravan, for Betty would be 
 afraid of prowling beasts. She would snuggle 
 closer to her brave man if but a little owl 
 hooted. Always alone, watched over by 
 moon and stars, canopied by new-leafing trees, 
 waking to all the sweet, stirring life of the 
 
 143 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 woods and to the wonder of having each 
 other, moving on in shade and shine and 
 shower, they would come by slow, blissful 
 stages to the new life in the new home. 
 
 One evening he heard the tramp of horses, 
 the jolting of the clumsy caravan, and the 
 lowing of the weary, homesick cow on the 
 trail. He ran up the grassy terraces and set 
 the wagon-gate ajar; then ran down to light 
 the fire on the hearth. But when David 
 pulled the horses up before the door Johnny 
 was gone. 
 
 Night was falling, and David and Betty 
 hurried to get Mary Lake's good furniture 
 in place. Soon the four-poster bed was up 
 and spread with the hand- woven, blue-and- 
 white coverlid. Flax- wheel and loom were 
 set against the wall, and on the cherry dresser 
 was displayed the scant array of pewter and 
 blue Canton ware, with the cooky- jar of brown 
 crockery in the place of honor. An oak 
 settle filled one chimney-corner, and the little 
 rocking-chair stood in the other. Black bear 
 skins warmed the floor. The kettle was bub- 
 bling merrily when Betty came to the door 
 to call Johnny to supper. 
 
 She had disappeared in a linsey-curtained 
 
 144 
 
A VISION OF ROMANCE 
 
 corner for a few moments, and there had been 
 gay, teasing laughter in the single big room 
 that was all in a splendid glow of firelight. 
 Then in the May-queen gown and veil that 
 Mrs. Blennerhasset had given her she stood 
 in the doorway, peering into the odorous dusk. 
 
 "He can't be far away. I thought he'd 
 like to see me in my wedding finery. It's so 
 sweet here, David; so dear and safe and 
 happy. The night is full of flowers and stars 
 and dew and sleepy little birds. Where are 
 you, Johnny? Won't you come in? Please, 
 Johnny!" 
 
 She went into the cabin at last, disappointed 
 and thoughtful, and put on a girlish frock of 
 blue linsey. Supper was eaten and cleared 
 away. By and by David shut the door. 
 When the fire was covered there was but the 
 faintest glow at the small, oiled-paper win- 
 dows. The latch-string was pulled in. A 
 whippoorwill cried in the willows. 
 
VII 
 
 THE HOME ON THE INDIAN BORDER 
 
 ^ 
 
 IN no year of his mission did 
 Johnny set his feet on the road 
 to the west with such a feeling 
 of well-being and happiness as 
 in the spring of 1811. A gen- 
 eral thaw that broke the back 
 of winter in the middle of February brought 
 him into Pittsburg with his seeds. By start- 
 ing ten days sooner than usual he could get 
 through with the work he had mapped out 
 for the early part of the season, and reach 
 Betty's home for a day's rest in apple-blossom 
 time. At least once in every year it was nec- 
 essary to reassure himself that Betty and her 
 babies were safe and happy in their little 
 Eden on the border. 
 
 In the other book which had become a 
 second Bible to him, there was a text that ex- 
 plained how zeal had lent wings to his purpose: 
 
 146 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 "He arrives sooner who eagerly desires it." 
 Beyond all he had dared hope, his labor of 
 love had prospered. As population increased 
 his nurseries everywhere were cared for; and 
 once his trees were planted fewer of them died 
 or reverted to their wild ancestry than had 
 been the experience in the east. They came 
 into full bearing much earlier, and, unless re- 
 strained by pruning, shot up as tall as forest 
 trees. Even in the wildest backwoods clear- 
 ings, where scant attention could be given 
 them by hard-pressed pioneers, they bore 
 small but abundant fruit of a mellowness and 
 spicy flavor such as no ungrafted tree would 
 bear in the worn-out soils of to-day. 
 
 Late in his third winter among the cider- 
 mills Dr. True, who was obliged to go up to 
 Pittsburg for medical supplies, went through 
 a number of old orchards with him. On the 
 quick return trip by the mail-packet he had 
 taken buds wrapped in wet moss and hemp 
 bagging, and grafted them on the young 
 nursery stock in the cove. Year after year 
 there had been persistent and intelligent co- 
 operation with Johnny, and Marietta and 
 Belpre would soon have all the old favorite 
 varieties of apples in their orchards, and there 
 
 147 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 would be fruit to ship to New Orleans. Grafts 
 from the first of these good trees were now 
 being carried westward and up the larger 
 tributaries. 
 
 His nurseries must be kept up to supply 
 the ever-increasing flood of new-comers with 
 trees; but Johnny had trained caretakers for 
 his plantations now, and, given seeds, much 
 of his work could be left to them. This re- 
 leased him to press his mission more vigor- 
 ously in the Indian country. Conditions had 
 long been working ruin for the tribes of the 
 Northwest, and their growing poverty and 
 helplessness was a piteous thing. 
 
 In the winter Indians still hunted in the 
 eastern hills, but with diminishing returns for 
 their labors, and Johnny journeyed westward 
 with them in the spring. This year a Ger- 
 man farmer rode with him to the first camp 
 on the Great Trail. There he meant to ask 
 the loan of a horse for the season, and to go 
 on alone. As room was made for him in the 
 circle about the fire, a brave said that they 
 had been expecting him. He pointed to the 
 pearly crescent that hung low in the west. 
 
 "It's Johnny Appleseed moon." 
 
 There were grins at his start of surprise. 
 
 148 
 
IT S JOHNNY APPLESEED MOON 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Yes, white settlers called him that, too. Well, 
 that was good. It moved him profoundly 
 to have won a nickname that stood for the 
 faithful performance of his engagements. 
 The Indians honored him, although they had 
 neglected his nurseries and made little use of 
 his ability and willingness to serve them in 
 many practical ways. And to them he owed 
 everything. Without their hospitality in the 
 harder seasons and on the wilder trails his 
 mission must have failed; and without their 
 ponies and canoes he never could have jour- 
 neyed over such great regions of country. 
 Now they waited in silence until he had eaten 
 of the generous bowl of hominy cooked with 
 chestnuts and butternut meats that a squaw 
 prepared for him, before they talked of their 
 misfortunes. 
 
 The game was almost gone. Famine stared 
 the children of the forest in the face. When 
 Johnny asked if they would have food to last 
 until the corn came in, they said that they 
 could get what was needed at the forts in 
 Canada. The British were their friends, and 
 had supplied them with warm blankets and 
 the best guns for hunting. 
 
 Johnny's heart sank with a sense of swiftly 
 
 150 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 coming disaster. There were rumors of war 
 with England. He stood up and looked ac- 
 cusingly into every shifty eye. 
 
 "Where will you get skins to pay for these 
 things? The British are bribing and arming 
 you. If they make war on the Americans 
 they will expect you to help them. The 
 Americans will never be driven from the 
 homes they have worked so hard to gain. 
 If you are so foolish as to let yourselves be 
 used against your neighbors you will lose all 
 you possess. The game is gone, to return 
 no more. Your truest friends are those who 
 will help you get cattle, tools and seeds, and 
 teach you the habits and tasks of white men." 
 
 Until far into the night he talked of the 
 blessings of industry and peace. There was 
 no famine in Piqua for Logan's tribe, which 
 numbered seven hundred braves. In that 
 farm village on the Miami there were warm 
 cabins, full barns and corn-cribs, cattle in 
 fenced pastures, meat in smoke-houses and 
 potatoes and apples in winter pits. The 
 squaws had spinning-wheels and looms, and 
 in exchange for their furs the braves were 
 buying useful tools of the Indian agent. 
 Blackhoof, Lewis and wise old Crane, Grand 
 
 ii 15 1 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Sachem of the Wyandots, knew that this was 
 the way of wisdom. The teachings of Te- 
 cumseh and The Prophet, that they should go 
 to war to get back their lost lands, were evil. 
 On what they had they could live in comfort 
 and security. 
 
 Into that council of bitterness and despair 
 he brought love and hope. Now he must mul- 
 tiply himself; engage the help of the more 
 civilized tribes, and convert the settlers on 
 the border to take up that heroic task of 
 saving themselves while saving a dying race. 
 His plans all changed, he rode away at dawn. 
 In the waxing of his moon, and the snows and 
 gales of early March, he went up the Cuya- 
 hoga Valley trail to Cleveland. In that region 
 he marked trees for distribution and left sup- 
 plies of seeds. Then, from the shore of Lake 
 Erie, he turned southwest into the border trail 
 which white men had blazed with ax-cuts on 
 trees all the way to Dayton. 
 
 Under every rude roof that sheltered a 
 family Johnny stopped to beg sympathy 
 and help for the starving tribes, to warn, to 
 reconcile. From one Indian village to an- 
 other he traveled to plant seeds and to take 
 such promise of relief as he could get. But 
 
 152 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 on both sides of the border there was much 
 to forgive, more to fear, and race antipathies 
 that no argument or appeal could break down. 
 And now the hunters, returning in desperate 
 straits, were committing fresh offenses. John- 
 ny's apprehension and compassion for white 
 people and red grew, as he rode through the 
 misty emerald aisles of April toward Betty's 
 home. 
 
 Unless he made haste the orchard would 
 have dropped its blossoms. At sunset one 
 day he was still ten miles from his journey's 
 end, and riding so fast that he would have 
 overlooked a rough little black - and - white 
 puppy, if that wise young dog had not lain 
 with his keen fox nose in the path. Lamed 
 by a thorn in his foot, he had dropped behind 
 a wagon, and had waited there for hours, 
 confident that some one would come by who 
 needed a lonesome, hungry and well-inten- 
 tioned little dog. 
 
 Johnny picked up the waif — for he m 
 left a domestic animal in the woods — washed 
 the injured foot at a spring, shared his last 
 dry hoecake, and set the grateful little fellow 
 comfortably across his saddle-bow. It was 
 long after nightfall and the house was dark 
 
 i53 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 when he drew rein; but a dewy incense came 
 up from the orchard that lay in snowy drifts 
 and mounds in the moonlighted glade. 
 
 The tall gate that opened on the trail was 
 always padlocked at night, so he rode around 
 the inclosure and up from the creek into the 
 yard. He turned the horse loose in the pas- 
 ture, and, not wishing to disturb the family, 
 took his seeds and blanket to a bench under 
 the blossoming trees. The puppy whimper- 
 ing with hunger, he was obliged to go back 
 to the spring-house to get him some milk. 
 He was fumbling with the fastenings of the 
 door when David called from the house: 
 
 "Who's there?" 
 
 "Johnny!" 
 
 David came out into the stoop, set his shot- 
 gun down, and shut the door behind him. 
 
 "You'd better halloo from the road after 
 this. I might have filled you with bird-shot. 
 Indians drove off one of my cows last week 
 and raided the smoke-house. I'll shoot the 
 next one that comes sneaking around my 
 place." 
 
 "They are starving. The game is gone." 
 
 "Well, I can't feed them. They have land. 
 Let them work as I do." 
 
 154 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 "They don't know how to work, David, 
 and have nothing to work with. They must 
 be helped for a long time, and be taught the 
 simplest tasks with kindness and patience." 
 
 "You can't teach wolves to herd sheep. 
 How are you, Johnny? Betty and the chil- 
 dren count the days until you come." His 
 arm went around the slender shoulders in 
 warm affection. He fetched out a crock of 
 milk and pushed the wagging puppy's muzzle 
 into the creamy pool. "Stuff your skin full 
 and grow, you little rascal. Jerusalem! John- 
 ny, this is an English sheep-dog! He'll be as 
 lean and swift as a hound, with a voice like 
 a bugle and the grit to tackle his own weight 
 in wildcats. What luck! Look here, will 
 you?" 
 
 He unlocked the barn door and, dragging 
 Johnny in, excitedly showed him, tied in a 
 horse-stall, a splendid specimen of a merino 
 ram. Napoleon had raided the flocks of 
 Spain, and the chief duty of the United States 
 consul at Lisbon, at that time, was buying 
 blooded sheep for the wool-growers of New 
 England. So serious was the need of woolen 
 clothing in the West that men of resource and 
 public spirit in Ohio were now bringing these 
 
 ■3D 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 valuable animals over the mountains, guard- 
 ing them as they did their children, and pay- 
 ing bounties on wolf scalps. 
 
 "That ram came from the royal monastery 
 of Guadeloupe, and has a pedigree as long as 
 your arm. We call him the Little Corporal. 
 With the ewes that Colonel Cushing is to 
 get for me he'll cost me a quarter-section of 
 land. What flocks we can have on these 
 thousand hills when we get the wolves and 
 the Indians cleaned out!" 
 
 While the door was being secured again 
 Johnny stood with bent head. There were ten 
 thousand warriors on the Ohio frontier, under 
 able leadership, and driven to frenzy by suf- 
 fering and evil counsel. Nothing was safe 
 here, however so well defended by lock and 
 gun and guardian dog. 
 
 " David, there will be war with England. 
 Tecumseh and The Prophet are organizing 
 and inflaming the Indians, and the British 
 are feeding and arming them. The more 
 civilized tribes are friendly to us, and others 
 could be won over. We must get at that 
 work now, this summer, while those misguided 
 chiefs are out on the Wabash with a thousand 
 of the most savage of the warriors — " 
 
 156 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 "General Harrison will attend to them," 
 David interrupted, impatiently. "We might 
 as well fight it out. If we have to lick the 
 redcoats and the redskins both at once, why 
 I guess we can." 
 
 "A white family has been massacred near 
 Sandusky!" 
 
 "I know about that. Don't tell Betty. 
 I've got an arsenal in the house, and the men 
 of this neighborhood are building a stockade." 
 
 "Then at the first sign of trouble send 
 Betty and the children down to Marietta. 
 For every defenseless thing in your care you 
 will have to answer at the bar of God." 
 
 He turned at once and went to the orchard, 
 so heavy of heart that it was long before he 
 slept. From dreadful dreams of the war- 
 cry, tomahawk and torch, he woke now and 
 then to a night that was absolutely still. 
 The blossoming trees over which were gather- 
 ing the dark clouds of savage war stood in a 
 tranced and fragrant loveliness. Betty, com- 
 ing out in a morning that was like the first 
 that blushed on Eden, caught her breath in 
 the sheer bliss of being alive in such a world. 
 Johnny was asleep, and when David joined 
 her she put her finger to her lips. 
 
 i57 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 " Don't wake him. When he opens his eyes 
 he'll look as if he thought he had died and 
 gone to heaven." 
 
 The children tumbled out of the cabin into 
 the happy day — Mary Lake's namesake, who 
 was going-on-seven ; David and Jonathan, 
 the inseparable twins, and two-year-old Jim- 
 my. Betty hushed their cries of delight over 
 the jolly little dog, and sent them with a 
 gourd full of wet cornmeal to feed the yellow 
 balls of peepy chickens. 
 
 "Mary," she said in the quaint phrase that 
 the motherly little girl had adopted, and that 
 had won for her the nickname of Mary-go- 
 'round, "you go 'round, dear, and look after 
 brother Jimmy." 
 
 She hurried through her morning's work, 
 and got out the supply of new clothing that 
 she managed always to have ready for the 
 beloved wanderer. Then, while he still slept 
 she refilled his food-pouch, for he was liable 
 to be off before any one was stirring in the 
 morning. Fetching the low rocking-chair 
 from the house, she sat under a tent of blos- 
 soming boughs with a bit of sewing, and 
 watched him with the solicitude of the child 
 of the cove of near a dozen years before. 
 
 158 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 Tears filled her eyes. All over Ohio fam- 
 ilies would be out, to-day, under the orchards 
 he had planted, while Johnny was homeless. 
 And he was beginning to look — not old, for 
 he was only thirty-six, and he would have a 
 certain look of youth if he lived to be a hun- 
 dred—but marked with his years of toil and 
 solitude, worn, purified by self-sacrifice, the 
 gentle and ardent spirit shining through. No 
 one in the region ever spoke of him except 
 with tender reverence. It was a new miracle 
 that, defenseless, he had never been in serious 
 danger from man or beast or the elements, in 
 a vast wilderness that bristled with perils. 
 Just now his face was shadowed by some 
 anxiety so deep that it pursued him into his 
 troubled dreams. He woke with a start. 
 
 For a moment of bewilderment he thought 
 himself back in the Pittsburg orchard on 
 that far-away morning. Here was the rosy 
 foam of apple-blossoms, the murmur of bees, 
 the lilt of bird-song, the rumble of a caravan 
 on the road; and in the little rocking-chair 
 the appealing guest? No, he had found her 
 grave by a deserted cabin, and had planted 
 an apple-tree where she lay dead from an 
 unhelped child birth, with the babe on her 
 
 i59 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 breast. This was Betty, and she was say^ 
 
 ing: 
 
 "Johnny, do you remember the night Aunt 
 Mary Lake died? There was no one in the 
 world then, belonging to me. And now I 
 have David, and my arms full of darling little 
 children, and you are here on this morning 
 when the home you made for us all is so 
 beautiful that I never want to go away to 
 heaven/ ' 
 
 "It will be like this on the other shore, 
 Betty." He quoted from his new gospel: 
 "For every wayside rose there is a rose idea 
 that blooms beside the River of Life." 
 
 She placed his breakfast before him on a 
 small rustic table, and when she sat down 
 again she folded the useful hands that were 
 so seldom idle. The mother of four children, 
 she was only twenty-five, and she had the 
 light, quick step, the merry laugh and the 
 ready blush and tears of a girl. They had 
 so many thoughts and memories in common, 
 and there was only this one day in the year 
 in which to share them. 
 
 "You remember what Dr. True used to 
 say, Johnny, 'People can be sick any time, 
 but my apple-tree blooms but once a year.' 
 
 160 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 There are such a lot of things to be done, but 
 I am not going to do them to-day." 
 
 In the happy hours that followed Johnny 
 went about the orchard pinching back buds, 
 removing suckers, cutting out superfluous 
 and aspiring twigs, to keep the trees headed 
 low and open to the sun. He got a scythe 
 and mowed the grass, and told Betty not to 
 have it raked away. It would soon disappear 
 in the new growth, and as it decayed some- 
 thing from it would be washed into the soil 
 that would paint the fruit in the colors of 
 ruby and gold. 
 
 "There w r ill be company this afternoon, 
 Johnny. We have a party every day while 
 the trees are in bloom. People come miles 
 from the new, bare clearings. I've made a 
 bushel of maple sugar and nut cookies. On 
 Sunday we'll have church. David reads from 
 the Bible, and we sing the old hymns." 
 
 She asked Johnny to bring out the big table 
 so they could have dinner in the orchard. 
 
 "It was Mrs. Blennerhasset who taught us 
 the pleasure of eating out of doors. We used 
 to row down to Isle le Beau to have straw- 
 berries and cream on the lawn. Used to! 
 Oh, Johnny, I can't believe that our dear 
 
 161 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Queen of the Fairy Isle has been gone five 
 years, and is poor and in dreadful trouble. 
 Do people blame them for being mixed up 
 in Aaron Burr's treason?" 
 
 "No, Betty. Every one who knew them is 
 sorry they were deceived and ruined. The 
 island is still theirs. They should come back 
 and live among the friends who love and 
 trust them." 
 
 "We never could understand it. Burr 
 was under the cloud of the duel with Hamil- 
 ton, and had used and betrayed old friends 
 before he came out to Marietta. But he daz- 
 zled every one with his plan for a colony far 
 down the Mississippi that was to make poor 
 settlers rich. You know how generous the 
 Blennerhassets were. He got them to use 
 their money to build a fleet of boats at Ma- 
 rietta, and to outfit them for what was a 
 treasonable military expedition. Then war- 
 rants were out. Mr. Blennerhasset and hun- 
 dreds of young men had to fly. A search 
 party went over to Isle le Beau. Drunken 
 militia from Virginia camped on the lawn, 
 tore up the gardens, wrecked the furnishings, 
 and even shot holes through the hall ceiling 
 into Mrs. Blennerhasset' s bedroom, to try 
 
 162 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 to frighten her into betraying her husband. 
 Colonel Cushing got a flatboat and smuggled 
 her and the children away on a bitter Decem- 
 ber night. What misery ! And the author of 
 it all was never punished." 
 
 This was a thing upon which Johnny had 
 often pondered. The wicked had fled when 
 no man pursued. 
 
 "Yes, Betty, he is being punished every 
 hour. He is living in exile, despised and for- 
 saken. Stripped of friends, honor and op- 
 portunity, his life can end only in poverty 
 and neglect. It must be punishment enough 
 for a man of evil and selfish ambitions to fail, 
 and then to have to live out the length of his 
 days in his own company." 
 
 "Oh, that is true!" She listened as to the 
 voice of some old Hebrew prophet. And as 
 she never had before, she understood John- 
 ny's compensation. He might dwell with the 
 beasts of the fields, but in what blessedness 
 and peace he would live with himself to the 
 end ! Presently she asked : "The house — that 
 fairy palace? Is it gone, too?" 
 
 "No, that looks much the same from Bel- 
 pre. A man from Kentucky rents the farm 
 from Colonel Cushing, and comes with slaves 
 
 163 
 
JOHNNY APPLES EED 
 
 every summer to grow a crop of hemp. But 
 
 from October to April the place is deserted. 
 
 rfcies ' - young people still go over to gather 
 the nuts." 
 
 ' I wish Mrs. Blennerhasset could know 
 that. She was so good to us — so eager to 
 give us pleasure. I am keeping the May- 
 queen gown she gave me for my wedding, 
 for Mary. Johnny, I wish we could take the 
 children to the island. They cannot go into 
 the forest here; but there, with no wild ani- 
 mals larger than squirrels, they could wander 
 all day." 
 
 That island of refuge ! There in the wave- 
 washed woods of Isle le Beau, where Indi- 
 ans never stopped, was a place of safety : t 
 flying people for whom there would not be 
 room in the few, small forts. 
 
 When Betty went into the house to pre- 
 pare dinner, Johnny was reminded by coax- 
 ing voices and tugging little hands that it 
 was time to go 'round the world. This was 
 a custom begun when Mary was two years 
 old. With the littlest baby on his back, 
 Johnny always took them around the high- 
 walled home-world of several acres, showed 
 them wonders that no one else could find, 
 
 164 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 and brought them back to mother in an 
 hour. 
 
 There was a ruby-throat among the honey- 
 suckles that clambered over the stoop, in- 
 quiring about when there would be coral 
 flagons of nectar. Although few were in 
 bloom, Johnny named and described the com- 
 ing blossoms of the flowering annuals that 
 bordered the graveled path to the spring- 
 house. Water gurgled about the milk and 
 butter crocks. It would talk and laugh and 
 play leap-frog all the long way to the ocean. 
 Minnows darted in the pool. A toad hopped 
 out, blinking, from under the willows. A big 
 green frog went "plunk!" into the creek under 
 a sparkling fountain of spray. The trees, 
 the flocks of fleeces in the blue sky, the ferns 
 that fringed the bank, and even the children 
 all stood on their heads in the water. 
 
 They stalked the troops of fairies who lived 
 in the ferns, but those gay and clever little 
 people were not to be caught. Then on all- 
 fours, like bear cubs, they went around the 
 picket-fence equator, under a tangle of shrub- 
 bery that was full of nests. They saw a chip- 
 munk, and then they didn't, so quick that 
 they batted their eyes. They listened at the 
 
 165 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 grass-ball nest of a field-mouse that was 
 packed with squeaking babies no bigger 
 than bumblebees. There were armored and 
 skurrying little beetles, furry pussies of cater- 
 pillars that stopped to have their backs 
 stroked, and garden spiders spinning their 
 fairy wheels. And up above, from Johnny's 
 shoulder, another world was to be seen that 
 was all flowers and butterflies. 
 
 For a long time they sat on the grass in 
 the orchard and watched the bees visiting 
 the apple-blossoms, and carrying their bags 
 of honey home through the tiny doors of their 
 street of straw hives. The chicken-yard had 
 to have a call, and every one took turns in 
 the swing under the arbor of fox -grapes. 
 Johnny had a lump of salt in his pocket to 
 coax the cows to the bars, so the calves could 
 be petted, and apples for his horse that was 
 resting in the pasture. 
 
 The Little Corporal had a high-fenced in- 
 closure to himself, and for all his royal state 
 bleated like a lamb in his lonely exile. They 
 stayed there a long time to comfort him with 
 handfuls of clover. Then, squealing like the 
 fat little pink-and-white pigs in the pen, 
 they scrambled through a plumed and tufted 
 
 166 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 hedge of lilacs and snowballs. They had a 
 drink from the mossy, splashy bucket at the 
 well, under pink banners of apple bloom, and 
 there they were at the stoop again. It was 
 noon by the mark on the new floor of broad, 
 white maple boards, and mother was blow- 
 ing a beautiful blast on the horn to call 
 father from some place outside the world to 
 a picnic dinner. 
 
 In the afternoon they were all out in the 
 orchard, the children romping with the 
 puppy on the grass, Betty shamelessly idle, 
 and Johnny, propped on his elbows, reading 
 from his other book, or just listening to the 
 talk and laughter. How beautiful it was — 
 how peaceful and sweet, this little tiring- 
 room of Paradise where a happ}^ family was 
 having a foretaste on earth of the joys of 
 eternity. It seemed incredible that this 
 lovely and innocent sanctuary should ever 
 be violated by the passions of men. 
 
 By and by a neighbor whose new cabin 
 stood in a snake-fenced, stump-littered clear- 
 ing two miles away, was left at the gate by 
 her husband on his way to the mill. Alary, 
 who was always bursting with eager friend- 
 liness, reached up a plump little hand. 
 
 12 167 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 " Don't you want to go 'round with me 
 and Johnny?" 
 
 "No, dear. Miz Varnum, if you don't 
 mind, ma'am, I'd just like to set and look 
 a spell. Them apple-trees air mighty han'- 
 some." 
 
 Johnny told her that there would be trees 
 in the nursery down the creek bank that 
 David would select and help them to set out 
 properly in the fall. Betty promised to save 
 flower and garden seeds for her. When oth- 
 er visitors came she and Mary served the 
 cookies, and spicy, pink sassafras tea in the 
 blue cups in the orchard. 
 
 Before sundown the guests were gone. The 
 children were fed and tucked into trundle- 
 beds in the wing that had been added to the 
 cabin. The still and odorous dusk folded 
 softly like a perfumed garment about that 
 little home of peace and love. 
 
 David came in from the fields. While 
 Betty moved about busily in the firelight, get- 
 ting supper, he began, with absorbed pleas- 
 ure in the task, the serious education of the 
 sheep-dog. First he must have a name, and 
 learn to obey instantly when called. With 
 duties around the imperial person of the Little 
 
 i63 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 Corporal, it was found that no name would 
 do but Old Guard. David remarked that he 
 must go out after supper to put the ram in 
 the barn and lock the gate. 
 
 They were at the table, which was spread 
 with every kind of good food that a well- 
 kept farm afforded, when an old Indian, a 
 figure of ferocity that was like an apparition 
 from Johnny's dreams of horror of the night, 
 appeared at the open door and demanded 
 something to eat. 
 
 "Get out!" David jerked a horse -pis- 
 tol from the chimney - shelf. The Indian 
 did not move, but glared hungrily at the 
 table. 
 
 They were all on their feet. Betty had 
 gone white and trembling, but pity was 
 stronger than fear. 
 
 "David, won't you let me give the poor 
 old man something? Please, dear." 
 
 "That dirty, drunken savage! Sit down, 
 Betty. Get out! Begone with you!" 
 
 Johnny burned with sorrow and indigna- 
 tion. Here, in the last extremity, was the 
 Shawnee brave who had loaned him the 
 beautiful painted canoe, made of birch-bark 
 from the far shores of Lake Huron, for his 
 
 169 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 first voyage down the Muskingum. There 
 was no time to use this personal plea now, 
 but only for the soft answer. 
 
 "He may be drunk, David, but he is starv- 
 ing, too, and dangerous as a wolf." He 
 turned to the Indian and tried to reach the 
 crazed brain by speaking in the man's own 
 dialect. " Black Arrow, you know me — 
 Logan's brother. I have slept with you un- 
 der one blanket. I have food in my pouch. 
 Go up to the trail and I will fetch it to 
 you." 
 
 In the delirium of the famished the man 
 only stared at him, drew his knife and lurched 
 toward the table. David fired. The sav- 
 age turned then and staggered out of the 
 house, to be lost at once in the dense shad- 
 ows of the shrubbery. The children, startled 
 from sleep by the shot, ran from their beds. 
 Betty was down on the hearth with them, 
 hushing their frightened crying. 
 
 As in a nightmare it seemed to take hours 
 to find and light a lantern. When Johnny 
 and David stood on the stoop with the door 
 shut behind them, the silence of the soft 
 spring night was stabbed through and through 
 with a single, piteous bleat. 
 
 170 
 
THE HOME ON THE BORDER 
 
 The Indian lay dead in the sheep-pasture. 
 Beside him was his wet knife, and the Little 
 Corporal with a dark stream flowing from the 
 wound in his neck. 
 
VIII 
 
 TRAGEDY 
 
 HJFTER the outbreak of the early 
 
 spring the Indians fell into a 
 
 sullen apathy from which it was 
 
 ;j difficult to arouse them. All 
 
 fl summer Johnny labored among 
 
 g^Jj them in a spiritual atmosphere 
 
 that was like a hot and humid day. But, 
 living in large groups as they did, it was 
 easier to help them than to serve the same 
 number of scattered white people. 
 
 To settlements as distant as Marietta he 
 sent Logan for cattle, seeds and plows; and 
 Piqua supplied teachers who could turn fur- 
 rows, yoke oxen, make harnesses of ropes and 
 rawhide, and build rail fences and corn-cribs. 
 Then, as the corn ripened, the outlook be- 
 came brighter. In October there was better 
 feeling, and more food stored for winter in 
 the Indian country of northwestern Ohio, 
 
 172 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 than for many a year. No fresh reports or 
 trouble had come from the Wabash Valley, 
 where Tecumseh and The Prophet had their 
 armed camp to defend the lands of the 
 Miamis from a proposed government survey. 
 His heart high with hope of better days 
 Johnny made a last round of the new nur- 
 series and then went east with the hunters. 
 
 The battle of Tippecanoe was forced by 
 General Harrison at an opportune moment 
 in November. But so long did it take news 
 to travel from Indiana Territory that Pitts- 
 burg did not hear of the event for a month. 
 With that came word of the violent and con- 
 tinued earthquake shocks in the Mississippi 
 and Ohio valleys. The Prophet seized upon 
 these disturbances to enrage the superstitious 
 Indians. His frenzied eloquence filled the 
 woods with painted runners to the Gulf, to 
 dance the Lakes dances and inflame tribes to 
 fight for their lost lands. 
 
 Johnny was then far up the Allegheny 
 Valley, struggling through the drifted glens 
 to reach the cider - mills, and heard nothing 
 of these menacing matters until he brought 
 in his seeds. The band that he joined on the 
 Great Trail had dwindled to a dozen dis- 
 
 173 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 couraged old men. The young braves had 
 gone back early in the winter to take part in 
 whatever exciting business was afoot. So 
 far as they knew, the explosion had spent it- 
 self, and there would be no war unless the 
 British gave the word. 
 
 The night was sharp and clear when he 
 lay down by the camp-fire for a few hours of 
 much-needed sleep. But suddenly they all 
 sprang to their feet in alarm. The stars had 
 vanished, and the hushed air was filled with 
 a suffocating, sulphurous vapor that made 
 the flames shoot up in long streamers and 
 burn blue. Then the earth heaved with a 
 vast but gentle movement, as if sighing in its 
 sleep. Trees crashed all around the camp, 
 a mile of caving bank thundered into the 
 creek, and water swept in a storm-lashed flood 
 across a marsh to their feet. Wolf -packs 
 howled, and flying clouds of water -fowl 
 screamed in the awful darkness. It was as if 
 all nature was in a state of dissolution. 
 
 No shock had been felt so far east before. 
 This lasted less than a minute, but it trans- 
 formed the Indians into such primitive hu- 
 mans of brute fear and ferocity, with con- 
 torted limbs and bloodshot eyes, as must 
 
 174 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 have inhabited an antediluvian world of 
 monsters. For an hour they went through 
 horrid rites to appease the anger of the Great 
 Spirit. And even more deeply was Johnny 
 shaken. What times were these — what por- 
 tents of disaster! 
 
 He had long believed that one who lives in 
 solitude and self-denial might see heavenly 
 visions, and have that speech with angels which 
 is heard within. Now, as he lay wide-eyed in 
 the restored tranquility of the night, lifting up 
 his heart in prayer for guidance, he thought he 
 saw Mary Lake — not here in this wild camp, 
 but in Betty's distant home, bending over 
 Betty's bed. Then, a wraith-like shape that 
 wavered in a bleak wind, she opened the door 
 and called — the old signal for help in the emer- 
 gencies of sickness — and from that dim room 
 behind her came the sound as though a fright- 
 ened child sobbed in her sleep. 
 
 Johnny roused the Indians. He had had 
 a message and must go at once. They must 
 take his seeds to Chief Crane at Sandusky, 
 and let him have their best pony and a pack- 
 age of warrior's bread. In a quarter of an 
 hour he was riding in midnight darkness over 
 the Great Trail. After crossing the Mus- 
 
 i75 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 kingum, and with only a pocket compass for 
 a guide, he plunged into the trackless forest. 
 It was after nightfall of the fourth day that 
 he dropped from the spent and mired pony 
 at the door. 
 
 Within the lighted house Old Guard whined 
 to be let out on this intruder. He leaped like 
 a wolf, and had to be called off, when Betty 
 let Johnny in. She stood there alone with 
 a shotgun that fell from her shaking hands. 
 
 "You frightened me. I thought it was an 
 Indian. So — so foolish of me. The Indians 
 are so quiet now that David went down to 
 Chillicothe. He has raised a militia com- 
 pany, and will get his captain's commission 
 from Governor Meigs.' ' 
 
 At once she was all concern for Johnny, 
 fetching dry socks for his half -frozen feet, 
 and a bowl of hot mush and milk. He asked 
 the usual questions about the children, who 
 were asleep, and then waited in silence for 
 her to recover her self-control. In mending 
 the fire she stooped with such difficulty that 
 he took the tongs from her. At that she 
 dropped to the hearth, and against his knees 
 sobbed out the terror that had broken her 
 courage. 
 
 176 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 " D-David wouldn't have left me for that — ■ 
 now. He was obliged to go, to — to fetch a 
 doctor — to help me. We didn't think — I'd 
 need help — so soon. I cried for Aunt Mary 
 Lake. She'd come if she could, Johnny. I 
 was afraid I might die — and the children be 
 left here — alone." 
 
 ''She called me!" His voice was hushed 
 with the wonder and glory of the vision that 
 had brought him here. He told Betty about 
 it as he lifted her to the bed. "I am going 
 back to a sugar-camp to get an Indian wom- 
 an. Dr. True says that some old squaws 
 can beat him at this kind of big medicine. 
 Old Guard is a regiment in himself. He 
 knew before he was born that it would be his 
 duty to protect something. Put up the bars 
 and go to sleep." 
 
 On the return journey the horse that he 
 took from the stable carried double. The 
 ancient and hideous dame had come unwilling- 
 ly, and only on the promise of a horse-load 
 of potatoes, pork and apples; but when she 
 saw Betty her black eyes sparkled with pro- 
 fessional pride, and she spoke tenderly enough 
 in her soft Shawnee tongue. 
 
 11 Pretty squaw! Her all right now." 
 
 177 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Johnny was glad that there were things to 
 be done — animals to be fed, cows to be 
 milked, wood and water to be fetched, and 
 scared children to be reassured, kept out of 
 doors and told something of the sacred mys- 
 tery of birth. 
 
 "You must be quiet and happy. There's 
 a little angel hovering over this house, try- 
 ing to come down to earth to be a brother 
 or sister to you. Mother will be in there, 
 waiting, until God lays the darling little bit 
 of a baby in her arms." 
 
 After an Indian camp-fire dinner in the 
 barn-lot, and a romp in the haymow, the 
 three little boys went to sleep and Mary 
 covered them warm with the sweet-smelling 
 hay. Leaving Old Guard on duty, she and 
 Johnny went a half-mile down the creek to 
 the nursery. To the child who could count 
 on her dimpled fingers the few times that 
 she had been taken out of the home inclos- 
 ure, this was thrilling adventure. Back from 
 the gravelly margin of the stream stretched 
 a flood bank that was covered with a low 
 growth of leafless willows and alders, and 
 last year's tall, rusty ferns. The thicket 
 closed behind them, and left no trace of 
 
 178 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 their passage when they crossed it to the 
 higher ground that sloped steeply up to the 
 forest-screened trail. 
 
 In a natural, under-washed bend of the 
 bluff, and behind a tall, stake-and-brush fence 
 that was woven with the living cables of fox- 
 grapes, the nursery was concealed from all 
 but its canopy of gray sky. Bursting with 
 delight, but noiselessly as any squirrel, for 
 Johnny had whispered that this was a secret 
 place, Mary scrambled up the stout trellis 
 and dropped near orderly rows of apple- 
 twigs. In every settled district in Ohio 
 Johnny now had these forest fastnesses, of 
 which the Indians knew nothing, where fly- 
 ing people might find temporary safety. He 
 had a purpose in bringing the child here, but 
 must not frighten her. 
 
 "Mary-go-' round, father knows about this, 
 but might not think of it, or be at home 
 when — Tell mother what a fine place it is for 
 hiding, so if she ever wanted to take you all 
 away — in a hurry — " 
 
 Mary nodded with gay understanding. To 
 a child it is the happy impulse of any moment 
 to want to go somewhere else in a hurry. She 
 would never have her mother's delicate beauty 
 
 179 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 nor the gentle sweetness that won the heart 
 and made it ache. But a friendly, helpful, 
 cheerful little person in a brown, butternut- 
 dyed cloak, squirrel-skin hood, and red knitted 
 stockings and mittens, she flitted about like 
 a winter robin while Johnny went over the 
 ground foot by foot, to make sure there were 
 no snake-holes. 
 
 The squaw was gone when, on the third 
 day, David burst into the house with an ashen 
 face and hoarse voice. "The Indians have 
 broken out again. The woods are full of 
 murdering bands. Fetch the children !" 
 
 He wrapped Betty and the day-old babe 
 that lay on her breast in the bed-clothing, 
 swept them up into his arms, and raced down 
 the frozen lawn to the creek bank. While 
 the children were scrambling into outer gar- 
 ments, Johnny ran with the bearskin rugs, 
 to be laid in the rowboat and over mother 
 and child. Mary sat by them to keep the 
 coverings tucked in, and David took the 
 oars. Johnny followed in the big canoe with 
 the little boys and Old Guard. 
 
 Torn veils of fine, dry snow streamed be- 
 fore a westerly wind that sent them scudding 
 down the swollen creek. In an hour they 
 
 180 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 reached the stockade in a tiny settlement on 
 the Scioto, into which frantic people were 
 gathering. Johnny helped carry Betty up the 
 bluff and into a blockhouse, where she would 
 at least have the care of women. No doctor 
 could be spared from the small capital, 
 where there was much sickness. As long as 
 he lived he never forgot how she lay with the 
 wee, downy face of the gasping infant pressed 
 to her breaking heart. 
 
 He had left her — to suffer this. How 
 would it be with him if she perished? 
 
 He spent a week driving down cows and 
 taking boat and wagon loads of provisions to 
 the log fort. David remained in command, 
 and half the men returned to cultivate the 
 fields and protect the deserted homes. A few 
 were shot from ambush at their plows ; horses 
 and cattle were run off, and some cabins and 
 orchards burned. Betty's baby died from 
 the exposure, and Johnny buried it under 
 the apple-tree with the low, roomy crotch, 
 where she could have the sad comfort of 
 seeing the short, grassy mound from the door- 
 way. The coming struggle was claiming its 
 first, innocent victims. 
 
 War was not yet a certainty, and was, in- 
 
 1S1 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 deed, not declared until the middle of June; 
 but troops had been ordered to proceed to 
 Dayton in May, to impress the Indians and 
 to prepare the Northwest for defense. John- 
 ny went up to Sandusky for his seeds, and 
 spent the next six weeks in Indian villages 
 where no work was being done. 
 
 In the outbreak of early winter even 
 peaceful and industrious tribes had reverted 
 to savagery, broken their plows and looms, 
 eaten their seed for this year's crops, and 
 slaughtered their cattle for horrid feasts. 
 Now they repented in a bitter poverty that 
 was relieved only by thieving raids across 
 the border. Other tribes Johnny found in 
 the brief enjoyment of a dreadful prosperity. 
 The braves had new blankets and firearms, 
 and their villages were abundantly supplied 
 with beef and flour. He rebuked them for 
 their treacherous folly, and refused to eat 
 anything of theirs except the forest nuts, and 
 the corn they had grown with their own 
 honest labor. 
 
 The orchards that he had planted — apple- 
 trees whose ripening fruits would be roasted 
 on their living branches — were in blossom 
 when, as if some secret word was borne on 
 
 182 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 the wind, the braves went westward. In a 
 week not a warrior was to be seen east of the 
 Miami, and the border settlers returned to 
 their homes. Since nothing would be planted 
 that year but men, no harvests gathered be- 
 sides souls, Johnny rode out to Piqua, where 
 Logan had his seven hundred warriors un< 
 arms to defend his village and the American 
 trading-post. Going on dow r n to Dayton, 
 he sent his seeds and tools to Cincinnati, 
 to be forwarded to Colonel Cushing at 
 Belpre, and then turned to the work of re- 
 lieving suffering. 
 
 The outlook was appalling. Of the army 
 that was gathering, only one regiment was 
 United States regulars. The young pioneers 
 of the Ohio militia and volunteers w r ere wholly 
 untrained, and were led by self-chosen offi- 
 cers, and they came in the poor clothing that 
 they had worn at their work in field and 
 forest. They brought their own arms: 
 cheap shotguns, rusty muskets and rifles that 
 their fathers had used in Mad Anthony's 
 campaign of eighteen years before, and even 
 some flintlocks — sacred relics of the Revolu- 
 tion. Blacksmiths came up from Cincinnati 
 to mend these worthless weapons, and farmers 
 13 lS 3 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 molded bullets and emptied their powder- 
 horns to supply ammunition. Johnny nursed 
 the sick, for teeth were chattering with ague, 
 and he scoured the country for blankets and 
 shoes, corn and pork. 
 
 Yet this feeble force of five thousand men, 
 under the leadership of a Revolutionary vet- 
 eran who was in his dotage, was expected to 
 cut its way through two hundred miles of 
 Indian -owned forests to Detroit, with five 
 times its number of perfectly equipped sav- 
 ages hanging on the flanks and waiting for 
 orders from British officers in Fort Maiden. 
 
 A cry of fury and despair went up from the 
 poor and scattered settlers on a long frontier, 
 a cry for an army and supplies adequate to 
 the task, with their own Indian - fighter, 
 General Harrison, in command. But Wash- 
 ington was far away, and the peril of the bor- 
 der but an incident to a nation unprepared. 
 After gun and torch and tomahawk had rav- 
 aged the country to the Ohio River, the Old 
 Northwest must defend itself, find the men 
 and money, train its own leaders, and build 
 its own fleet of green timber on Lake Erie. 
 
 There was one thing that these young 
 pioneers knew how to do supremely — how to 
 
 184 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 fell trees, and with them build blockhouses 
 and log bridges, and lay the swamps with 
 corduroy. When the word was given the 
 axes rang up the valley of the Miami. Johnny 
 found Captain Varnum leading his company 
 in a mighty slaughter of ancient timber, and 
 learned that Betty and the children were on 
 the farm. Neighbors were caring for the 
 corn and cattle. When the fighting began 
 they would go down to Marietta. 
 
 "I'll be where the earliest news is to be 
 had, and alarm the people along the border 
 if there is need," Johnny reassured him. 
 
 There was a wild hurrah of relief and pride 
 when word went abroad that the gallant boys 
 had cut their way into Detroit. With such 
 a feeling of security as the Northwest had 
 not had in a year and a half, men returned 
 to their corn-fields, never dreaming that this 
 strong key-fortress could be so speedily lost. 
 But Johnny knew. An amazing mistake 
 had been made. At the rapids of the Maumee, 
 finding the march through the woods ham- 
 pered by the transport of supplies, the food, 
 military stores and medicines were loaded 
 on a sailing-vessel and sent by water. The 
 exhausted troops dropped in the barracks 
 
 185 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 within the gates, only to learn that war had 
 been declared and that the boat had been 
 captured by the British on Lake Erie. A 
 small force of Ohio volunteers was sent back 
 at once to the vine-clad banks of the River 
 Raisin to meet and protect the reinforcements 
 and supplies that had been started north. 
 This was ambushed by a band of Tecumseh's 
 warriors who slipped over from Canada. 
 
 At this news, which struck consternation 
 to the hearts of the defenders, Johnny sought 
 the colonel of the Third Ohio Volunteers. 
 A man seven years younger than himself, 
 Lewis Cass had come out to Marietta in the 
 same year, to study law with Governor Meigs 
 and then to ride the Muskingum Valley cir- 
 cuit. Even at thirty he was a ponderous 
 young man of heavy figure and large, smooth- 
 shaven, immobile face. His words were few 
 and well considered, and he had a reputation 
 for honesty, solid learning, clear thinking, 
 and a quiet, constructive patriotism that 
 must lead to some distinguished service. It 
 was the future Governor who was destined 
 to transform the wilderness of Michigan Ter- 
 ritory into a modern state who answered 
 Johnny's question with deliberation. 
 
 186 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 "A criminal blunder has been committed, 
 and we must pay for it. It will take two 
 years to overcome the mistake. Get out, 
 Johnny, and save all the people you can." 
 
 When Captain David Varnum marched with 
 the second relief party out of the beleaguered 
 fortress, Johnny disappeared in the woods 
 to learn what he could of the enemy's plans 
 from the native Indians. At Brownstown he 
 found a village of friendly Wyandots, whose 
 young braves were out warning the scattered 
 families of French trappers and scouting for 
 the American army. If the fort was sur- 
 rendered they were to take the news to the 
 valleys of the Maumee, Miami and Wabash. 
 Thence it could be carried swiftly to Dayton 
 and Vincennes. With the Ohio border this 
 tribe was unacquainted, and they could not, 
 in any case, reach it in time. 
 
 "Why?" Johnny was startled. 
 Chief Walk-in-the-Water drew a map of 
 the head of Lake Erie in the ashes. Word of 
 a British and Indian victory would be carried 
 by canoe to Sandusky. From there the run- 
 ners would scatter, small bands striking the 
 border at many points at once. Killing 
 and burning everything in their path, they 
 
 187 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 would make for the crossing-places of the 
 Ohio River, and stir up tribes to war from 
 Michigan to Alabama. Braves from San- 
 dusky were with Tecumseh. 
 
 "I cannot believe that!" cried Johnny. 
 11 Chief Crane is a stanch friend of the Ameri- 
 cans, and a wise and honest man." 
 
 There was a shrug. The Grand Sachem 
 was old. Many evil things were done under 
 his nose, and to much that he saw he shut 
 his eyes, for he could no longer hold the hot- 
 heads of his tribe who were all for war. No 
 doubt ample means for carrying out this plot 
 were hidden near his village. 
 
 "Then I must find and destroy them." 
 
 With a bag of parched corn for food, and 
 a horse that knew the narrow trace through 
 the jungle of the Black Swamp which stretched 
 from the Maumee to the Sandusky River, 
 Johnny slipped around the deserted shore of 
 the lake. Making a detour of the populous 
 Indian town, he camped in the edge of the 
 woods on a sandy point that overlooked the 
 wide entrance to the bay. Night after night, 
 in the light of the full moon, when the forest 
 was peopled with a host of shifting shadows 
 and one more could pass unnoticed, he crept 
 
 188 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 down - shore. Near the landing - place and 
 around the village he searched the brush- 
 grown hollows until he found the unopened 
 cases of firearms and ammunition. Not know- 
 ing how much time he would have, and frantic 
 with fear for the thousands of imperiled peo- 
 ple, it was all he could do to wait for the dark 
 of the moon. Then paddling cautiously out 
 in a canoe, he dropped the guns in deep water. 
 The powder he emptied in bog-holes and cov- 
 ered with muck, and to the thirsty sand he 
 gave the kegs of fire-water. 
 
 There was more that he failed to find; but 
 the loss of so much would alarm and delay 
 the runners, and he dared not risk discovery. 
 Moving several miles to the east, he lay 
 hidden on the lake-shore trail, with his horse 
 saddled and tethered in a grassy glade, while 
 he lived on parched corn and wild black- 
 berries. In the long hours of watching he 
 worked out the details of the feat of Logan 
 w T ho, unaided, had fetched twenty-five white 
 women and children out of Fort Wayne and 
 down through a hundred miles of forest swarm- 
 ing with hostile savages, in safety, to Piqua. 
 There was more than a chance that he could 
 do that. Like the foxes of the hills, in whose 
 
 1S9 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 dens he had slept, he knew the twists and 
 turns and secret retreats of every wild way 
 in Ohio. 
 
 The year declined from the zenith and 
 drowsed through the long days of August. 
 At four o'clock in the morning the disk of 
 the dog-star burned like a little moon above 
 the silvery expanse of the most placid of all 
 the Great Lakes. At noon the sun shimmered 
 on a blue field that was seldom ruffled by 
 storm; and it set late, in splendor, behind the 
 violet islands. Sixteen hours a day Johnny 
 watched those low, wooded masses and rocky 
 headlands. In crossing this wide body of 
 water Indians rested midway, and when the 
 weather was clear a camp-fire could be seen, 
 like a flickering red star, low down on the 
 water. But men who turn into demons and 
 run on the devil's errands stop for nothing. 
 It was out from under a rising morning mist 
 that an enormous fleet of canoes appeared 
 and sped toward the bay. As they neared 
 the shore the reckless braves stood up and 
 waved their arms in the contortions of the 
 primitive war-dance. Some leaped over- 
 board and swam to the landing. 
 
 Detroit had surrendered! 
 
 190 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 Johnny dashed into the woods and leaped 
 to the saddle. By riding south, straight down 
 the Scioto trail, he could make sure of rescu- 
 ing Betty and her children. But if he did 
 that the scattered settlers along the lake 
 shore, and the many people on the nearer 
 border for a hundred miles southwestward 
 from Cleveland, would have no warning. 
 Massacre unchecked would run red to the 
 Great Crossing of the Muskingum. 
 
 Digging the only pair of spurs he ever 
 owned into the flanks of the horse, he galloped 
 east. All day he pounded through heavy 
 sands and struggled across the wide, marshy 
 mouths of the innumerable waterways. At 
 isolated cabins standing in corn-fields and 
 orchards he called out his message. It was 
 dusk when his horse fell dead before a door 
 where a family ran out from a rude supper- 
 table at his shout: 
 
 "Detroit has fallen! Indians coming! 
 Keep off the trails! Warn your neighbors! 
 Take the news to Cleveland! A horse and 
 food!" 
 
 From a fresh mount he drank a gourd of 
 milk. A woman stuffed his pockets with hoe- 
 cakes. In five minutes he was gone into the 
 
 191 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 twilight aisles of the border trail. Thunder- 
 ing through the sloughs, and up and down 
 the undulations of the watershed, he blew 
 blasts from a sawed-off powder-horn that 
 could be heard a mile. With his trumpet-call, 
 which sounded like the day of judgment, he 
 aroused cabins and settlements where people 
 slept with their doors open in the stifling heat 
 of the August night. Into the darkness and 
 into the ghostly light of a late-rising moon 
 they sprang from their beds. Many began 
 to harness their oxen and horses to old cara- 
 vans, and to bring out their household goods, 
 but Johnny cried: 
 
 "Fly at once! Take what food you can, 
 and pile onto your horses ! Turn your cattle 
 and pigs loose in the woods ! Hide the women 
 and children in the nursery until the Indians 
 have passed! The men must stay out to 
 warn every family they can reach! Then 
 make for the nearest stockade through the 
 wildest glens and swamps! If that is crowd- 
 ed, go by night marches, afoot, to the Ohio 
 River!" " 
 
 On through the short summer night he 
 rode. In the earliest hours in the morning 
 his horse flagged in his pace. He dragged 
 
 IQ2 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 the saddle off and turned the animal into a 
 grassy glade to give him a chance of life. 
 At the next cabin, a mile away, he captured 
 a half-broken colt in a pasture. His ears 
 
 HE BLEW BLASTS FROM A SAWED-OFF POWDER-HORN 
 THAT COULD BE HEARD A MILE 
 
 193 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 ringing with screams, a panorama of horror- 
 stricken faces swimming before his eyes, he 
 raced on. 
 
 He saw the sick carried from their beds, 
 and he herded families that, in the moment 
 of panic, would have scattered. In an or- 
 chard, her apron full of windfalls, he found 
 a half -foolish and palsied grandmother who 
 had been forgotten. Sweeping her up to 
 the saddle, he restored her to the distracted 
 family. At a log mill he ran into a dozen 
 farmers who were waiting for their grist, ten 
 and twenty miles from their homes. Par- 
 alyzed for a moment by his message, they 
 stood like dead trees, then leaped to their 
 horses and fled. 
 
 In the middle of the second night he heard 
 yells and saw the smoky flare of pine-knot 
 torches. A bullet whistled by his head, and 
 his colt leaped as if shot and sped like an 
 arrow. Rising in the stirrups, Johnny gave 
 the war-whoop to deceive the Indians into 
 thinking him one of themselves. Cold sweat 
 burst from every pore. Massacre and burn- 
 ing had overtaken him! In a dawn of rose 
 and gold and amethyst he passed a cabin 
 whose smoldering ruin was ringed with 
 
 194 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 charred corn. Slain animals lay on the 
 ground, but by some miracle the people had 
 escaped. But looking down a small water- 
 way he heard triumphant yells and saw a 
 great volume of fiery smoke billow up from 
 the woods. 
 
 At that he reeled in his saddle and ceased 
 to think. He was still a trumpet-call — a 
 voice crying in a wilderness of nameless hor- 
 rors — but his mind was lifted above con- 
 scious thought in one wild prayer for Betty 
 and her little brood. In this hour of an- 
 guish he remembered the pallid face and wide 
 blue eyes that the war -orphaned child of 
 the cove above the shipyard at Marietta had 
 turned upon him. Now, in tortured fancy, he 
 saw her so again, but lying among the ferns 
 on the creek bank, staring up at God. 
 
 It was true that her home lay on the Piqua 
 trail, twenty miles within the border; but 
 the beautiful place was widely known, and 
 even in the first rush the Indians would go 
 out of their way to destroy it. Every farm 
 that he passed had been swept by fire, and 
 ghastly shapes lay on the ground. And now 
 another messenger was abroad — smoke. In 
 the dead air of a day of humidity heavy vapors 
 
 195 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 were unable to rise above the canopy of the 
 forest. The vistas were blue with the suffo- 
 cating cloud, and flights of complaining wood- 
 pigeons streamed out to the clearer air of the 
 hilltops. 
 
 He had turned eastward on the long home- 
 stretch when he overtook Logan on horseback 
 with his ten-year-old daughter Ellen on a 
 pony. Not knowing that Detroit had surren- 
 dered the chief had left Piqua two days be- 
 fore to take this child, who was the apple 
 of his eye, to Chillicothe out of the perils 
 of savage warfare. From there he meant 
 to send her on to the family of his foster- 
 father, Captain Logan, near Lexington, Ken- 
 tucky. Now he transferred her to Johnny's 
 care. 
 
 "My wife will not leave her people, and 
 the lads are braves who must share the fate 
 of their tribe. Nelly will not delay you. 
 She can ride as hard and fast as you. Take 
 her on with you and save your friends. I 
 will ride down the border to Dayton." 
 
 "Have you heard anything of Captain 
 Varnum?" 
 
 "Fell in a second ambush on the River 
 
 Raisin." 
 
 196 
 
TRAGEDY 
 
 They gripped hands with the sense of loss 
 which comes from a last parting. 
 
 As they separated the dark father and 
 child faced each other. "Farewell, Nelly. 
 The lodge will be lonely without you. Love 
 your new home and friends. Grow up 
 white." Their looks clung to each other 
 until the chief wheeled and galloped away. 
 Their next meeting was in the land of the 
 Great Spirit, for Logan was killed in the fol- 
 lowing year when scouting for General Har- 
 rison. If this little royal exile shed a tear, 
 now, no one knew. Burying her face in the 
 pony's long mane she raced after Johnny. 
 
 Along the smoke-dimmed, winding trail the 
 endless lines of motionless trees made the 
 shadowy, inescapable walls of a labyrinth seen 
 in a nightmare. The sun had begun to de- 
 cline when Johnny swayed dizzily on smelling 
 burned wood and roasted apples. His horse 
 shied and bolted, leaving him on the wreck- 
 age of the wagon-gate of Betty's home. 
 Within the circle of blasted orchard trees the 
 field-stone chimney stood above the dying 
 embers of the house. 
 
IX 
 
 THE SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 H1LD GUARD shot out of the 
 thicket on the flood bank when 
 | Johnny ran down the creek, 
 leaped ferociously, and then 
 fawned upon him in frantic 
 delight and raced back to the 
 nursery. Johnny put his lips to the close- 
 woven, leafy screen. 
 
 "Betty! Are you all there? Safe?" 
 His knees gave way under him when he 
 heard the breath of a reply. On the other 
 side he knew that she too knelt, thanking 
 God that he was here. After a moment he 
 was able to whisper: 
 
 "Wait. There are some things I must do." 
 
 He gave the whinnying pony a slap on the 
 
 flank that sent him flying across the water 
 
 and into the woods. No grazing animal could 
 
 starve, and in summer it was not likely to be 
 
 198 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 attacked by wolves. Then he turned to the 
 painted savage who lay not a hundred yards 
 
 away, a ghastly thing with his throat torn 
 open by Old Guard, and dragged the body 
 into the densest part of the undergrowth. 
 Washing the dog's bloody muzzle in the 
 creek, he bade him run up the slope and jump 
 into the inclosure. Scrambling over the sway- 
 ing trellis, he pulled Ellen up after him. 
 
 Betty was crouched with the children in 
 the cave-like hollow at the back, behind the 
 plantation of apple-twigs. Out of her drawn 
 and colorless face her heavily ringed eyes 
 stared like the unseeing eyes of the dead. 
 But for her terror-stricken little people there 
 was merciful diversion in the Indian maid. 
 A gorgeous tropical bird dropping from the 
 sky could not have astonished them more. 
 In her petticoat of crimson cloth, her elabo- 
 rately beaded moccasin-leggings of deerskin, 
 and the jaunty blue jacket that dripped silver 
 buttons, she looked to be all that Johnny 
 
 described her. 
 
 "This is Princess Nelly Logan, of 1 lqua. 
 
 Nothing but friendly and admiring looks 
 greeted the forlorn and blameless child; but 
 the Princess Nelly shrank back. She had 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 seen such things as must make white people 
 turn with horror from one of her race. With 
 the face of a stone image, but a heaving 
 breast, she stood aloof until Mary-go-'round 
 ran and laid a rosy cheek against her own of 
 warm bronze. 
 
 "I never had a sister. Let's be twin 
 sisters." 
 
 "All right." There was a tear that Mary 
 kissed away. The two little girls lay down 
 together on a bed of leaves in the cave, with 
 their arms around each other like the babes 
 in the woods, when Johnny whispered that 
 they must all go to sleep at once, so they 
 would be rested for travel at night. When 
 he went back to the screen with the sentinel 
 dog, Betty followed him. 
 
 "What — what has happened?" 
 
 "Detroit has fallen." 
 
 With a choking sound she swayed against 
 him. A question about David was on her blue 
 lips, but she forbore to ask it, and Johnny did 
 not tell her. She could bear no more, and 
 would need all the hope and courage she could 
 keep to sustain her in the terrible days to 
 come. At this moment her distracted mind 
 must be turned into safer channels. 
 
 200 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 "Dear Betty, think of the children you 
 must help me save, and try to sleep," he 
 begged. But when, staggering from the ex- 
 haustion of he knew not how many hours of 
 waking, he fell in a limp heap at her feet, he 
 knew that she would sit there beside him, 
 shuddering, all the waning afternoon. Katy- 
 dids were calling across the dusk when she 
 woke him and gave him bread and told him 
 the brief story of their escape. 
 
 "The smoke alarmed me. Wood-pigeons 
 streamed out, complaining, as if the whole 
 border was on fire. Then chickens, pigs 
 and cattle were on the trail. I sent the chil- 
 dren on ahead. The dog drove the farm 
 animals into the woods, and I got a basket 
 of food and the children's shoes. We heard 
 — things that will ring in our ears forever. 
 When they had burned the house the Indians 
 searched for us. And after a band went by 
 overhead Old Guard dashed out at some- 
 thing — someone — ' ' 
 
 "Don't think about it any more." The 
 thought of the death that had almost tracked 
 her and hers to this hiding-place turned his 
 own heart to ashes. She did make an effort 
 to think of other things, and pointed to the 
 
 20I 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 trampled nursery in mute distress. At that 
 Johnny could find it in him to smile. 
 
 "I'm glad. Oh, I pray to God that all my 
 nurseries may lie in ruins under the feet of 
 people who escaped the fate of their homes 
 and orchards." 
 
 Now they must plan what they were to do. 
 He told her that they might not find safe 
 shelter until they reached the Ohio. Once 
 across the Scioto, they could make for Bel- 
 pre through the wild country which lay back 
 of the valley of the Hocking, avoiding the 
 river, the trails and the settlements. And on 
 their way they must rescue every one they 
 could. While Johnny went out to find the 
 rowboat, where it was hidden among the 
 willows, Betty gathered up the food and 
 knotted the children's leather shoe-strings. 
 Then, looking at the Princess Nelly, she 
 thought of something that would not have 
 occurred to the wisest man. 
 
 "My dear! This will never do! Have you 
 nothing plainer to wear?" 
 
 Few backwoods families ever had anything 
 more than the ugliest and scantiest of cloth- 
 ing, and they went barefooted eight months 
 in the year. This beautiful raiment on one 
 
 202 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 of the feared and hated race would a me 
 bitter resentment, and perhaps violence, in 
 poor fugitives. With loving compassion she 
 helped the little girl into a linscy slip and 
 clumsy shoes, and hid the offending splendor 
 in the small bundle of necessaries that she 
 carried on her back. 
 
 Johnny had them all lie down in the boat. 
 Using an oar for a rudder to keep the light 
 craft in the shadow of the bank, he let it 
 drift down the dark stream. The moon would 
 not rise until three o'clock in the morning. 
 Before midnight they reached the stockade 
 on the Scioto. The settlement had been 
 burned, and the tiny fort was crowded. Many 
 had gone by to Chillicothe, and more were 
 arriving every hour. One family had been 
 overtaken and massacred in full view of the 
 gate. The bodies would have to he out 
 until morning. Crying had been heard, of 
 a child or a panther, or perhaps an Indian to 
 lure rescuers to an ambush. 
 
 Telling a sentinel that he would remain 
 near this crossing of trails as long as people 
 continued to come, and save all he could, 
 Johnny went down. He was getting into the 
 boat when the sheep-dog came out of the 
 
 203 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 undergrowth with the handle of a splint 
 basket in his mouth. Betty lifted the baby 
 that a doomed mother had pushed into the 
 brush as she ran, and hushed its wail of hunger 
 with a bit of maple sugar tied up in a ker- 
 chief. For the first time in that long day of 
 horrors she found the relief of tears. 
 
 Johnny turned the boat into the Scioto. 
 A mile down-stream he shot it across to a 
 point on the eastern bank where a parting 
 of the hills was covered with small swamp- 
 timber. In late summer the ground was 
 nearly dry, but under the low branches of the 
 trees it was all a tangle of pea-vines, noi- 
 some water-weeds, and thorny shrubs. In the 
 black jungle snakes had to be risked. Taking 
 three-year-old Jimmy on his back, and post- 
 ing the dog at the rear, he broke the way to 
 a grassy opening. 
 
 "Not here," he signaled. Plunging into the 
 woods, he mounted a grassy rise that was 
 covered with acres of wild grapes. The 
 scared and weary children dropped, sobbing, 
 in the pitch blackness of the leafy tents. 
 Wise little Ellen Logan put her hand firmly 
 and repeatedly over every quivering mouth, 
 and whispered that it was dangerous to cry. 
 
 204 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 With a word of reassurance and orders to Old 
 Guard, Johnny was gone. Making his way 
 back to the stockade, he lay below the trail 
 with his ear to the ground until he heard the 
 beat of galloping hoofs and the rumble of a 
 wagon. Pursuit was close behind this fleeing 
 family when he sprang to the horses' heads. 
 
 "Jump out! Throw out your food! ,, He 
 fairly hurled them into the brush, and lashed 
 the horses into a run down the steep bank 
 and across the ford. The shots that rang from 
 the blockhouse were returned by the Indians 
 as they dashed by and plunged into the riv- 
 er. In the confusion of loud noises, Johnny 
 reached out a hand and spoke to the sturdy 
 young German who was comforting his weep- 
 ing wife. 
 
 "Hermann, take your wife and child down 
 to the boat and stay there with them." 
 When he had a load of rescued people he left 
 this first man to watch the trails, and went 
 down the river. 
 
 Betty came out of the black camp with the 
 infant whose screams of hunger imperiled 
 them all. "Is there a woman here with a 
 baby? She must give one breast to this 
 
 motherless child." 
 
 205 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Dawn glimmered in the forest fastness as 
 the third boat-load was brought in. One 
 family had a bag of meal and a small iron 
 kettle. A fire was built in a wild-grape tepee, 
 and by instalments enough mush was boiled 
 for thirty people. Remembering that farm 
 animals were everywhere at large, Betty took 
 Old Guard's long muzzle in her hands and 
 looked into his intelligent eyes. 
 
 11 Drive home the cows." 
 
 The sheep-dog was plainly puzzled; but 
 presently he put his nose to the ground and 
 trotted away. The sun was high when, with 
 all the pride of discovery, he brought in two 
 cows with dripping udders. 
 
 For two days and another night the wom- 
 en and children lay hidden, with the dog 
 and one man to guard them, while Johnny 
 and the other men took turns in watching 
 the trails and scouring the woods. Every 
 hour exhausted and half-crazed people were 
 brought in. Some came down from the 
 stockade, which held only a small supply of 
 food, and was liable at any time to be at- 
 tacked in force. A woman was found in a 
 hollow tree. Two children were traced to 
 a blackberry - patch, to which they had 
 
 206 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 been led by the almost human footprints 
 of bears. 
 
 In the wild flight naked feet had been cruel- 
 ly bruised and cut, so that many could not 
 hope to keep up on the hard night marches. 
 Ellen helped solve that problem. Going about 
 timidly, she bathed the wounds and bound 
 them with cool plantain leaves. From a 
 horse-blanket Betty cut bag moccasins with 
 a hunting-knife, and laced them about ankles 
 with strips from a rawhide harness. The 
 men fashioned soles of tough beech bark, and 
 tied them on with raveled hemp rope. 
 
 More than a hundred people followed 
 Johnny on the first night's march down a 
 ravine whose ribbon of bright water was 
 arched over by phantasmal sycamores. Night 
 after night they made their slow way over 
 forest-clad ridges, through tangled slashings 
 and gullies, and baffling mazes of laurel on 
 rough hillsides. By day they camped in wild 
 vineyards, in deep, brush-grown pockets of the 
 hills, and in the dry beds of ponds in the 
 middle of rustling marshes. At times war- 
 whoops came faintly to their ears, and along 
 some distant, elevated trail pine-knot torches 
 glimmered like fireflies. When smoke from 
 
 207 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 a burning cabin or settlement drifted over 
 them, more people would be found huddled 
 in a cave or in one of Johnny's nurseries. 
 
 Famine marched with them, although food 
 was in abundance. The smallest stream had 
 fish; the wild oats were full of quail; myr- 
 iads of water-fowl skimmed every pond ; and 
 flocks of turkeys fed in the oak and chestnut 
 groves on last year's withered acorns and 
 nuts. But they dared not fire a rifle, nor 
 cook any savory thing whose odor would be- 
 tray them. Only in the most hidden situa- 
 tions, indeed, could they venture to roast the 
 potatoes and corn which they found about 
 the few deserted cabins that had been over- 
 looked by the Indians. The cows that Old 
 Guard drove in kept the children alive. Once 
 meal was discovered in a half -burnt mill 
 which had broken from its moorings and 
 drifted into back-water. 
 
 A small number of people, able to scatter 
 and move about freely by day, could have 
 foraged for plums, beaten out the oats, and 
 dug lily roots in the marshes. But this fur- 
 tive and flying company grew to a small 
 army, and every addition to the ranks in- 
 creased the suffering and peril of all. Speech 
 
 208 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 was abandoned. They fell into the silence 
 of fortitude or listening terror, of dumb be- 
 wilderment or dull misery. Johnny had to 
 shorten the marches. On the last night there 
 was a journey of only a few hours to be made, 
 but that was in the rough knobs of the Ohio 
 River. Up and down the steep hills, densely 
 wooded with oaks and hickories, staggering 
 men carried limp children and fainting women 
 supported one another. Johnny's cheering 
 word went back to spur the falling line to 
 another effort. 
 
 11 Courage now! Almost there!" 
 After a terrible hour they broke through to 
 thinner growth on the crest of a grassy, spur- 
 like ridge. A gun-shot brought them to a 
 standstill, with such a shock of cruel fright 
 that women and children sank weeping to the 
 ground. 
 
 "Halt! Who's there?" The challenge 
 came up from below, where, at every ten rods 
 of the three miles of rail fence w T hich stretched 
 along the woods at the top of the farms, 
 Belpre had posted a sentinel. 
 
 " Johnny Appleseed with refugees." 
 Young Waldo Putnam ran up from the 
 fields, and dropped his rifle when he saw that 
 
 209 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 famishing host. "The Lord save us, John- 
 ny ! How are we to care for all the perishing 
 people who are coming down upon us? Every 
 house is full to the ridge-pole, and two hun- 
 dred are living in Farmers' Castle. We have 
 food, but no shelter." 
 
 "Is any one living on Isle le Beau?" 
 
 "Not now. You know Indians never stop 
 there, but the tenant took his niggers and lit 
 out for Kentucky like a scared rabbit when 
 the first runners made the crossing." 
 
 "We'll camp in the woods on the lower end 
 of the island." 
 
 People who had dropped were dragged to 
 their feet again. For a mile the low ridge 
 ran across the meadows, dividing the farm 
 village into the upper and lower towns, and 
 rising to a hundred-foot bluff above the water. 
 They could hear the rustling corn and smell 
 the laden orchards, but the scattered houses 
 of the long street that fronted the river were 
 dark. Johnny laid Betty in the midst of her 
 spent children under the cedars. Almost fall- 
 ing down the slope in his haste and weakness, 
 he hammered on Colonel Cushing's door. 
 
 A strange, wild figure, stricken with famine, 
 transfigured by his errand, he was. Since he 
 
 2IO 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 left Dayton in May he had been in the wilder- 
 ness, in such stress of mind and circumstances 
 that his dark hair had grown to his shoulders 
 and fallen about his gaunt face. His shirt 
 was in tatters, and because they impeded his 
 movements he had cut his ragged trousers 
 to the knees, exposing his scarred and swol- 
 len legs and bark-sandaled feet. The family, 
 startled from their beds by what they thought 
 an Indian alarm, were not certain of his 
 identity until, with a frantic cry, he crumpled 
 up in the doorway. 
 
 "Help for starving people in the cedar- 
 grove on the bluff !" 
 
 Doors flew open and lights appeared. 
 People boiled out of the houses and the 
 timber chateau of Farmers' Castle like bees 
 from hives, and swarmed on the beach. There 
 was a confusion of shouts and running foot- 
 steps. Johnny fainted from sheer relief when 
 he saw the huge negro, Kitt Putnam, in the 
 van of the stalwart men who started up the 
 bluff to carry the helpless down. When he 
 came to himself, with his head in Mrs. Cush- 
 ing's lap and a cup of warm milk at his lips, 
 the boats and the ferry were being manned, 
 and the young girls of Belpre, in their light 
 
 211 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 summer gowns, were moving about with 
 candles, ministering to the prostrate crowd on 
 the sand. 
 
 It was near morning before all were got 
 across. In the fear that some Indian might 
 be lurking about, sentinels were posted at 
 the landing-place. Family groups slept wher- 
 ever they dropped in that woodland sanctuary 
 — slept to waken late in the day, to be fed and 
 comforted, and to sleep again. So the scores 
 that Johnny had led to safety won their way 
 back to health and sanity, and to the taking 
 up of their broken lives. 
 
 Six weeks later he returned to Belpre. 
 Knowing the country as did no one else, he 
 had guided a force of armed and mounted 
 men from the Ohio River settlements, all over 
 the region up to Zanesville and the new town 
 of Columbus, to relieve the beleaguered stock- 
 ades, bury the dead, and round up the farm 
 animals in the woods. It was incredible that 
 civilized human beings would ever re-people 
 that desolated wilderness; but no other talk 
 was heard than to fight it out, then to go 
 back and begin again. 
 
 Such courage and faith thrilled Johnny. 
 With autumn colors flaming against the sil- 
 
 212 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 very blue of Indian-summer skies, it was seed- 
 time, and he must be off to replant his ruined 
 nurseries, in such wild solitude and danger 
 as he had never faced before. Wolves would 
 increase and become bolder. There would be 
 no friendly faces to greet him, no sheltering 
 cabins except in the few, defensible settle- 
 ments, no Indian camps on the Great Trail. 
 And he must stay out nine months in the 
 year, traveling fast and incessantly, to keep 
 his plots from being overrun with weeds and 
 forest seedlings. 
 
 His dark-gray eyes burned with zeal when 
 he brought Mrs. Cushing in haste to the door 
 to assure him that his seeds and tools had 
 come up from Cincinnati. The Princess Nel- 
 ly's beautiful, long-tailed pony had been 
 found, and Johnny ran to the mill to arrange 
 for Kitt Putnam to be spared a week to take 
 the chief's little daughter on in state to 
 Kentucky. Aside from Kitt's special quali- 
 ties, no escort was as safe for woman or child 
 as a negro, upon whom the most savage Indi- 
 an looked with sympathy as a dark-skinned 
 brother of misfortune. 
 
 Colonel Cushing was drilling raw recruits 
 on the beach — "licking these young cubs into 
 
 213 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 shape so General Harrison can use 'em," he 
 explained to Johnny. In bordering states, 
 and in every far-flung settlement of the Old 
 Northwest, there was grim determination to 
 overcome this paralyzing disaster. Here in 
 Belpre the new wheat was being ground; 
 wheel and loom hummed and clattered in ev- 
 ery house, and grandmothers and little girls 
 knitted in the sun for the soldiers. Pigs 
 were being fattened; standing corn and the 
 recovered horses and cattle guarded in field 
 and pasture, and potatoes and apples gath- 
 ered to store in winter pits. 
 
 Never had Johnny seen such a harvest of 
 apples. They lay in glowing heaps under the 
 trees of three miles of almost continuous 
 orchards, coloring the earth and perfuming 
 the air. All the old fall and winter favorites 
 were there — the Bellflowers and Pippins, the 
 Greenings and Spies, the Seek -no -furthers 
 and Never-fails, the Russets and Rambos. 
 Very early in the last century this town, on 
 its rich, alluvial meadow, became famous for 
 the cargoes of fruit that it shipped to New 
 Orleans. This crop was to have gone into 
 the hold of the Comet, the amazing new steam- 
 boat that went plunging and shrieking like 
 
 214 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 some fiery dragon up and down the forest- 
 walled floods of the Ohio and Mississippi. 
 
 Johnny's instant thought was that, in the 
 matter of orchards, the river settlements 
 could now take care of themselves, and after 
 the war there would be nurserymen in the 
 larger towns. He was released to work in 
 the backwoods. Now for an hour he gave 
 himself up to the pleasure of strolling under 
 the trees which were dropping their leaves 
 in preparation for peaceful sleep, and feasting 
 on the fruit in the company of this New- 
 Englander of such genial and sterling vir- 
 tues. They spoke of the refugees on Isle le 
 Beau. Many had already gone on to friends, 
 and shelter must be found for all before winter 
 set in. As for the orphans, there would al- 
 ways be "room for one or two more" under 
 Colonel Cushing's roof. 
 
 "My good wife and I are getting on in 
 years, Johnny, but we'll take in all we can. 
 I guess the youngsters won't mind sleeping 
 three in a bed. There'll be a bed for you, too, 
 if it turns my rheumatic old bones out on the 
 floor. What will you do now?" 
 
 "Go back. Begin again." 
 
 "Hm, yes, after the war we'll all have to 
 15 215 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 begin again. Johnny, we meant to pay you 
 for this bounty in one lump sum when we sold 
 the surplus of this crop. Now we must keep 
 what we have for the army and to feed home- 
 less people. But better days are coming. 
 When the war is over the East is going to 
 break up and move West." 
 
 Then the eager words tumbled out: "You 
 can pay me now with a horse, a blanket and 
 a bag of meal. There must be orchard trees 
 to set out when these brave people return to 
 their fire-swept clearings. No," he inter- 
 rupted the shocked protest, "I shall not starve 
 and the Indians will not molest me. An 
 apple-twig in his bridle protects my horse 
 from thieves. Good-by! Unless you set up 
 cider-mills so I can get seeds down here, I 
 may not see you again. New-comers will 
 pour into the Indian lands that will be for- 
 feited or purchased now, and I must go west- 
 ward on the crest of every new wave." 
 
 He gripped the hand of this long-time friend 
 and turned away at once. So he had parted 
 from David Varnum and Logan. So, with a 
 sharper pang, he must part from Betty and 
 miss from his life the little Eden that had, 
 for so many years, been his heart's home on 
 
 216 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 the border. Until the little boys grew up, 
 he thought, she would be obliged to live in 
 Marietta, where David's people and Dr. True 
 would see that she lacked nothing. Except 
 in spirit he could hold to no one. He could 
 foresee his life as one long story of hail and 
 farewell. 
 
 In a voice gone husky Colonel Cushing 
 bade him Godspeed. These bowering orchards 
 were the gift of this missionary of peace and 
 beauty and brotherly love who had woven 
 himself into the very fabric of their lives. 
 Now they were losing him, and to the chil- 
 dren of the third generation he would be a 
 legend, his blossoming and fruiting memo- 
 rials benefits forgot. With a lump in his 
 throat and misty eyes he watched Johnny 
 stride across the fields and beach, and launch 
 a canoe — watched until he had leaped to the 
 landing and disappeared among the majestic 
 trees of Isle le Beau. 
 
 That Fairy Island! Its queen in ruined 
 exile, her white palace stood in a stained and 
 battered beauty. On the weedy lawn bare 
 patches marked the bonfires of vandals. The 
 tall picket fence of the garden was down, with 
 its wall-fruit trees barked and dead. Behind 
 
 217 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 the classic pillars of the curving verandas 
 that flanked the front, baled hemp was stored, 
 inviting the accidental fire which destroyed 
 the historic mansion on the Christmas eve 
 of that year. Within, the wainscoted hall 
 had been turned into a sleeping -kennel by 
 black field laborers. The Cushings and Put- 
 nams had rescued the spinet, a portion of the 
 library, and much else, in a forlorn hope that 
 the owners would return to claim them. But 
 here were torn draperies hanging from broken 
 windows, wrecked furniture, shattered mir- 
 rors, wanton bullet-holes, dishonored books, 
 cobwebs, dust, and the dissolution that comes 
 to the house untenanted. 
 
 At the end of the two-mile walk across the 
 pastures and up through the woods he found 
 Betty sitting on a fallen log, directing a group 
 of women in cutting and sewing new gar- 
 ments. In a secret closet of Mrs. Blenner- 
 hasset's big garret workroom, where her free 
 black servants had spun and wove and fash- 
 ioned clothing for a numerous and lavish 
 household, some bolts of linen and woolen 
 cloth had been discovered, and a store of 
 knitting-yarns. 
 
 Betty was in black for David. All her 
 
 218 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 bright color was gone. Something of youth 
 had left her, never to return, but there was 
 in her grave and gentle look the quiet forti- 
 tude and decision with which frail and timid 
 women often meet disaster and stand erect 
 under crushing burdens. She did not speak 
 of her bereavement at once, but of busy days. 
 She had been of use to these poor, distracted 
 women who had never had much to work with. 
 Then she spoke of the happy children, who 
 had forgotten that time of suffering and ter- 
 ror, and were having an unforgetable holiday 
 in the freedom and joy of the woods of Isle 
 le Beau. 
 
 Small fires were being replenished to cook 
 the noonday meal, and Old Guard was round- 
 ing up the scattered children who were forag- 
 ing with the squirrels for the falling nuts, 
 when Johnny and Betty walked down to the 
 tapering point of the island. Autumn rains 
 had not yet begun, and the River Beautiful 
 was at its lowest and clearest, a gently flowing 
 current of heavenly blue. In the absence of 
 shipping it had slipped back at once into its 
 old, wild solitude. 
 
 Betty sat on a rocky grotto, so pale and 
 still, with her chin cupped in her palm, that 
 
 219 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Johnny's heart went out to her in that early 
 passion of protecting love. He knew now 
 that he must love her forever. 
 
 "Tired, Betty?" 
 
 "No. Thinking of all I must do — alone." 
 
 "It will come right. You will go to Ma- 
 rietta soon?" 
 
 "For the winter — until the war is over." 
 She turned to him a face of bright bravery 
 and high resolve. "We are going back. 
 David would not rest in his soldier's grave 
 with his children growing up in dependence. 
 I will let his people help me with seed and 
 tools and cattle; and that first family you 
 rescued on the Scioto trail will go with us — 
 strong young Germans who lost their all. I 
 have too much land, and can make it worth 
 while for them to stay with us for ten years. 
 We can live in a half -faced camp the first 
 year. It will be hard, but indeed, Johnny, 
 I could not live anywhere else. The place 
 is peopled with memories. There is a little, 
 lonely grave. It will be long before we have 
 such comforts, and our home will never be as 
 beautiful again, but — " 
 
 "It shall be as beautiful. I am going back 
 
 now." 
 
 220 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 She gave a little cry of fright and grief. 
 Then her face kindled. "It — it makes one 
 brave just to look at you. People tell me 
 it will be so hard that it may well shorten 
 my life/' 
 
 Whatever his own sense of coming sorrow 
 and loss, he could not but choose the best for 
 her. "He who loseth his life shall find it." 
 
 "I never understood that before — why you 
 have to go back now, and perish if you must." 
 After she had eased her heart in quiet weeping, 
 she spoke again. "There are so many things 
 David wanted to do — give land for a school- 
 house, have regular church services, clear the 
 forest of wolves and breed sheep, send the 
 boys to the academy at Marietta; do all the 
 things that are necessary to keep the next 
 generation around us from falling back into 
 rudeness, ignorance and impiety. He left 
 those tasks in trust to me." 
 
 As they walked back to the camp she told 
 him that she would have some things of the 
 old days to keep memory green. A week be- 
 fore the alarm she had had an impulse to 
 gather up treasures of the heart — David's 
 Bible, Johnny's little rocking-chair in which 
 she had nursed all her children, Aunt Alary 
 
 221 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Lake's cooky-jar, and her wedding-gown for 
 Mary's great day of happiness, and hide 
 them in the cave in the nursery. And now 
 she had another — Mrs. Blennerhasset's riding- 
 habit of scarlet broadcloth which had been 
 left in the workroom closet for repairs. 
 
 "I can see that kind and beautiful lady 
 every time I look at it — the Fairy Queen who 
 had only to wave her wand to give every 
 one pleasure. Out of that I shall make a cir- 
 cular cloak. The color of it in our soberly 
 clad lives! As a child I remember thinking 
 that no hour could be so dark and cold that 
 this glowing thing would not warm and 
 cheer it." 
 
 Nearly twenty years afterward, in an hour 
 of darkness, of bitter cold and wild storm, 
 Johnny remembered these wistful words and 
 spread that mantle above her. Now, with the 
 old look of pale exaltation, he parted from her 
 until the war should be ended, and crossed 
 to Belpre. He spent the short afternoon in 
 preparations for departure, made a supper of 
 apples, and camped in the cedar-grove on the 
 bluff. 
 
 Joy came with the morning that was crisp 
 with a light rime of hoar-frost. So early 
 
 222 
 
SAVIOR OF THE REFUGEES 
 
 that no one was stirring in the town, he rode 
 through the fragrant orchards and out over 
 the Bloody Way, to begin another dozen 
 years of work that should make that ravaged 
 wilderness bloom again. 
 
X 
 
 FRESH FIELDS 
 
 DOZEN years after the close of 
 the war Johnny's new orchards 
 blossomed and fruited in little 
 towns and on well-cleared farms 
 all the way out to the head- 
 waters of the Miami, but John- 
 ny was not there to see them. 
 
 For the thousands of people who had come 
 to live in the Ohio River Valley the year 
 eighteen hundred and twenty-five was marked 
 by the completion of the Cumberland Road 
 to Wheeling, Virginia, and by the journey 
 to the new West of the Marquis de Lafayette. 
 It was a triumph of pioneer energy and faith 
 that the nation's aged guest was able to travel 
 by post from the Potomac, and then by a 
 palatial steamboat to St. Louis. Banquets 
 and balls were given him in river ports of 
 astonishing size and resources, and far up 
 
 224 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 in Indiana, at the head of navigation on the 
 Wabash, a venturesome settlement was made 
 in that year and named in his honor. 
 
 It was thus that the floods of population 
 and trade had fallen down the Ohio and 
 backed up the larger tributaries. But behind 
 and above these navigable streams the coun- 
 try of Johnny's beautiful labors was still 
 heavily wooded and thinly settled, and must 
 remain so until canals and railroads ended 
 their isolation. 
 
 Even there, however, people were living in 
 comfort and security. What Indians were 
 left were confined to reservations; w r ild ani- 
 mals w r ere disappearing, and little flocks fed 
 on a thousand hills. Few children were more 
 than five miles from a log school-house, and 
 few families farther than a half -day's journey 
 from a mill town near which Johnny had a 
 flourishing nursery. In the matter of or- 
 chards this region, too, could now grow its 
 own supply while the sower was off to fields 
 unsown. 
 
 To the people of America a new door of 
 dreams had been set ajar. With the boom- 
 ing of successive cannon from Buffalo to 
 the Battery, an all-water route w r as opened 
 
 225 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 through the Erie Canal, from the mountain- 
 walled seaboard to the prairies and forests 
 that lay back of Toledo and Detroit. Sailing- 
 vessels and steamers from the old Indian 
 trading-posts around the Great Lakes waited 
 at the Niagara docks to transfer their wild 
 cargoes of peltries, maple sugar, tan -bark, 
 potash, dried huckleberries and boiled honey, 
 to canal barges. They returned loaded to 
 the guard-rails with eager emigrants and all 
 their worldly goods. From the boat-yards 
 of Cleveland, and from the orchards and corn- 
 fields of the lake shore westward to Sandusky, 
 Johnny had glimpses of the magnitude of this 
 new migration as he went over his territory 
 planting seeds, distributing trees, selling his 
 nurseries to responsible men for the small 
 sums that would outfit him for this new ven- 
 ture, and taking leave of old friends. 
 
 No one tried to dissuade him; indeed, 
 many rejoiced. The setting sun has always 
 been the shining goal of men, and America 
 is still breeding a tribe of Israelites who move 
 on, seeking the land of Canaan. Scarred vet- 
 erans of pioneering in the rough hills of Ohio 
 and western Pennsylvania also struck out 
 for the level lands of Michigan and Indiana. 
 
 226 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 And no reason could be urged against his 
 going. At fifty-one Johnny was ageless. His 
 dark hair was pointed with silver, it is true, 
 but his senses were as keen and his wiry fig- 
 ure as active, erect and tireless as they had 
 ever been. To him time was an illusion of 
 the mind, and seasons existed only in the 
 soul. It was the springtime of life so long 
 as the vision beckoned and the spirit leaped 
 to some task undone. 
 
 He was now gleaning seeds at the cider- 
 mills in his earliest orchards at Chillicothe, 
 Belpre and up the Muskingum Valley. Late 
 in February he crossed from Zanesville to 
 Columbus on short relays of horses that could 
 be returned at once to their owners. On his 
 way to Detroit he stopped for his farewell 
 visit with Betty. 
 
 What changes the years had brought to the 
 home on the old border which he had re- 
 stored to beauty and she had kept together so 
 bravely! At twenty the twin boys were in 
 trade in Cincinnati, and, by much self-denial, 
 paying Jimmy's way through Andover. In 
 her seventeenth year Mary-go- 'round had 
 had a gay winter in Marietta. There she had 
 lost her heart to Ethan Hildreth. He was 
 
 227 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 a distant cousin of the literary physician who 
 had long shared and then succeeded to the 
 medical practice of the lamented Dr. True, 
 and who indulged a harmless fad for keeping 
 records of the weather. The gilded cock on 
 the gable of Dr. Hildreth's house, that waved 
 its tail feathers gallantly in the teeth of every 
 wind, was the never -failing subject of face- 
 tious comment. When gibed about the rest- 
 less habits of the bird, the doctor was wont 
 to remark, dryly: 
 
 "You keep your ears open and you'll hear 
 that rooster crow one of these days," and 
 went off to add some item to the tabulated 
 report which he made annually to the Ameri- 
 can Journal of Science. 
 
 Mary came home to wear her mother's 
 yellowing wedding-gown and veil under the 
 blushing trees of the orchard. It was she and 
 her shrewd and energetic young Yankee hus- 
 band who remained on the big, prospering 
 farm. And now two babies of a new genera- 
 tion had begun to tumble out of a larger 
 cabin into every happy day. 'Round her 
 small world of home and social duties, for 
 the place was the center of neighborhood life, 
 Mary moved briskly on endless errands, with 
 
 228 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 a cheerful ease and efficiency that were de- 
 lightful to look upon. She greeted Johnny 
 with the old affection, and then left him to 
 visit with her mother. 
 
 Betty sat in his low rocking-chair, knitting 
 a tiny red stocking, and with Mary's crowing 
 baby on her lap. At forty there was not a 
 w r hite hair in her bright crown, but her large, 
 wistful blue eyes seemed lost in her pale, 
 delicately featured face. Mary, always ten- 
 derly conscious of her mother, turned a warn- 
 ing look on Johnny when he told his purpose, 
 for Betty went still whiter and put her hand 
 to her heart as if in a spasm of pain. 
 
 "Oh, Johnny ! going so far away from us all, 
 for so long a time?" 
 
 When he could he followed Mary out of 
 doors. Fitful sunshine now and then broke 
 through clouds, making the bare trees of the 
 orchard etch their blue shadows on the snow. 
 
 " Isn't Betty well?" 
 
 "Who? Oh, mother! No one calls her 
 that any more but you, Johnny. I thought 
 you meant that fat rogue, Little Betty. Yes, 
 I guess she's as well as usual. Anything start- 
 ling always — " Her lips trembled. "I'll tell 
 you just how it is, Johnny. In that terrible 
 
 229 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 war-time her heart was injured. We children 
 never knew until Jimmy went away to college 
 last fall. Then, when there was no one to lean 
 on her any more she gave way all at once. 
 She might live for years, in much comfort, 
 if she would only spare herself. She's the 
 mind and heart and conscience of the country- 
 side. Every one runs to her and wears her 
 out. Watch her to-day and you'll see what 
 I mean." 
 
 Ah, he did watch her with a proud and 
 breaking heart. How lavishly she burned 
 the oil of life to keep the light shining for 
 less-endowed people who were stumbling up- 
 ward along dim, rough ways. The old trail 
 had become a main-traveled road, and all day 
 passers-by dropped in to consult her — about 
 raising money to keep the school going until 
 corn-planting time; to cut the first pink 
 calico dress a pretty, excited girl had ever 
 owned, and to ask her to persuade the un- 
 progressive not to oppose a much -needed 
 road tax. She prevailed with the leader of 
 the young men to give up the rude and cruel 
 sport of a shooting-match. Then a new set- 
 tler, of whom she had never heard before, 
 came to say that the baby had died and 
 
 230 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 his wife was distracted because no travel- 
 ing preacher could be found for the funeral. 
 Betty would go herself. 
 
 " Give the poor mother my loving sympathy 
 and tell her that I'll come to say a few words, 
 and fetch the singing-school so there will be 
 
 music." 
 
 "There!" cried Mary, with helpless tears, 
 when the comforted man was gone. "It's 
 seven miles, Johnny, and such roads and 
 weather! It will send her to bed for a week." 
 
 "Don't be so troubled about me — please, 
 dear. I must go. A little bit of a baby can- 
 not be put away in the cold earth without 
 people being reminded that of such is the 
 Kingdom of God." 
 
 When Mary was in the spare room, tacking 
 a new quilt in the frame for a quilting-bee, 
 Betty and Johnny had an hour alone; and 
 because this might be a last parting they 
 touched upon memories never spoken of be- 
 fore or afterward. 
 
 "Johnny, do you remember the night David 
 brought me here, a bride? You — you lit the 
 fire to welcome us home; and then we were 
 sheltered with loving companionship, and you 
 were out alone in the roofless night?" 
 
 16 2 3* 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "I would have stayed, Betty, if I could 
 have borne it." Across the chasm of a quarter 
 of a century of silence he looked his confession 
 of a love foregone. 
 
 "I know," she murmured. "I think I 
 have always known since the night Aunt 
 Mary Lake died. There was no one in the 
 world, then, as near and dear as you. If 
 you— " 
 
 For the remaining years of his life he had 
 the knowledge to bear that, if he could have 
 chosen differently, her days on earth might 
 have been longer. A glowing stick broke 
 into coals and faded to an ashen rose on the 
 hearth, and the clock on the chimney-shelf 
 ticked away a little space of eternity. And 
 then a look of brooding tenderness. 
 
 "You have not been unhappy, Johnny?" 
 
 "No, dear. My mission has filled the cup 
 of life, and having you in the same world has 
 made it overflow." 
 
 After another silence she laid her hand on 
 his in gentle pressure. "You have made 
 my life infinitely happier. I cannot imagine 
 any world, here or hereafter, where you were 
 not." 
 
 In the evening he stored up other memories 
 
 232 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 for years of solitary wandering. As the day 
 darkened to a close the wind grew to a gale 
 which penetrated the crevices of the house, 
 so that Mary settled her mother in a high- 
 backed chair and folded the scarlet cloak 
 about her. The first new-born lamb of the 
 season was brought in by the fire, and stories 
 were told of brave and faithful Old Guard, 
 who had run his race. With the two chil- 
 dren in rosy sleep, Betty sitting w T ith closed 
 eyes and folded hands, Mary knitting, and 
 Ethan Hildreth shaping a hickory ax-handle 
 "to the fit of his own fists" with an almost 
 pious absorption, Johnny rested his elbows 
 on the hearth and read aloud by the light of 
 the fire. 
 
 In a voice of extraordinary beauty, now 
 loud and clear, now soft and thrilling, he 
 amplified such texts as "Heaven is not out- 
 side a man, but within." Then with poetic 
 imagery he pictured the Garden of God where 
 every order of creation dwelt in harmony, 
 and each found its own highest happiness and 
 usefulness. Until the fire was covered for the 
 night he lay marking guide-post passages 
 to his hereafter in the copy of Swedenborg 
 that he had bought for Betty. She was asleep 
 
 233 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 when he departed in the morning, and, al- 
 though he might never see her again, he 
 would not have her awakened. But that 
 night, unable to bear the comfort of any fire- 
 side where she was not, he lay out on a bleak 
 hilltop, and to a cloud- wracked sky where 
 no star glimmered lifted up his heart in 
 prayer for her sweet, fading life. 
 
 By ways still wild from infrequent travel 
 Johnny went up to a point on the Sandusky 
 River where the Senecas had a small reserva- 
 tion. There he got an Indian guide and the 
 loan of a horse through the bottomless, tim- 
 bered morass of the Black Swamp to the 
 rapids of the Maumee. To his dismay, he 
 found the wide river that floundered in a 
 trough of the low plain in raging flood, the 
 waters thundering down the falls with the 
 foam-crests of ocean surges. 
 
 His seeds were rafted across with difficulty, 
 and he could do no planting in the saturated 
 ground of the busy mill and transport towns 
 which flanked the foot of the rapids. Nor 
 could he get through the hundred miles of 
 densely wooded and boggy bottoms to Fort 
 Wayne. But he promised to come down- 
 stream with the flatboat - loads of wheat, 
 
 234 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 corn and hogs in the autumn. Determined 
 and optimistic people here were clearing and 
 draining their rich lands, and had begun 
 work on canals to the Miami and Wabash. 
 When these should be completed — and John- 
 ny's hundred-mile panorama of orchards in 
 this valley had blossomed and fruited before 
 that labor of Hercules was done — people 
 would pour into an unhealthy region which 
 had fewer settlers than before the war. 
 Then the little log lake port of Toledo, 
 that now stood up to its ears in mud and 
 malaria, would rival Detroit. 
 
 Room was found for his two leather bags 
 of seeds in a train of freight-wagons carrying 
 flour, meal and pork to feed the transients 
 who were passing through the old wilderness 
 capital on the strait. Miles of grassy marshes 
 and cranberry bogs, a dozen foaming streams 
 with crumbling banks, sunken and tilted cor- 
 duroy, and sloughs that would have floated 
 boats, extended all the way up to the plank 
 sidewalks of Detroit. Johnny paid his pas- 
 sage, at that time and for many seasons there- 
 after, by helping pry out mired wagons, get 
 discouraged oxen on their legs again, and re- 
 pair broken wagons at improvised forges. 
 
 235 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Even then the old gateway of armies and 
 trade was a trim little city of white wooden 
 houses and picket-fenced gardens. Stand- 
 ing in level green fields flanked by farms, with 
 cattle grazing under trees that trailed their 
 low branches in tranquil waters, and with 
 every sort of craft anchored in the roadstead, 
 it reminded a famous traveler, a decade later, 
 of the quiet beauties of Holland. 
 
 As this was the season when most of the 
 wild merchandise was brought in from the 
 woods, the open spaces of the town were 
 full of traders from distant posts; French 
 trappers with their violins and their gaudily 
 decked Indian wives; priests baptizing in- 
 fants and giving in marriage; impish half- 
 breeds, and majestic braves in beaver-skin 
 blankets. These mingled in the streets and 
 shops with elegant ladies of an old French 
 and British aristocracy, with wealthy busi- 
 ness men and government officials. And to 
 this sufficiently strange and varied crowd was 
 added the Yankees, New-Yorkers, planters 
 from the Southern seaboard, Western pio- 
 neers, and the German, Dutch and Irish peas- 
 ants, who poured up from a steamboat to 
 gaze on the cliff -like forest wall through 
 
 236 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 which they must break to reach their land 
 of promise. 
 
 A day was required for goods to be tumbled 
 out of the hold, for wagons to be loaded, and 
 animals to find their land legs again. In a 
 store crow T ded with time-pressed customers, 
 where anything was to be had from a piano 
 to a tomahawk, Johnny bought a suit of 
 buckskin, cowhide boots water-proofed with 
 deer tallow, a package of salt, and a bag of 
 meal. For a stout pony he gave the last of 
 his money to a mournful Ottawa. Loading 
 his baggage on the animal, he was waiting 
 in the Grand Circus for the forest-bound 
 procession to form when a heavy hand clapped 
 him on the shoulder. 
 
 "Good omen! I never thought to see 
 Johnny Appleseed moon rise on the woods of 
 Michigan." It was the Territorial Governor, 
 Lewis Cass, who grasped his hand. "Were 
 you going through Detroit without coming to 
 see me?" 
 
 Johnny smiled. "There was no need. 
 You have an orchard." 
 
 "True; and I also have a table and a fair 
 library where I like to see the face of a brave 
 man and a friend. Detroit has had its or- 
 
 237 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 chards, and its good living from Montreal, 
 since early French days. But the country 
 behind it is wilder than was Ohio when you 
 and I came out to the Muskingum, with 
 many more Indians and ravening beasts. 
 However, we will be shipping flour to Buffalo 
 in five years." 
 
 "No doubt of it," Johnny agreed. 
 
 "Well, dear pilgrim, I've cut a few roads 
 for you to travel. Would a letter from me 
 be of use to you?" 
 
 Johnny considered a moment. "No, I 
 think not. One doesn't need a ticket of ad- 
 mission to men's hearts." 
 
 "You don't." The Governor compressed 
 his lips and nodded in assent. Lifting his 
 beaver hat with marked respect, he passed 
 
 on. 
 
 With such a thrill as he had not felt since 
 that eventful day in Pittsburg twenty-seven 
 years before, Johnny went out on this heroic 
 human tide. Men on saddle-horses led the 
 way across the marshy ground to the west and 
 into the woods. Families followed in demo- 
 crat wagons with strings of laden animals, 
 in carts, in frail chaises whose broken skele- 
 tons were left to bleach along this wild way, 
 
 238 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 and in the slow but sure ox-drawn prairie- 
 schooners. Those afoot, like Johnny, had 
 no trouble about keeping up, for in this 
 lacustrine land of ponds, wet depressions and 
 water-filled gullies there were no hills to 
 climb, and the stumps and fallen trees that 
 littered the ax-widened Sauk trail made all 
 travel slow. Ten years later, when this 
 forest-girt highway had become the post-road 
 to Chicago, it was still an obstructed mire, 
 with many unbridged streams. 
 
 But within a twelvemonth after the open- 
 ing of the Erie Canal emigrants were pouring 
 over it eight months of the year. Every 
 mile of it out to the crossing of the St. Joseph 
 rang with axes, and every considerable stream 
 soon had a sawmill. No one could journey 
 over it for an hour without seeing smoke 
 curling up through the noble beeches and 
 ship-mast conifers. The narrower ravines 
 were spanned by tree trunks, and Johnny's 
 Indian pony "toed" these slippery foot- 
 bridges as easily as he; and at the sprawling 
 log tavern which marked the limit of a day's 
 travel, there was either a good ford or a tim- 
 ber-raft ferry worked with ropes and pulleys. 
 
 In a beautiful wilderness where friends 
 
 239 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 sprang up with the myriad delicate flowers of 
 the forest, Johnny lived a second youth of 
 eager joy in his mission. It was dangerous 
 for a man to camp alone where huge bears, 
 timber - wolves, lynxes, panthers and wild- 
 cats were so numerous and bold; but Johnny 
 was seldom obliged to do that, for wayfarers 
 were nearly always on the road. Or he man- 
 aged to reach some lichened, beechwood cab- 
 in, where he slept on a pole-bed laced with 
 rawhide, heaped with pine boughs and spread 
 with deerskins. But except for his bag of 
 meal he must often have gone hungry, for 
 new-comers were living chiefly on game, and 
 paying for their limitless acres with peltries. 
 Besides the problem of food, Johnny was 
 perplexed to know where to put in his seeds. 
 There were no hills or bluffs, and he was 
 obliged to rail off corners of clearings or to 
 fence in inclosures against barns or mills 
 with slabs or brush. So he proceeded through 
 the timbered plains, and through the "oak 
 openings" farther west, where every cabin 
 was raised in a grassy copse encircled by great 
 trees. That was a gently rolling country of 
 park -like beauty — of wide - spreading oaks, 
 little hills and dancing brooks, and of sunny 
 
 240 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 spaces sown with blossoms, where a gay 
 woodpecker drummed on every ancient bole 
 and the wood-thrush filled the bright, cool 
 days with melody. 
 
 It was on an evening late in April, when 
 his orchards in Ohio were in bloom and his 
 heart ached for his old day in Paradise with 
 Betty, that he reached the point on the St. 
 Joseph where there was a crossing to the 
 country of the Pottawatomies. Not for ten 
 years was a white settlement made on the 
 north bank, from which he now saw the camp- 
 fire and skin lodges of a village of this numer- 
 ous tribe that held the lands around the head 
 of Lake Michigan. Following a couple of 
 mounted braves who forded the broad stream 
 by the light of pine-knot torches, he rode up 
 the steep, wooded slope and sought shelter 
 in a cabin that he was surprised to find on 
 the edge of the Indian town. Pulling the 
 latch-string, after the custom of the country, 
 he walked in. A white woman, petticoated 
 in deerskins like a squaw, screamed, and 
 her rough husband dropped a shotgun. 
 
 "Thought it was them pesky redskins, 
 stranger. Air you that appleseed mission- 
 er?" Johnny's fame ran everywhere be- 
 
 241 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 fore him. "Haul up a stool and pitch into 
 the grub." 
 
 But Johnny stood aloof in the doorway. 
 "The Indians are peaceable. Why should 
 they molest you?" 
 
 11 Because I'm squattin' on their land, an' 
 they're try in* to scare me out. I'm willin' 
 to pay, but — " 
 
 "You are not. You do not expect to 
 pay, for you are well aware that they will 
 not sell. You are a thief, and the meanest 
 kind of an enemy of every decent white man 
 in the country. If your family is killed the 
 crime will be on your own head. I'll report 
 your wicked trespassing to Governor Cass. 
 When you move across the river I'll plant 
 an orchard for you." 
 
 Sick at heart to find the old wrongs and 
 hostilities springing up like poisonous weeds 
 on this new border, he led his pony to the 
 Indian village. That he had been Logan's 
 brother would not commend him to a tribe 
 that boasted the massacre of Fort Dearborn. 
 But they had seen him leave the cabin a 
 moment after entering, and the most un- 
 friendly savage was disarmed by a claim on 
 his hospitality. 
 
 242 
 
THOUGHT IT WAS THEM PESKY REDSKINS, STRANGER. 
 AIR YOU THAT APPLESEED MISSIONER ?" 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 1 ' I need food/ ' he said, simply. ' ' All men, 
 white and red, are my brothers; but I do not 
 break bread with thieves and trouble-makers. 
 But leave that man alone. I will rid you of 
 him without violence." 
 
 They made room for him at the fire. In 
 the morning they offered to keep his tired 
 pony on the fresh pasture, and to lend him a 
 canoe to go down the historic "St. Joe" to 
 Lake Michigan. There were already many 
 cabins along the north bank of this stream 
 that was navigable by steamboats. Near 
 them he found sheltered nooks for his seeds 
 in high banks; and he found coves back of 
 the cliffs that sprang from the silver beach 
 below the old French trading-post at the 
 harbor mouth. In these northern lands the 
 season was later than in Ohio, so, until the 
 end of May, he continued his planting in a 
 region where later generations reaped a mil- 
 lionfold. Long after his labor of love had 
 ceased Michigan became the commercial or- 
 chard of the Middle West. 
 
 The new clearings were bannered with 
 corn, and all the glades were red with wild 
 strawberries when he returned to the Indian 
 village. The tribe had refused to care for a 
 
 244 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 nursery, but Chief Pokagon hitched a horse 
 and an ox to a flaming chariot and drove 
 Johnny down to the Tippecanoe River. He 
 had reason to be proud of the wagon that he 
 had made for himself, after no known model, 
 long before a white man's vehicle was seen 
 in that country. The hay-rack bed was 
 mounted on hickory axles, and the solid 
 wheels, hewn and burned and scraped out 
 of cross-sections of a white-oak tree, were 
 painted a bright vermilion. Until the Potta- 
 watomies signed away their ancestral lands 
 and went west of the Mississippi, Johnny could 
 always count upon a lift of fifty miles in this 
 triumphal car. Throned on a high seat beside 
 the chief, who wore his war bonnet of eagle 
 feathers, they rumbled across the lake-dotted 
 prairies of northern Indiana, with its great 
 herds of deer and buffalo. After crossing the 
 shallow head-waters of the Tippecanoe, he and 
 his pony were set on the southward trail. 
 
 A true Indian path in prairie country, it 
 followed every turn of the eastern bank and 
 clung to the shadow of the trees. Sheltered 
 alike from sun and storm, it had a broad 
 ribbon of water and a double belt of wood- 
 land between it and prairie fires. On the one 
 
 245 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 hand were ancient camping-places, all the for- 
 est fruits and blossoms, and the rapture of 
 thrushes; and on the other an emerald sea 
 of wind-rippled grass, with its fleets of cloud 
 shadows, and the fluting of the meadow-lark. 
 And all the way down to where it poured its 
 tribute into the Wabash the Tippecanoe had 
 every witchery of prairie streams — flowery 
 meads, and marshes sky-woven with water- 
 fowl; long stretches of bottom-land wooded 
 with sycamores, maples and hawthorns, and 
 deep, winding ravines brimming with beauty, 
 where the water twisted and foamed for miles 
 over rocky rapids. 
 
 Starting from the busy little year-old river 
 port of Lafayette, Johnny spent the sum- 
 mer exploring the enchanting valley of the 
 Upper Wabash, searching out the settlers in 
 the bottoms, the mills on the creeks, and the 
 " neighborhoods" of from six to ten cabins 
 on adjoining quarter-sections of prairie. Peo- 
 ple who had been on the treeless areas five 
 years had wood-lots growing from black wal- 
 nuts and the seeds of locusts, and they had 
 hedges of hawthorn shrubs and osage orange- 
 trees, planted on ditched and sodded ridges 
 for wind and fire breaks. 
 
 246 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 In the shelter of a few such living fences 
 on the Wea and Wildcat prairies, in the knot 
 of hills that overlooked Lafayette, and on 
 bluffs above high water, Johnny began to put 
 in his seeds. It was late in September, when 
 the whistle of the first steamboat of the sea- 
 son was a Gabriel's trump over a forty-mile 
 radius of country. During a month of dry 
 and windless weather he worked rapidly up- 
 stream. From the sources of the Wabash he 
 had only to make a twenty-mile portage across 
 the low undulations of the watershed to reach 
 Fort Wayne and the valley of the Matimee. 
 
 The prairie-grass had grown six feet high 
 and turned brown. With sharp nights it lost 
 its embroidery of purple and gold ray-flowers. 
 Long imprisoned in forests, Johnny fell under 
 the spell of these spaces bare and grand, 
 arched over by wide, sun-drenched or star- 
 ry domes, where the winds blew free and the 
 spirit fared forth to brave adventure. Often 
 before seeking shelter for the night he climbed 
 a tree to look out over the sunset - gilded 
 billows, with their horizon lines of blazing 
 autumn woodlands. Wild herds were drowned 
 in that ocean of herbage; cabin roofs were 
 awash; the canvas-covered schooners of new- 
 
 17 
 
 247 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 comers, the wagon-loads of corn and wheat, 
 and the droves of hogs and cattle going down 
 to flatboats on the river, plowed through like 
 ships at sea, with parted waters in their wake. 
 
 But it was a landscape of terror as well as 
 of beauty, where the vigilance of men never 
 ceased. A spark from a careless hunter's fire, 
 borne on a high west wind, would sweep a 
 sea of flame over a fifty-mile prairie in an 
 hour, often overtaking fleeing herds of deer 
 and buffalo. Around every "neighborhood" 
 the farmers mowed and burned a wide strip 
 of grass and plowed the land as a protection. 
 Johnny was cautioned to sleep in a cabin when 
 he could, and to camp on the eastern banks 
 of waterways, where he would find old Indian 
 cobble-lined fire-holes in cleared spaces in the 
 timber belts. 
 
 In the last week of October he reached the 
 house of one of the few Scotchmen in the 
 country. The man had a plot in the shelter 
 of the thorny hedge ready for him, and, in a 
 cold wind that threatened to blow the shock 
 of red hair from his head, sat on a sawbuck 
 and talked as Johnny worked. 
 
 "I hae a braw coatie o' buffalo-hide to fend 
 the cauld frae ye. It cost me nae mair than 
 
 248 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 a chairge o' pooder an' shot, so there's nae 
 occasion for gratitude. But an orchard here 
 is like the grace o' God. It canna be had 
 for siller." 
 
 "The best things in life are those that can- 
 not be bought." 
 
 "Ay, ye gang aboot gien yer bonny trees 
 wi'oot price." By and by he remarked that 
 it was blowing up to rain or to drive one of 
 the deil's ain fires. His look was one of 
 anxious concern. "Man, ye'll bide the blawy 
 nicht?" 
 
 Johnny thought not. The planting season 
 was short, and no time was to be lost. With 
 such a wind at his back he could easily make 
 the ten miles to the portage by nightfall 
 and be in Fort Wayne the next evening. 
 Filling the pockets of the warm fur coat with 
 corn-dodgers and the hickory-nuts that the 
 children had patiently picked out for him, 
 he took the river trail. 
 
 With the waning day the wind increased. 
 The sun set in a bank of fiery rose, with a 
 smoky pall above it; and after it disap- 
 peared no light lingered on the plain, for a 
 wrack of gray storm-clouds hid the moon and 
 stars. In the darkness Johnny could not see 
 
 249 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 to cross a steeply walled and watered ravine, 
 nor could he venture to build a fire in the dry 
 leaves and underbrush of the narrow belt of 
 woods that topped the west bank. Tethering 
 the pony under the trees and supplying him 
 with grass, he ate his own supper, and with 
 his half-empty bag of seeds for a pillow lay 
 down with a huge hollow log to windward. 
 
 What with the roar of the wind and crowd- 
 ing thoughts, it was long before he slept. In 
 the settlement which had grown up around 
 "Mad Anthony's " old fort and Indian agency, 
 a big plot would be ready for him, and men who 
 had brought in corn and marsh-hay would be 
 waiting to take him all the way out to Shane's 
 Prairie and Twenty-four-mile Creek. Brave 
 women were there who never winced if a bear 
 or a panther scrambled across the roof, but 
 who cried in their sleep for the bowery homes 
 they had left in the East. Ah, what a mission! 
 Again, as in Ohio, it was to be his privilege 
 to feed the multitude in these new wilds with 
 comfort and beauty. 
 
 He decided that he would leave his pony 
 on the farm of William Worth near the town, 
 and go down the Maumee with the flatboats. 
 From Toledo he could make a quick passage 
 
 250 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 to Erie, paying his way by pushing cord-wood 
 under the boiler of a steamboat. Thence he 
 could cross to his old gleaning-field in the 
 Allegheny Valley. In the spring he could 
 work his way down the Ohio and up the 
 Miami to Piqua. Thus he could save time 
 and energy — but for the first year since he 
 had known her he would not see Betty! All 
 he could hope for was to have word from her 
 when he came into Pittsburg in February. 
 Turning upon his bag of seeds he buried his 
 face in his arm, and when he was at peace 
 again he slept like a child. 
 
 And then, what dreams of sound and light in 
 the moment before awaking ! Upon the fabric 
 of the wind — the loud moaning, the surf -rush 
 of long grasses, and the threshing of the bare 
 tree-tops — were woven filaments of sighs, silk- 
 en rustlings and aerial whispers. A glow as 
 of the rising sun was suddenly a burst of 
 glory, as if the Creator had just spoken; and 
 upon that were etched the black web of the 
 trees, little flying birds and shooting stars. 
 It was a puff of hot smoke, a blinding glare, 
 the howling of wolves, the thunder of hoofs 
 and the frantic plunging of the pony that 
 brought him to his feet. 
 
 251 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 He leaped to get his hat over the faithful 
 animal's eyes, but with an awful scream the 
 pony broke loose and shot into that flaming 
 sea. Shaking his blazing coat from him, 
 Johnny fell down the bank, pursued by fire 
 to the water's edge. Then a cloud of sparks 
 and a billow of smoke rolled over him, filling 
 the ravine. 
 
 There he lay immersed, with the smell of 
 scorched fur and flesh in his nostrils, and the 
 struggles and cries of suffocating and drown- 
 ing creatures in his ears. Very soon, how- 
 ever, it was so still that he could hear the 
 shallow water chuckling over its stony bed. 
 The smoke lifted slowly, but, once it had 
 risen to the prairie level, was whirled away 
 on the wind. After a long time he crept up 
 the farther bank and, burned, drenched and 
 blinded, lay in a gale which blew itself out 
 in gusts that were laden with the ashes and 
 cinders of dead fires. 
 
 When he had recovered from the shock he 
 had to consider if this was the end — if he, 
 like his pony and his seeds, lay on the fiery 
 death-bed of the prairies. Then he was not 
 dismayed. He would leave nothing behind 
 him but the unfinished task, and from that 
 
 252 
 
HE LEAPED TO GET HIS HAT OVER THE FAITHFUL 
 
 animal's eyes 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 God called men every hour. And all that 
 he valued was laid up in heaven or would join 
 him there. Into his heart he gathered his 
 treasured memories and beliefs — had a vision 
 of the orchards that he had planted to gladden 
 the eyes of men and angels. He summoned 
 the image of Betty, and the kindred spirits 
 of those who had gone before — relived hours 
 of happy companionship with them and an- 
 ticipated eternity until, from the agony of 
 his burns and the torture of morning light 
 to his eyes, he sank into unconsciousness. 
 
 Afterward he remembered that the clearest 
 vision of all was of Logan, who knew the wild 
 ways of these old lands of the Miamis in the 
 dark. As on that night in the Shawnee vil- 
 lage on the Scioto, he felt the young chief's 
 arm about him, heard his voice calling: 
 11 Brother! Brother! Brother!" until he 
 struggled up again from some abyss into which 
 he had slipped. He got to his feet, bandaged 
 his eyes, and without hesitation took an un- 
 seen path. When asked afterward how he 
 made his way to Fort Wayne, he answered 
 with simple and reverent conviction: 
 
 "I was led." 
 
 Three days later he staggered out of prairie- 
 
 254 
 
FRESH FIELDS 
 
 grass higher than his head, to hear the tinkle 
 of cow-bells, and the laughing chatter of the 
 school-children who were out on the hilly 
 banks south of the town gathering hazelnuts. 
 His hair was singed unevenly, and a strip of 
 buckskin from his shirt was bound across his 
 eyes. In his fire-blackened and water-shrunk- 
 en garments, with his arms flung wide for the 
 support of gathered sheaves of grass, he was 
 such a figure as a farmer might have set up 
 for a scarecrow in a corn-field. But from his 
 firm, sweet lips came the gentlest speech these 
 startled young people had ever heard. 
 "Are there little children here?" 
 "Yes, sir." It was Billy Worth, a tall 
 boy of twelve, who spoke. They all picked 
 up their Indian baskets and, running across 
 the fire-strip of plowed ground, crowded 
 around him with the divine compassion of 
 childhood. Those prairie-bred little folk un- 
 derstood his terrible plight, for the fire in 
 which he had so nearly perished had been 
 watched with alarm from Fort Wayne. 
 
 "Will you lead me to a doctor?" And he 
 told his name. They looked upon him with 
 wondering awe, for they had heard of him 
 and his beautiful mission, as who in that 
 
 255 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 region had not? And when he added that 
 he had lost his seeds, but would have a new 
 supply to plant for them in the spring, emo- 
 tional Madeleine Bourie, the small daughter 
 of a French trader of the place, covered his 
 blistered hand with tears and kisses. 
 
 "Saint from heaven, have you lost your 
 eyes, too?" 
 
 "No, dear little one; I hope not. But I 
 cannot bear the light." And it seemed that, 
 after three days of famine and torturing 
 pains, he could no longer bear his own weight 
 on his feet. He was sinking to his knees 
 when Billy set sturdy shoulders under his 
 arm. 
 
 "You lean on me, Johnny. I'm strong. 
 Jean Bourie, you get on the other side o' 
 him." 
 
 The evening glow was on land and river, 
 and on the rude but busy trading-post around 
 the old fort, when the children brought 
 Johnny slowly in across the fields. 
 
XI 
 
 THE WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 *Y the time sturdy apple-trees 
 as tall as himself were growing 
 in flourishing young orchards 
 j all over his new field of labor, 
 Johnny was faring farther. His 
 eyes had received no perma- 
 nent injury from the prairie fire, and he 
 was still in his full vigor; but at fifty-five the 
 best man has fewer years and diminishing 
 powers before him. With the feeling, un- 
 known to youth, that no time was to be lost, 
 his heart yearned over wildernesses unsown. 
 Therefore, in June of 1830, his eager feet 
 took the road which Governor Cass had cut 
 through the woods to the Grand River coun- 
 try. In that region, and along the numerous 
 sandy inlets from Lake Michigan that pene- 
 trated the pineries, he left seeds for fall plant- 
 ing with the missionary priests who had 
 
 257 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 rustic chapels in every cluster of huts of 
 French and Indian trappers. And there the 
 conviction grew upon him that menacing in- 
 fluences were abroad. 
 
 To the sower weather is the one, large, ever- 
 present fact of the universe. He puts in his 
 seeds early or late as he is permitted by kind 
 or inclement skies. Then, unable to hasten 
 or delay the harvest by any industry or clever- 
 ness of his own, he waits for the increase with 
 anxious eyes on the heavens. A drought or 
 flood, an untimely frost or rain or burning 
 sun, may bring the labor of a year to naught. 
 So he comes to note and to interpret every 
 change in the temperature, the direction and 
 force of the wind, the formation of the clouds 
 and, especially, any variation from the nor- 
 mal in the pageantry of the seasons. In his 
 three decades of planting in wild places, 
 Johnny had gained all the weather wisdom 
 of the farmer. A poet and seer besides, he 
 was sensitive to disturbances in nature's har- 
 monies. And now, discord had crashed across 
 the rhythmic measures of the year, threaten- 
 ing to make one of those historic periods to 
 which men refer back in some such descrip- 
 tive phrase as "the year of the big wind." 
 
 258 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 Beginning with the spring equinox, storms 
 such as had not been known in a half-century 
 had strewn the Atlantic coast with wreckage 
 and swept up the valley of the Mississippi 
 with destructive violence. All over the coun- 
 try the months of planting were cold and wet. 
 Midsummer was oppressively hot, even in 
 these northern woods and waters, with such 
 electric tempests as made old hunters un- 
 easy. Then, late in August, a day of sinister 
 aspect — of a haloed and spotted sun which 
 gave off pale-blue and violet rays — ended in 
 a night that was made memorable by the 
 most brilliant aurora ever seen by that gen- 
 eration of woodsmen. The women lit fresh 
 candles before the images of Mother Mary 
 and spent the ominous hours in prayer. This 
 was followed by six weeks of stormy weather, 
 with nocturnal illuminations. 
 
 At Muskegon Johnny found a half-breed 
 Frenchman, so old that his merry little face 
 was a scrap of crinkled brown crepe, who pre- 
 dicted a long, cold winter, with deep snow 
 and good hunting only for "M'sieu Wolf." 
 He had no theory concerning it; but about 
 fifty years before, when, as a young man, he 
 had been at Prairie du Chien on the upper 
 
 259 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Mississippi — "Oui, M'sieu, Dog Prairie" — 
 sunspots, bright northern lights and a bleak 
 and early autumn had been the forerunners 
 of a terrible season. From Montreal to Kas- 
 kaskia and the Rocky Mountains game was 
 destroyed by wolves, and many trappers never 
 returned to their stations. It struck Johnny 
 as significant that the Eastern newspapers he 
 had seen in Detroit in the spring, and this un- 
 lettered child of nature in the heart of the 
 continent, should agree in harking back a half- 
 century for comparison with this year's ex- 
 traordinary weather. When he reached Ma- 
 rietta in the winter he would ask Dr. Hildreth 
 about this. 
 
 No one else could remember so far back, 
 and at first scant attention was paid to the 
 ancient coureur du bois. But in the weeks 
 which should have been mild and clear a 
 gray, heaving lake, sodden woods and "red 
 battles in the sky " stopped the violin-playing 
 and dancing of light-hearted vagabonds, and 
 filled Johnny with a sense of impending ca- 
 lamity. 
 
 In deep anxiety about his young orchards, 
 he went down to the trading-post at St. 
 Joseph in a mackinaw boat with hunters 
 
 260 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 who were obliged to go for their winter out- 
 fits. From there he sent word over the road 
 to Detroit that, in a season which might be 
 severe, men should multch the roots and 
 wrap the trunks of their tender little apple- 
 trees with straw and bagging. He would take 
 the same warning down the Maumee from 
 Fort Wayne, and send it back along the 
 Wabash and White River valleys. 
 
 Then, in the brief allotment of ten days of 
 Indian summer, after which cold rains and 
 sharp nights set in, he had a profound ex- 
 perience. When he reached the ford of the 
 St. Joseph on a still, hazy evening, he found 
 the river so swollen that he hailed the Indian 
 village for help in making the crossing. Chief 
 Pokagon answered him and launched a canoe ; 
 but he stopped in midstream when a voice 
 of worship and of love ineffable, as of an angel 
 come down from the choir invisible, poured 
 a flood of liquid melody out of the forest. It 
 was the hermit -thrush. Never seen, and sel- 
 dom heard to sing in this southern limit of 
 the pines, the Indians called it the spirit bird. 
 White man and red were tranced until that 
 hymn of unearthly purity and beauty had 
 ascended to the skies. 
 
 261 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 In the hush which followed, a cherished 
 memory of Betty recurred to Johnny with 
 such vividness that he saw again the gay 
 and tender child of the cove above the ship- 
 yard at Marietta. With light, flying foot- 
 steps that seemed not to touch the grassy 
 floor, she sped across a copse that was faintly 
 silvered with moonlight. Turning with a 
 happy smile, she waved her hand to him be- 
 fore she vanished in a belt of woods. 
 
 As he stepped into the canoe the chief 
 gazed upon him with reverence, for now he 
 knew what it was in Johnny's face that had 
 arrested him at first sight, and then held 
 him. It was some resemblance to the tribal 
 tradition of Pere Marquette, whose few, 
 saintly years in these wilds, more than a hun- 
 dred and fifty years before, had never been 
 forgotten by the Indians. The face of that 
 sinless man, who had constant speech with 
 angels, had been a pale flame like an altar 
 candle which had been blessed. Johnny had 
 that look now. Had the spirit bird brought 
 him a message? 
 
 He thought so. And he had seen some- 
 thing beautiful, reassuring him as to the well- 
 being and happiness of a dear friend who had 
 
 262 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 long been in failing health; but he could not 
 fathom its meaning. He lay long that night 
 thinking of the voice and the vision, and when 
 the sky cleared and countless stars bloomed 
 on the dark, he wondered if there were not 
 one more softly shining for a soul returned 
 to its home on the wings of that celestial song. 
 
 The next six weeks of the bleak weather, 
 in which there was now and then an illumi- 
 nated night, he spent among the settlements 
 on the Maumee. From Toledo he worked 
 his way on a Lake Erie steamboat to Cleve- 
 land. Journeying southward, he gleaned seeds 
 along the Cuyahoga and Muskingum. It was 
 his intention to go down the Ohio and up the 
 Scioto, and to ease his aching loneliness by 
 seeing Betty in March. 
 
 He was in Zanesville early in December, 
 when his apprehensions were confirmed by 
 another day of a dark-cratered sun, followed 
 by an auroral display which kept awe-struck 
 people out of doors all night. 
 
 The play of the northern lights began after 
 sunset, in a blush that covered half the 
 horizon. This mounted to a golden corona 
 in the zenith, from which it presently fell in 
 transparent drapery folds that wavered be- 
 
 18 263 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 tween pillars of crimson fire. Spindles of 
 silvery luster darted from this, and through 
 it the stars appeared as blue-white electric 
 points. Stars innumerable glittered on a 
 slate-colored southern sky. In a profound 
 hush of nature the temperature dropped to 
 an icy chill. The first large flakes of snow 
 which wandered in the air at dawn were 
 stained a lovely rose by the flickering light 
 that lingered in the heavens. 
 
 Incredibly beautiful as was the spectacle, 
 it aroused the superstitious fear of the igno- 
 rant and alarmed even the educated. Not 
 within the memory of living men had such 
 phenomena of the polar regions occurred in 
 temperate latitudes. Now, Johnny learned, 
 from New York and Boston newspapers, that 
 the auroras he had seen in the wilds of Michi- 
 gan were also reported from the Eastern sea- 
 board and from the observatories of London 
 and Paris. These singular occurrences, with 
 their attendant storms, were not local. What- 
 ever there was of menace in the air appeared 
 to be enveloping the northern world. The 
 succeeding days of wind and rain, snow and 
 sleet and unseasonable cold filled every one 
 with bewilderment and consternation. 
 
 264 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 The Ohio Valley that was known to early 
 pioneers had no such extremes of weather as 
 are experienced in this semi-denuded region 
 to-day. From the settlement at Marietta the 
 winters had been uniformly mild. With grass 
 until January, then light falls of snow that 
 soon disappeared in soft thaws, and only an 
 occasional "spell" of freezing temperatures, 
 cattle were provided with little or no shelter. 
 Corn was left in shocks in the fields and fuel 
 in the woods, to be brought in as it was needed. 
 Spring returned early in March, with blos- 
 soming trees and greening pastures. 
 
 But now the earth was saturated, then 
 frozen, then swept by bitter winds and 
 mantled with white. Over a road deserted 
 by travel Johnny made his way southward, 
 from one cider-mill to another, to find farm- 
 ers putting up sheds for their cows and run- 
 ners under their wagon-beds, as if this were 
 New England. His own work was stopped 
 by another storm in the week before Christ- 
 mas. From heaps of pomace congealed to 
 granite and buried under six inches of hard- 
 packed snow, he could not wash out seeds. 
 On the ice of the Muskingum he tramped 
 down to Marietta. 
 
 265 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Sleigh-bells were jingling merrily in a crisp 
 day of cold sunshine, for every one who had 
 a horse was out in a gay cutter or hastily con- 
 trived bobsled, to make the most of a winter 
 sport that was usually of brief duration ; and 
 shouting children were snow-balling, coasting, 
 and skating on Duck Creek. How it warmed 
 the heart of any Yankee in exile — this typical 
 New England town in the West! With its 
 twin-towered "two-horn" church, its wide, 
 tree-bordered streets, its colonial houses and 
 prosperous little college, and now, with its ice- 
 contracted flood and wooded hills all hoary 
 with snow, it looked not unlike Burlington, 
 Vermont. The last touch of similitude to a 
 "down-east" port was given by the concern 
 that was felt for an overdue steamboat from 
 Pittsburg. 
 
 Johnny had other anxieties — the possi- 
 bility that even his old orchards in Ohio 
 might be winter-killed. Where long, severe 
 seasons were the rule, apple-trees, like wise 
 animals, grew thick, shaggy coats. But here, 
 where even the delicate peach nourished, his 
 trees had no such defense. Many of them 
 kept, up to full maturity, the thin, satiny 
 bark of rose canes. When he reached the 
 
 266 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 town his canvas seed-bag was wet and frozen, 
 so he hurried up to Dr. Hildreth's house and 
 turned the precious contents out on sheets 
 on the dry attic floor. Then he ran down to 
 the front yard to find the weather-man. 
 
 Meteorology was then an experimental sci- 
 ence and the subject of popular derision. 
 For more than twenty years Dr. Hildreth 
 had been, here, one of the dozen or so ob- 
 servers of the weather scattered over the 
 eastern third of the country, who were with- 
 out honor. A man of the slightest physique, 
 muffled to his ears by an anxious wife, 
 Johnny found him beside his little observa- 
 tion station, which looked like the shuttered 
 belfry of a wooden church set up on posts 
 on the lawn. 
 
 The gilded cock on the house gable was 
 boxing the compass, in its laudable efforts 
 to determine the direction of erratic gusts 
 of wind. Seeing it so, a facetious neighbor 
 hailed the doctor from the gate. 
 
 "If this is the kind of weather that 'tarnal 
 rooster of yours brings, I'll wring his neck. 
 I've got a cargo of pork and flour to ship 
 to New Orleans, and the river is freezing 
 
 over." 
 
 267 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "Put runners under your old mud-scow 
 and you can sledge it down over the ice pretty 
 soon," was the doctor's advice. 
 
 The man went on, laughing, but Johnny 
 asked, seriously: "Is that true? ,, 
 
 "I think it is, Johnny. A good many 
 straws are blowing that way." He added, 
 dryly, "I have quite a reputation as a hu- 
 morist in this town, but if I am not much 
 mistaken I am going to lose it this winter." 
 
 He opened the door of the airy little struc- 
 ture and, as eagerly as a boy to the interested 
 listener, explained the various instruments 
 within. And when Johnny told him about 
 the recollections and predictions of the an- 
 cient, half-breed trapper in western Michigan, 
 his hands shook with excitement and his 
 thin, smooth-shaven, intellectual face glowed 
 with the enthusiasm of the scientific in- 
 vestigator. 
 
 "Can he read? How old is he?" 
 
 "Not a word — no more than his pony. 
 His speech is a rude, French-Indian patois in 
 which nothing has been printed. He's eighty- 
 five by the mission register." 
 
 "Such people often have wonderful mem- 
 ories — their minds are not cluttered up with 
 
 268 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 thinking. This is interesting, undoubtedly 
 reliable, for it confirms other data. Fifty- 
 three years ago this winter your father and 
 mine were at Valley Forge with Washington, 
 trying to keep their discouraged souls in their 
 freezing bodies. They, too, looked up at 'red 
 battles in the sky/ and down at their bloody 
 footprints in the deep snow of the severest 
 season this country ever knew. Same signs 
 this year — the atmosphere in an explosive 
 state for months before, and winter setting 
 in early and with unusual severity. In that 
 winter of '7 7-' 7 8 cattle, sheep and unlucky 
 travelers perished everywhere north of Mary- 
 land, and many old orchards — " 
 
 He stopped at Johnny's stricken look, and 
 made haste to put the matter in a more cheer- 
 ful light. 
 
 "A surprising number of orchards did sur- 
 vive. It's truly wonderful how plants and 
 animals adapt themselves. The wild geese 
 and ducks fled southward this fall a month 
 before their usual time, and my horse is 
 growing a coat like a buffalo. The bark of 
 the fruit-trees has roughened and thickened, 
 and the buds squeezed up and fairly burrowed 
 into the twigs. Men seem to have lost that 
 
 269 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 protective instinct. The orchards will pull 
 through all right, Johnny." 
 
 "They can be trusted to do their best." 
 Johnny often startled people by speaking of 
 his trees as though they were conscious 
 beings. "But why do such seasons occur? 
 What does it all mean?" 
 
 "Ah, that is what we are trying to find 
 out! All we know is that once in two gen- 
 erations or so, varying from fifty to eighty 
 years and coincident with sunspots and au- 
 roral displays, the magnetic conditions and 
 cold of the polar regions descend to low lati- 
 tudes. The periods vary in duration and 
 intensity as in time. Let us hope that this 
 explosion has spent itself." 
 
 Glancing at the instruments within before 
 closing the door of the station, the doctor 
 was shocked to see the rapidity with which 
 the barometer was falling. 
 
 "Another storm coming, and that boat not 
 
 in!" 
 
 The pale sun was still shining on the un- 
 sullied landscape when, in the face of amused 
 merry - makers, the doctor unfurled a little 
 black storm-flag from his gate-post. 
 
 "Ethan should be on that boat," he said 
 
 270 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 as they turned into the house. "He went 
 to Boston in November for the sheep-breed- 
 ers, to see if better prices could not be got 
 for their wool. He was in Philadelphia last 
 week, on his way home." 
 
 The streets of the town were suddenly 
 emptied by a new snow-storm, which blew in 
 on a thirty-mile gale at the darkening end 
 of the day. A neighbor dropped in to ask 
 what grudge the doctor had against the town 
 that he should afflict it so. In the good old 
 Puritan days in Salem he would have been 
 burned for a wicked wizard. 
 
 After supper Johnny was sitting with the 
 family before an open fire, where every one 
 was too anxious about Ethan to talk or read, 
 when the whistle of the steamboat was heard. 
 A tortured thing, the thin, continuous shriek- 
 ing was torn into shreds and whipped away 
 on the roaring wind. 
 
 "I must go, my dear," the doctor insisted, 
 as he and Johnny slipped into overcoats. 
 "There will be sick and possibly injured peo- 
 ple on that boat. Have a hot supper and a 
 warm bed ready for Ethan. I may be de- 
 layed, but Johnny can fetch him up." 
 
 Only in the larger cities were streets lighted 
 
 271 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 in that day, but curtains were drawn back 
 and the glow of fires and whale-oil lamps 
 flared into the storm. The scared faces of 
 women and children could be seen pressed 
 to window-panes. From every house men 
 ran out and down Muskingum Street to the 
 wharf. 
 
 The wind, racing counter to the current, 
 had heaped up the water in the narrowed 
 channel until it was a welter of foam-crested 
 billows and wallowing troughs. The boat 
 could not be seen, but its shrill whistling, 
 straining labor, and slithering crashes through 
 shore ice could be heard above all the noises 
 of wind and flood. Like a specter it loomed 
 out of flying clouds of snow, keeled over and 
 smashed into the slip. 
 
 A cheer went up. As soon as the gang- 
 plank was run out Johnny went aboard with 
 other men to carry fainting, hysterical and 
 battered passengers off and into the shelter 
 of the nearest warehouse. The crowd had 
 begun to disperse when he ran to the doctor. 
 
 "Ethan didn't come!" 
 
 "Are you sure?" 
 
 "Yes. The captain said there had been 
 heavy snowfalls on the mountains and the 
 
 272 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 stage-coach had not got in when he left. No 
 mail from the East for a week." 
 
 The doctor collapsed on a bale of wool, 
 white as a tallow candle. "This is serious! 
 No telling when another boat can get through. 
 If the temperature continues to fall the river 
 will soon freeze over. Johnny, Mary is up 
 there on the farm, with no help besides a 
 bound boy of sixteen, and she has a frail 
 young baby. Ethan brought in enough fuel 
 for an ordinary winter before he left, but not 
 enough for such a season as this. That hol- 
 low of the hills is a perfect trap for snow. 
 This little family of my own blood may be 
 snowed under and frozen to death." 
 
 And Mary had a frail mother to care for, 
 too! Johnny's heart leaped to Betty in this 
 new peril, but he did not speak of her. Ex- 
 cept to Alary, he never spoke Betty's name. 
 In a sacred reticence he had always held her 
 locked in the inner shrine. Now he said, 
 simply : 
 
 " Don't worry about that. It will be all 
 right. I am going up there. When Ethan 
 can get through have him fetch my seeds." 
 
 "You can't do it, Johnny! It's a hundred 
 and fifty miles. You might make the rest 
 
 273 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 of the way if you could get a boat to Chilli- 
 cothe. No horse could travel such a distance 
 in this weather." 
 
 "I wouldn't think of taking a horse. If 
 Ethan had come on this boat he would have 
 gone on?" 
 
 "Oh yes, certainly ; he would probably have 
 perished, but no consideration could have held 
 him, with his family in such a plight." 
 
 "Nothing can hold me." Johnny's eyes 
 burned, and his colorless face was drawn with 
 emotional strain. There was some mystery 
 here — some old grief that had never lost its 
 keen edge of pain. The doctor had always 
 known that a special tie bound Johnny to 
 Mary's family, but into the nature of it this 
 gentleman of delicate mind had no desire 
 to pry. But he felt the passionate strength 
 of it in the quiet voice and restrained speech : 
 "Any man can do what he must." 
 
 "At least you will wait until this storm 
 is over?" 
 
 "I will not wait a moment after daylight. 
 It may storm all winter. You think so your- 
 self. I will go down-shore through Belpre 
 to Hockingport, and up the Hocking River 
 over the ice. There are villages and farms 
 
 274 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 all along the way, and no hills to climb. I 
 can make it in ten days, even if there arc 
 drifts and with the wind in my facc. ,, 
 
 Johnny was asleep in ten minutes after he 
 reached the house, renewing his powers for 
 the ordeal before him. But no other one 
 of that prayerful household slept soundly 
 through the hours in which the wind moaned 
 in the chimneys, tormented the trees and 
 shook the sashes. By lamplight the next 
 morning he was trussed in woolen clothing 
 and furs and provided like an Arctic explorer. 
 The doctor added blue goggles to protect his 
 eyes from snow-blindness. Word of his inten- 
 tion had filtered through the storm -bound 
 town, and a dozen hero-worshiping boys ap- 
 peared to pilot him across the Muskingum and 
 to cheer him lustily from the site of old Fort 
 Harmer. His answering halloos were borne 
 back to them after he was lost to view in the 
 snow- veiled woods. 
 
 Sleet had fallen in the night and formed a 
 crust as smooth as glass, but not strong 
 enough to bear his weight. Through this he 
 broke at every step. The temperature had 
 dropped to five degrees below zero, and it was 
 snowing, again, in stinging pellets as fine and 
 
 275 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 hard as sand, driven by a furious gale. There 
 would have been some shelter in the forest, 
 but the road had disappeared, and he dared 
 not risk losing his way. Facing the full force 
 of the wind, he made his way from tree to 
 tree along the edge of the woods. Now and 
 then he had a glimpse of the narrowing strip 
 of gray water. Every hour or so he stopped 
 at a farm-house to get warm and to drink 
 black coffee. In Belpre, where he slept, he 
 got flat staves at the cooper-shop and fitted 
 them with leather straps. On these ski-like 
 snow-shoes, in a lull of the storm, he sped 
 over the shore ice to Hockingport. 
 
 He could not use these helps in the valley 
 of the Hocking, where loose snow had been 
 blown down from the hills and heaped in 
 drifts. Then the sky opened again, and a 
 cataract of fleece as soft and thick as wool 
 tumbled down and was broken to foam 
 on a river of wind. Against this blast he 
 struggled along the low growth of the bank, 
 passing a town and a number of farms un- 
 wittingly. Once, the near-by house oblitera- 
 ted, he stood among cattle huddled in the lee 
 of a stable. A haystack looming out of the 
 smother, he burrowed into it to sleep. 
 
 276 
 
ON THESE SKI-LIKE SNOW-SHOES HE SPED OVER 
 THE SHORE ICE 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Not until late in the spring did the people 
 of Ohio learn that the entire Mississippi Val- 
 ley was in the grip of this storm, which opened 
 with a crash in the last week of December. 
 A wonder, at first, it soon became a terror, 
 then a benumbing, bewildering horror, as it 
 raged for days unabated. Changing in char- 
 acter from time to time — running the gamut 
 of rain and snow and sleet, veering winds and 
 minus zero temperatures — it continued to im- 
 peril the lives of men and animals. Travelers 
 caught out in it lay over for days in the first 
 shelter to be found. In a few historic in- 
 stances men did get through; but many 
 more perished. When the snow went off in 
 March the bodies of strangers were found in 
 the woods and on the prairies. And this was 
 but the overture to a winter of storm. 
 
 Johnny went on. The only sign of life, 
 now, in storm-beleaguered villages, was the 
 faint glimmer of light through snow-incrusted 
 windows. In spite of huge fires, farm-houses 
 were cold. Shelterless cattle were turned 
 into fields to help themselves to what food 
 they could paw and pull from shocks and 
 stacks. With creeks, ponds and wells frozen, 
 men were melting snow in soap-kettles which 
 
 278 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 were fitted into the tops of brick and clay 
 ovens under sheds in the yards. Ropes were 
 stretched from doors to barns and to buried 
 wood-piles, to guide men in and out on life- 
 saving errands. 
 
 At the end of ten days he had reached the 
 upper end of the Hocking Valley, and was 
 obliged to skirt the hills and to make his way 
 across a tract of tangled marshland to the 
 Scioto. For miles here there were no houses. 
 All landmarks had disappeared. Once a wolf 
 tracked him for a long distance, for there were 
 still a few of these raiders of the flocks in the 
 rough hills of Ohio. His feet wxre frost- 
 bitten when he reached the river-bank and 
 was guided to a house by a glimmer of light 
 through the gauzy veils of snow. There, 
 unable to get his boots on, he was obliged to 
 lie over for a day. The delay was an eternity 
 of mental agony, for the situation of people 
 had become alarming. Every family was 
 marooned, with starving and freezing cattle 
 and diminishing wood-piles. 
 
 By noon the next day he was able to speed 
 up the river on his snow-shoes, over a new, 
 glazed surface. But when he turned west- 
 ward into the creek he faced a bitter wind 
 
 19 2 79 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 and a dazzling light on the glittering ice, for 
 against the gray sky a white sun shone for 
 a time, its disk clearly marked by a halo of 
 prismatic colors. A slaty dome was darken- 
 ing above the white fields when he reached 
 the home of his heart. 
 
 In that trap for drifting snow the house 
 was sunk to the window-sills. But cheerful 
 firelight glowed through the panes and from 
 an out-oven under a shed. There, as he 
 thought, the bound boy was shoveling snow 
 into the big iron kettle. Hearing his foot- 
 steps crunching through the crust as he 
 stumbled up into the yard, the figure turned. 
 It was Mary, in a suit of Ethan's old working- 
 clothes, who dropped the shovel and ran tow- 
 ard him. 
 
 ''Ethan! Oh my dear, my dear! Thank 
 God you have come!" 
 
 "It's Johnny, Mary!" He caught her and 
 held her while she sobbed on his shoulder. 
 "Why, Alary, dear little Mary-go- 'round, 
 this isn't like you! Ethan's all right. He 
 missed the boat, so, of course, I came." 
 
 She laughed and wept hysterically. "I 
 don't know which I've been the most afraid 
 of — that Ethan would come, or that he 
 
 280 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 wouldn't. So much trouble this year, all 
 coming at once, has sapped my courage and 
 strength. I guess there isn't— quite enough 
 of me — to go 'round — this time, Johnny." 
 
 "Why are you doing such work as this? 
 Where's that boy?" 
 
 "Otto? Getting the sheep into the fold 
 that he boarded in on the hill-slope under the 
 barn floor. He's a good, strong, German boy, 
 Johnny, doing more than a man's work. We 
 have to keep this fire going to supply the 
 stock and the house with water." 
 
 "Well, go in now and see if you can cook 
 enough for two men." He was extraordi- 
 narily happy as he took up a pail of water 
 and followed her along the tunnel-like path 
 to the house. His orchards were resisting 
 the weather, and it was his blessed privilege 
 to protect and cherish Betty and her loved 
 ones until Ethan should return. 
 
 For an hour he melted snow, and worked 
 about the animals which were crowded into 
 the stable, whistling all the while. Then he 
 milked the cows. Now for a heartening 
 supper, ease for his frost-bitten feet, and 
 an evening of joy! The wind had died 
 down and sparkling stars come out when he 
 
 281 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 started toward the house again. Then the 
 hush, the icy chill, the rosy blush spreading 
 along the horizon and climbing to the zenith 
 in pulsing flares of splendor! In a stillness 
 broken only by electric cracklings in the air, 
 the snow-laden trees in the orchard were 
 stained to a sardonic semblance of the April 
 blossoming. 
 
 Another storm! No rest, now, no safety 
 for any one, until, in frantic haste, more 
 work was done. In such apprehension as 
 he had never before felt, he went in and 
 set the pails of milk on the floor. No one 
 was in the low-ceiled, fire-lit living-room; 
 no breath of wind was stirring, but, as he 
 opened the door, Betty's little empty chair 
 swayed lightly on its rockers. A surge of 
 memory swept him back to the hour and the 
 room in which Mary Lake had died. A 
 wistful, hovering presence, loath to leave 
 those long loved on earth, her spirit had 
 seemed to linger before taking its final flight. 
 This room, too, had its gentle ghost. 
 
 Hearing him, Mary hastened in from the 
 kitchen. The face of the delicate baby on 
 her arm was a snowdrop against her sable 
 breast, for Mary was dressed in the unrelieved 
 
 282 
 
WINTER OF THE DEEP SNOW 
 
 black of mourning. At that he cried out, 
 hoarsely : 
 
 "Where's Betty?" 
 
 She burst into tears, her grief fresh at the 
 sight of his. 
 
 "Oh, Johnny, I didn't know where to write, 
 you move about so. Didn't Dr. Hildreth 
 tell you? Mother — died — suddenly — three 
 months ago." 
 
XII 
 
 UNDYING LOVE 
 
 E stood there, stunned by the 
 shock, shaken to the founda- 
 tions of his faith, that Betty 
 ^J could drop out of life and he 
 live on, unknowing, and with 
 no sense of loss. Then a com- 
 forting reassurance filled his mind and heart. 
 He had known! And he had not lost her! 
 When he spoke it was in assertion: 
 
 "It was early in October; in that brief 
 season of Indian summer." 
 
 "Yes, Johnny, but you could not know!" 
 "I knew! She told me about it herself, 
 but I did not understand." He described 
 the heavenly voice with its tidings of great 
 joy, preparing his soul for the vision of that 
 hazy moonlit evening on the St. Joseph River. 
 "She appeared to me like that to comfort 
 us all with the thought that she was as well 
 
 284 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 and happy as the little girl I knew and loved 
 in Marietta — immortally young and well and 
 happy, all her cares and pains and tragic 
 memories fallen from her. Oh, Mary, heaven 
 is not far away, but within and close around 
 us." Then with entire unconsciousness he 
 used one of Betty's endearing mannerisms of 
 speech: "Don't cry so; please, dear. It 
 grieves her." 
 
 It gave her the strange, consoling feeling 
 that her mother was speaking to her through 
 him. As the chill of the dropping tempera- 
 ture penetrated the house and the pathetic, 
 uncomplaining child shivered in her arms, 
 she went to Betty's wardrobe-chest and took 
 out the scarlet cloak to wrap around it. 
 
 "I could not bear to use this before, John- 
 ny, but now I can. Nothing else seems to 
 keep my pale little Blossom so warm." The 
 splendid color trailing to the floor, and Mary's 
 words, reminded him of Betty's girlish fancy 
 about Mrs. Blennerhasset's riding-habit: "No 
 day could be so dark and cold but that glow- 
 ing thing would warm and cheer it." 
 
 Now he had something to say that would 
 try the soul of the bravest: "That is your 
 part, Mary, to stay in the house, cherish this 
 
 285 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 frail little life, and keep us all warm and in 
 good cheer. Can you be brave? Another 
 storm is coming; and Dr. Hildreth thinks it 
 may storm all winter, as it did in that ter- 
 rible season of Valley Forge. Ethan may 
 not be able to get through until spring. Let 
 us pray that he may not try." 
 
 She went white and swallowed hard, but 
 with a new understanding of their peril, and 
 gratitude for the love which had impelled 
 him to make this desperate journey for their 
 protection, she returned his look with one of 
 resolute courage. 
 
 "I should be ashamed to fail you, Johnny. 
 Tell me what I must do." 
 
 "Get supper at once," was his practical 
 suggestion. "Otto and I will need plenty 
 of hot food to keep us going for some hours 
 yet." 
 
 In a moment, so did he imbue them all 
 with his undismayed spirit, the household, 
 which for two weeks had lived in a state of 
 half -paralyzed alarm, began to wear its 
 normal aspect of cheerful industry. While 
 one child laid the table and Mary pre- 
 pared supper, Little Betty sat in the low 
 rocking-chair and held the baby. With two 
 
 286 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 boisterous little ones scrambling over him, 
 and a tired collie sprawling and lolling at his 
 feet, Johnny took the strong and willing G 
 man boy into his confidence. 
 
 After a hasty meal they went out together, 
 comrades in arms for the weeks of battling 
 with arctic weather which lay before them. 
 By the spectral illuminations in the sky they 
 stretched guide-ropes to outbuildings, bed- 
 ded the stock, fetched in a week's supply of 
 wood, and, digging the rest of the fuel out 
 of the snow, stored it in the oven-shed. It 
 was ten o'clock when they came in, the boy 
 to fall asleep at once in his warm feather-bed 
 in the loft, and Johnny— His days of men- 
 tal and physical strain, followed by the spirit- 
 ual shock, and that by further hours of toil, 
 had brought their reaction of mood. He 
 stood within the door, struggling for self- 
 control, hollow-eyed with the torturing fear 
 that Betty might have been laid away in that 
 most desolate and forlorn of all earthly pla< 
 —the remote and neglected country- burying- 
 ground. He could not bear to think of her 
 as forsaken, out alone in the cold and dark- 
 ness and coming storm. 
 
 ''Where — where is she, Mary?" 
 
 287 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "In the orchard, Johnny, under the tree 
 with the drooping branches, where she loved 
 to sit in the little rocking-chair.' ' 
 
 He went out again to pace the drifted aisles, 
 and to sit on the bench under the twin trees 
 where, on one morning of many a spring, he 
 had wakened to see her so blithe and hap- 
 py under the tent of pink bloom. Now he 
 watched beside her frozen bed, questioning his 
 guidance. He had left her, and through dan- 
 ger, hardship and grief she had come to this 
 untimely end. The snow laid so deep above 
 her was spread with reflections from the cold 
 fires in the sky, a mockery of the comfort and 
 glow of the fireside; and the snow-burdened, 
 rose-tinted trees of his generation of patient 
 planting and yearning love might well have 
 their next blooming beside the River of Life. 
 Had his sacrifice been in vain? 
 
 Chilled to the bone, trembling with ex- 
 haustion, rilled with profound spiritual con- 
 fusion, for even the angels, he believed, have 
 their hours of dark discouragement and sepa- 
 ration from God, he returned to the house. 
 On the hearth he passed his hand across his 
 eyes in an effort to recall some urgent reality 
 of the physical world. 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 "There is something — I think my feet 
 need some attention, Mary." 
 
 They were white and shrunken with frost. 
 When thawed out to a swollen and burning 
 redness he was obliged to sit helpless for 
 two days, while a fresh fall of snow was laid 
 to the depth of fifteen more inches over the 
 entire Mississippi Valley. But, in Ethan's 
 larger socks and boots, he was out in the bliz- 
 zard of wind which blew the loose snow down 
 from the circling ridge. 
 
 No morning dawned thereafter in which the 
 temperature was above zero. Day after gray, 
 lowery da}' the wind was a steady, fierce gale 
 with new snow falling, or old snow blowing be- 
 fore it. Fences, corn-shocks and low outbuild- 
 ings were submerged. Doors banked over- 
 night had to be cleared for exit, windows for 
 daylight ; runways plowed in the barn-yard so 
 animals could be let out for air and exercise; 
 snow broken up and shoveled from under or- 
 chard trees, when the lower limbs lay on the 
 surface and bruised their bark by threshing 
 over a glazing of sleet. And, daily, snow had 
 to be melted for water ; corn, hay and bedding- 
 straw dug out of frozen tombs ; feed cut up for 
 sheep, and warmed for pigs and chickens. 
 
 289 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 The house was well stocked with food, but 
 as the bitter weather continued unabated, 
 and the supply of fuel ran low, all Johnny's 
 waking hours and troubled dreams were filled 
 with alarm. Ethan had left a quantity of 
 cord-wood in the forest, but even if it could be 
 located and uncovered horses could not be 
 driven into the woods where low branches 
 rested on the ground, and their legs could 
 not plumb the great depths of crusted layers 
 of snow. Johnny and Otto felled small trees 
 along the creek, and dragged the logs up 
 into the yard with ropes. This wood was 
 wet and green, and warmed the house so ill 
 that on the coldest days the children were 
 kept in bed. 
 
 By incessant toil and sleepless vigilance 
 the twin specters of freezing and famine were 
 kept at bay ; but the bitter cold, biting winds 
 and bewildering blurs or stinging blasts of 
 snow became an obsession. And there was 
 danger to the mind in this storm-beleaguered 
 isolation. From the last week of December 
 no travelers were seen on the road. Rarely 
 did the air clear sufficiently for the nearest 
 neighbor, a half-mile distant, to be hailed 
 with dinner-horn and fluttered table-cloth; 
 
 290 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 and if a letter from Ethan lay in the village 
 post-office, three miles away, it might as well 
 have been in the moon. Upon their hearts 
 lay the unspoken fear that Ethan might 
 have tried to get through, and was now lost 
 in some tragic mystery never to be solved 
 until Judgment Day. For all they knew, the 
 earth had swung into some cataclysmic cycle 
 and lay forever congealed, all life locked in 
 crystal prisons, to be sepultured in imme- 
 morial snow. 
 
 The white mantle had lain unsullied on the 
 frozen earth for ten weeks, and had increased 
 to the depth of four feet on the level, with 
 every valley, hollow, forest, fence and build- 
 ing a trap for deeper drifts, when Johnny 
 was awakened one morning in March by 
 the sound of water dripping from the eaves. 
 He scrambled into his clothing and ran out 
 into the soft glow of the rising sun and a 
 balmy southern breeze. 
 
 "A thaw, Alary! The snow is going off!" 
 he cried. He was wild with relief himself, 
 and Mary broke into such tears and laughter 
 as frightened the children when she gathered 
 them into her arms for morning prayers. 
 
 It was true ! It was unbelievably true that 
 
 291 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 water was dripping everywhere, from eaves 
 and trees, and trickling away in clear riv- 
 ulets. Avalanches slid from roofs; trees 
 dropped their white burdens; buried things 
 emerged, and the snow sank visibly. In three 
 days they watched the wild ducks and geese 
 go north, hour after hour, in hurrying flight. 
 Then the sky brightened ; patches and fringes 
 of misty emerald appeared; song-sparrows, 
 phcebes and bluebirds arrived, and the buds 
 swelled and turned green on the lilac-bushes 
 and fruit-trees. The orchards had weath- 
 ered this historic winter! 
 
 With a bright apple-twig in his button- 
 hole, Johnny went slopping about in the 
 wet, making preparations for the coming 
 flood. Soon Betty would have her tender 
 coverlet of grass, and birds and blossoms 
 would burst into song, color and perfume 
 above her. He could bear to think of 
 her as here in this dear, familiar place, cher- 
 ished by those she had loved. All summer 
 she would lie in shine and shade and shower, 
 under silver moon and soft starlight, and in 
 his beneficent wanderings he would have 
 her with him, in spirit, under the same 
 kind canopy. 
 
 292 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 And now he could bear another thing which 
 had haunted his nights of sleepless pain. 
 It was certain that, in the Northern woods 
 and on the treeless prairies, the snow must 
 have lain deeper, the temperatures fallen 
 lower, the wind raged with destructive force. 
 Undoubtedly his nurseries and young or- 
 chards in Michigan and Indiana had per- 
 ished, and his five years of labor there been 
 brought to naught. But that was of small 
 importance compared with the suffering, and 
 the loss of crops and live-stock, by thousands 
 of new settlers who would sink at once into 
 deeper poverty. It was his to keep them from 
 falling into despair. Better luck next time! 
 Better days coming! 
 
 The vision of sublime service to humanity 
 brightened and beckoned as the blossoming 
 maples began to light their fires of spring 
 along the edges of the woods and water- 
 courses. He waited only on Ethan's return 
 with his seeds to be off to his blighted fields. 
 
 Before the end of that week of thaw, the 
 ice of the snow-flooded creek suddenly broke 
 up and went out with the crashing reports of 
 artillery. Water swept up the lawn to the 
 door-step, and a wild torrent uprooted trees 
 
 293 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 and carried them away, together with small 
 buildings and luckless animals. In the sta- 
 ble at the time, Johnny ran out, driving the 
 horses before him and shouting to Otto and 
 the collie to get the cattle and sheep up on 
 higher ground. Mary, standing in the door- 
 way, screamed a warning as the oven-shed 
 was whirled into the flood; but Johnny saw 
 the danger too late. Struck by a corner of 
 the roof, he went down. 
 
 The dog dragged him out, and Mary, 
 struggling through rushing, ice-blocked water 
 to her knees, led him to the house. Dazed 
 by the blow, he still remembered his errand 
 of mercy and would have broken from her, 
 but she made him understand, at last, that 
 the animals had all swum to safety. She 
 bandaged the swelling bruise on his head; 
 but when she had got him into bed he sank, 
 almost at once, into a dreadful stupor with 
 heavy, labored breathing. 
 
 No help for him who had kept them all 
 from perishing! When he became violently 
 ill, the utmost that she could do was to try 
 to relieve his headache and nausea; and 
 when fever came up and he wandered in his 
 mind, she sat beside him in tearless anguish 
 
 294 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 and kept cold water on his burning, restless 
 head. She scarcely noticed the rapid going 
 down of the flood, the sudden disappearance 
 of the sun at midday, the slaty sky of night 
 glittering with blue-white electric points, the 
 flickering fires which played with sinister 
 splendor along the northern horizon, or the 
 icy chill of the air. 
 
 The last of the green wood was gone. 
 Otto built up a smoking, sputtering fire with 
 the water-soaked wreckage strewn about the 
 yard. That night the soft earth and the 
 creek, which had returned to its channel, 
 were frozen to iron. Then on a polar gale 
 the wild water-fowl fled southward from frigid 
 lands of famine. The leaden sky of dawn was 
 black with them, screaming before the blast. 
 For two days the house rocked in the arctic 
 tempest, and the world was obliterated in 
 flying clouds of snow as thick and impene- 
 trable as a fog at sea. 
 
 Through all the noises and horrors of that 
 storm Johnny raved in delirium. At times 
 it took both Alary and Otto to hold him in 
 bed. He cried out for his seeds, and was 
 comforted only for the moment by the assur- 
 ance that Ethan would fetch them. When 
 
 20 295 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 he reached out his arms for the little rocking- 
 chair, Mary brought it to the bedside; and 
 when he stared at the scarlet cloak hanging 
 on the wall and muttered about the cold, 
 she spread it over him. But when he begged 
 her to put it over Betty to warm and cheer 
 her, she knew nothing of that old memory 
 which surged up and beat upon his heart, 
 and could only weep in her helplessness. 
 
 "Oh, Johnny, try to remember! Mother 
 is warm and happy in heaven." 
 
 As the storm died away in fitful gusts of 
 sleet, and the cold hardened to minus de- 
 grees that chilled the blood, he became quiet- 
 er. Thinking that he slept at last, and pray- 
 ing for Ethan to come in this extremity of 
 peril, Mary lay down, without undressing, to 
 nurse the baby whose delicate bloom of re- 
 viving life she owed to Johnny's care of them 
 all. 
 
 Then her exhaustion betrayed her. In the 
 blessed silence and darkness, after that long 
 time of storm and stress, she fell asleep. The 
 first things of which she was vaguely aware, 
 in the early hours of morning, were the frantic 
 barking of the dog, and the river of cold 
 which was flowing through the house. And 
 
 296 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 whether in her dream or waking she never 
 knew, but she heard her mother's voice: 
 
 "Mary, you go 'round, dear, and look after 
 Johnny." 
 
 How sweet it was — the gentle tones, the 
 quaint phrase treasured in her memory. 
 But this was not spoken in the old manner 
 of reminding a thoughtless child of duty in 
 the midst of play, but was anxious, insistent, 
 pleading : 
 
 "Mary, Mary, Mary! You go 'round, 
 dear, and look after Johnny!" 
 
 She suddenly sat up, wide awake and with 
 a sense of danger. Somewhere in the yard 
 the dog was barking continuously in wild 
 alarm. The door was open. Johnny's bed 
 was empty. 
 
 She found him, the collie standing guard 
 beside him, lying cold and senseless on Betty's 
 snowy grave, over which he had spread the 
 warm, red cloak. When she and Otto had 
 carried him in, Mary put the brooms, the 
 butter-bowls, the children's stools — every 
 small, dry, wooden thing at hand — into the 
 fire to heat blankets and water, and bade 
 the frightened boy strip the fences of their 
 top rails. 
 
 297 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "Keep the fire going! Burn every fence 
 and building on the place, if you must, but 
 keep up the fire! Here is one of God's angels 
 perishing." 
 
 It was an hour before Johnny's heart beat 
 with its full force, and from the death-like 
 chill he passed into fever and delirium. The 
 day dawned bright and still and intensely 
 cold, the sun shining on dazzling fields of ice- 
 glazed snow, and waking a million sparkles 
 from swollen green buds frozen in the hearts 
 of icicles. 
 
 They were all around his bed — Mary and 
 Ethan, and the good doctor for whom Ethan 
 had "swum through high water to Columbus," 
 on the bleak April day that Johnny returned 
 to consciousness. A winter that had streaked 
 young Ethan's head with silver had bleached 
 Johnny's hair and beard to the snowy white- 
 ness of the pillow on which he lay. He knew 
 them, and the old smile of love and gentle hap- 
 piness lighted his cavernous eyes and wasted 
 face; but in a moment he looked beyond them, 
 around the room, in wistful inquiry. Mary 
 had to lean over him to hear the faintly 
 spoken words: 
 
 "Where's Betty?" 
 
 298 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 "Why, Johnny, don't you remember?' 1 
 And then, seeing how it was with him, that 
 
 he mercifully remembered nothing of the sor- 
 row and terror and hardships of that night- 
 mare of a winter, she finished, "Mother's 
 in the orchard, Johnny." 
 
 "Are the trees in bloom ?" 
 
 "Not — not yet." The fruit-trees of Ohio 
 did grow another set of buds, and, late in 
 May, put forth a few, pale, scattered blooms. 
 
 His presence here, in this home of his heart, 
 seemed perfectly natural, and about his ill- 
 ness he expressed neither surprise nor curi- 
 osity, but accepted it with the unquestion- 
 ing simplicity and patience of a child. They 
 all hung upon his next words. 
 
 "Betty will want — her little rocking-chair." 
 
 Ethan jumped up. "That's right, John- 
 ny. Don't you let me forget my manners." 
 
 He carried the chair out to the orchard. 
 Mary found him there on Johnny's bench, 
 his gaunt face buried in his hands. His 
 arms tightened around her and the precious 
 little rosy Blossom on her breast. 
 
 "Mary, while I lay in Marietta with the 
 broken rib I got in the boat-wreck, I should 
 have gone raving mad if I had not known 
 
 299 
 
JOHNNY APP.LESEED 
 
 that Johnny was here. To think that I 
 should find you all safe and well, not even a 
 silly sheep lost, and him lying like that! 
 And I dropped his seeds in the flood when 
 the ice went out under me on the Scioto/' 
 He clenched his fists, and the few, slow, diffi- 
 cult tears of the man of Puritan ancestry 
 were squeezed out and hung on his lashes. 
 "I'd sweat blood to have Johnny his old 
 self again and to get his seeds back for him." 
 
 "It is unlikely that he will ever ask for 
 them," the doctor said, as he joined them. 
 "He has had a concussion of the brain from 
 the blow on his head, and that was followed 
 by brain-fever of such severity and persistency 
 that his recovery is surprising. Has he been 
 under mental strain or suffered some emo- 
 tional shock?" 
 
 Since the mischief was done and it would 
 avail nothing, Mary could not speak of the 
 effect of her mother's death on Johnny. 
 "He felt responsible for all of us and worked 
 far beyond his strength. And he was anxious 
 about the orchards, especially his young 
 trees and nurseries farther west — slept ill all 
 winter," she said. As long as she lived she 
 never could forget how often he had got up 
 
 300 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 in the night to pace the floor of his little room 
 for hours, or to go out to lonely vigils by 
 Betty's ice-locked grave; and she could never 
 speak of that time to any one but Ethan. 
 
 "It has been a trying season for every one," 
 was the doctor's sober comment. "The 
 minds of many people have been more or less 
 affected. Johnny's young plantations in the 
 West have all been destroyed, I am afraid, 
 with the crops and stock and much of the 
 game, for the snow lay ten feet deep on the 
 prairies. He may always be spared the 
 knowledge of this loss, for there is a lapse 
 of memory extending over several years, and 
 some mental confusion. Well, Ohio has its 
 orchards — a debt to Johnny that we can 
 never pay. It will be a long time before he 
 gets back his physical vigor, but be pa- 
 tient and hopeful. I think he will improve 
 in both body and mind. Just now" — he 
 tapped his own head significantly — "Johnny 
 isn't all here." 
 
 When he was gone Mary turned and wept 
 on Ethan's breast. "Oh, my dear, my dear, 
 I understand Johnny's devotion to us who 
 never did anything to deserve it. Once in 
 his ravings he cried out, 'I'll take care of 
 
 301 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 your babies, Betty!' He rescued us all in 
 the war, he made this home beautiful for 
 us twice, and he always has watched over us. 
 In some strange way that I am content never 
 to know, he belonged to mother. Now he is 
 ours, to love and hold in reverence, and, if 
 he is always to be like this, to care for ten- 
 derly as long as he lives." 
 
 Ethan wrote at once to his cousin, Dr. Hil- 
 dreth, to assure him that the family and 
 stock had come through the winter unharmed, 
 owing to Johnny's care, and that Johnny 
 himself had been seriously ill, but was now 
 recovering. As there would be no seed for 
 his gleaning this year, people must not be 
 alarmed if he was not seen along his old 
 routes. 
 
 "Nothing keeps so well as bad news," he 
 remarked to Mary as he sealed the letter. 
 "Let us work and pray that in another year 
 there will be none to tell about Johnny." 
 
 As a beginning in that labor of love Mary 
 laid aside the mourning which bewildered 
 and distressed him. By and by he ceased 
 to ask for Betty. It was as though he had 
 found her and was companioned by some 
 presence, invisible to others, in which he had 
 
 302 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 a quiet happiness. The little rocking-chair, 
 with the scarlet cloak thrown over it, stood 
 by his bedside, and when he got up it v. 
 returned to its old place on the hearth. 
 Often when Johnny lay before the fire with 
 his Bible or other book, he looked up at who- 
 ever might be sitting in it, smiled, and read 
 something aloud. They soon learned that 
 he loved to see it occupied by Mary or Little 
 Betty, with the baby in arms. 
 
 Ethan cleared the yard of wreckage, cut 
 away dead and broken limbs, and grubbed 
 out winter-killed trees and shrubbery; and 
 the children gathered up and buried the 
 many little bundles of feathers which lay 
 under perches. Everything possible was done 
 to give the place its normal, seasonal aspect; 
 but the summer which followed the winter 
 of the deep snow was dark and inclement. 
 They were anxious about the effect upon 
 Johnny the first time he came out into a 
 day of threatening clouds and fitful sunshine. 
 Puzzled by the sodden, dropping leaves, the 
 absence of bloom and fruit, and by the 
 scarcity of birds and bees, he asked: 
 
 "What season is it?" 
 
 "It's June, Johnny." 
 
 3°3 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 "But there are no apples!" 
 
 "Ohio has been lucky, but we must ex- 
 pect a crop failure now and then." Ethan 
 tried to speak lightly, but it was difficult 
 not to be candid with Johnny. "A freeze 
 in March killed the first buds, and the season 
 has been bad for everything." 
 
 He stared at them wildly " I never heard 
 of such a thing happening in Ohio. I — I 
 don't remember anything about it." 
 
 "You were very ill at the time, Johnny." 
 In spite of her the tears welled into Mary's 
 eyes, his bewilderment and distress were so 
 piteous. But she was inspired to add : "You 
 know you always stop to spend a day with — 
 with mother in the spring." 
 
 The mystery cleared, he lost his look of 
 alarm, and, his interest in himself always of 
 the slightest, he dismissed the matter from 
 his mind. "Are the orchards like this all 
 over Ohio?" 
 
 Ethan nodded, and they waited with sus- 
 pended breath, half fearing, half hoping that 
 he would ask for the seeds lost in the flood 
 and for his blighted plantations in Michigan 
 and Indiana. But for him those disasters 
 had never happened and Betty had never 
 
 3°4 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 died. As it was with her, all his cares and 
 pains and tragic memories had fallen from 
 him. He held only to the great fundamentals 
 — his undying love for her and his beneficent 
 purpose. " There will be no seeds this year," 
 he said, but not sadly. His face took on the 
 look it had worn in his youth in Pittsburg 
 when his start on his mission had been so 
 long delayed — that look which saw no hard 
 or hindering circumstance, but only the dis- 
 tant and splendid goal. 
 
 His compassion was all for others when he 
 looked upon Ethan's fields, where seed had 
 rotted in the cold, wet ground, or had sprung 
 up in thin, pale growth, only to be beaten 
 upon by hail-storms or deluges of rain. 
 Even if the weather improved there could 
 now be only the scantiest of crops, and peo- 
 ple and animals must suffer many privations. 
 
 When skies are unkind the husbandman 
 must work all the harder for what may be 
 saved, so Johnny was out, now, bringing a 
 wonderful store of practical wisdom and 
 skill to Ethan's help. He guided the plow, 
 swung the scythe, repaired tools and harness, 
 followed the sheep on the hills, led the men 
 of the neighborhood to a grassy marsh where 
 
 3°5 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 wild forage might be cut to eke out their 
 scanty meadows, and brought in the winter's 
 supply of fuel. So he won back, if not his 
 old, tireless strength, at least his old, well- 
 directed energy, and fitted himself to take 
 up his inspired task again. But as he said 
 nothing about this, Ethan and Mary thought 
 that even his mission was fading from his 
 memory. They had a feeling of happy se- 
 curity that he would remain with them in 
 contentment. Capable as he was of doing 
 his own work, he showed an increasing un- 
 fitness to take care of himself. 
 
 It was in this year of profound discourage- 
 ment and ruinous losses, when men had to 
 sacrifice stock they could not feed, and go 
 into debt for high-priced seed brought up 
 from the South, that Johnny lost something 
 of the natural man's instinct of self-preserva- 
 tion. His spirit of brotherly love pushed 
 him over the verge of reason into those ec- 
 centric and endearing forms of self-sacrifice 
 which ever afterward marked him. Because 
 it had been necessary for men to do so when 
 animals were on short rations, he continued 
 to carry heavy loads, and to walk long dis- 
 tances, to spare horses. He refused to eat, 
 
 306 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 even at tables generously supplied, until sure 
 that women and children had had enough, 
 and he gave his clothing to any ill-clad stran- 
 ger whom he met on the road. 
 
 And, seeing how hard plants and low animal 
 orders struggled against extinction, his sym- 
 pathy and reverence for all life developed 
 into a poetic and fantastic consideration. 
 An earthworm drowned out of its burrow, a 
 bee made sluggish by cold rain, became a 
 piteous thing. He pruned trees like a sur- 
 geon, only to heal some ill, insisting that they 
 could feel the cruel knife; and he was sure 
 that seeds were moved by thought and emo- 
 tion, as they lay in pulsing germination in 
 the dark. 
 
 Again there were but ten days of Indian 
 summer, and winter set in so early and severe 
 that, by the middle of December, wagons 
 were driven across the frozen Ohio. But 
 while the weather was intensely cold, there 
 were few storms and little snow, and the ice 
 went out in February with such destructive 
 floods as had never before been recorded. 
 All Western streams were choked with wreck- 
 age, and towns were cabled to trees on the 
 bluffs. Then, as the water subsided, the bot- 
 
 307 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 toms were spread with rich alluvia, and the 
 season leaped into genial spring. As if by 
 magic the ground thawed and dried out for the 
 plowing in March. The birds, sadly dimin- 
 ished in number but mad with joy, arrived 
 early and raised an extra brood that golden 
 summer, as if aware that they must restore 
 nature's disturbed balance. 
 
 In Johnny's veins, too, the sap of spring 
 ascended. He brought in the new-born lambs 
 to the fire. He spaded the flower-beds and 
 kitchen garden. From fruit-tree and shrub 
 he cut away dead wood and parasitic suckers. 
 As the sunny, showery days of April went 
 by he had many secret sources of happiness 
 about which those who loved him could 
 only surmise. As though it were some un- 
 folding drama, he watched the clustered buds 
 of the apple-trees swell and swell until every 
 little nosegay showed the pink edges of close- 
 packed petals. He went to sleep one night 
 on the bench in excited expectancy, and in 
 the morning awoke to that miracle of spring 
 — mounds and drifts and banks of rosy 
 bloom, a blue ocean of incense, and the har- 
 mony of birds and bees. 
 
 Before he was awake Mary had slipped 
 
 308 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 out with Betty's little rocking-chair. For 
 long, speechless moments he gazed at it 
 swaying in the breeze, and at the blossoming 
 boughs shaking out their fluttering draperies 
 of pink and pearl. His breakfast was placed 
 before him on the rustic table, and gleeful 
 children tumbled out into the happy day. 
 And here was friendly, helpful, cheerful 
 Mary-go- 'round sitting beside him with a bit 
 of sewing. He startled her by remarking 
 that the trees were so lovely because it was 
 their wedding-day, and told her something 
 of the fertilization of the blossoms by the 
 bees. But when the thought had dwelt in 
 her mind a moment, she said: 
 
 "That is beautiful!" She blushed like any 
 bride, and sat for a time in tender reverie. 
 "Ethan and I were married under the apple- 
 blossoms. Think of being canopied with 
 bliss in such an hour!" 
 
 By and by she asked, "Johnny, do you 
 remember how you used to take us children 
 on a journey 'round the world?" 
 
 Yes, he remembered, with a pleasure as 
 great as hers. There were little ones here 
 to-day — no break now, to him, in the flow 
 of the generations. The hours went by in the 
 
 309 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 old manner of Betty's time. He got a scythe 
 and mowed the grass, and he fetched out the 
 big table for the picnic dinner. Then, yield- 
 ing to tugging hands and coaxing voices, he 
 took the littlest baby on his back and marched 
 away at the head of a procession, for such 
 brave and laughing adventure as would make 
 them say, when they grew up, " Don't you 
 remember ? ' ' When Mary heard them scram- 
 bling on all-fours, and squealing like bear cubs 
 under the shrubbery, she cried for pure hap- 
 piness. 
 
 Johnny was having his old day in Paradise 
 with Betty and her little brood. 
 
 They were not surprised in the morning 
 to find that he was gone, but, more than a 
 little anxious, Ethan followed him, unseen, 
 for two days. Mary ran down the road to 
 meet him on his return, and Ethan dropped 
 from his horse to walk with her. 
 
 "It's all right, Mary. I watched Johnny 
 go into farm-houses and villages all bowered 
 in his orchards. The country never looked 
 more beautiful. And such welcomes! Men 
 and women, children and dogs, ran across 
 fields and down the lanes to meet him. He 
 will come back when the trees are done 
 
 310 
 
UNDYING LOVE 
 
 blooming, and there will be no harm in his 
 taking such a holiday at any time. He has 
 a friend in every person, a home under every 
 roof in Ohio." 
 
 When the scented snow of faded petals was 
 drifting on every wind, Johnny reappears 1. 
 He came in out of the dewy dusk, to stand 
 erect in the doorway, his feet in bark sandals, 
 his head minus a covering, his silver hair and 
 beard a frame for a face of burning zeal and 
 unquenchable youth, to announce a bit of news 
 which had thrilled his heart and the heart of 
 all America seven years before. 
 
 "The Erie Canal has been opened! Thou- 
 sands of people are pouring over Lake Erie 
 into the woods and prairies of Michigan and 
 Indiana. Ohio does not need me now. I 
 am going out there to plant orchards.' ' 
 
 21 
 
XIII 
 
 THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 fc?v * 
 
 W9&& 
 k^***^^ 
 
 w? 
 
 Sip 
 
 11 
 
 H 
 
 m 
 
 Mm 
 
 ^E talked for an hour, pouring 
 forth such a torrent of elo- 
 quence that, when he took his 
 blankets to the bench in the 
 orchard, he left them thrilled 
 and uplifted. 
 
 1 'It was as though he had been up on a moun- 
 tain, talking with God." Mary's voice shook 
 and her eyes were wet. "But we cannot let 
 him go. He would die in some wretched, 
 lonely way." 
 
 "I don't believe it ; but what if he should?" 
 Ethan had been carried off his firmly planted 
 Yankee feet, as by the sound of trumpets 
 and drums. It was the man's point of view: 
 courage and faith were equipment for any 
 task; and life was the thing — the vision, the 
 adventure. The woman must hold fast to the 
 good already gained. 
 
 312 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 "But, Ethan, Johnny is growing old!" 
 "He doesn't know it. He never will know 
 it. Don't you dare tell him." The tone was 
 exultant. It had been an unforgctable ex- 
 perience to see consecration rekindle the fires 
 of youth. 
 
 "That's just it. He lives in a dream — " 
 "It's a brave dream that will make him 
 work to the last day of his life as if inspired. 
 I hope he'll never wake up. Mary, what has 
 he lost, after all? Except for a measure of 
 his physical strength, nothing that would ever 
 be of any use to him. And, like most men of 
 his wiry build and active mind, he has a won- 
 derful vitality that will stand him in good 
 stead. What a world this would be if we 
 could all be delivered from self-distrust and 
 fear — forget the things that paralyze effort; 
 age and failure, sickness and sorrow." 
 
 "That's a beautiful thing to see in Johnny, 
 but you know, Ethan, that he is incapable of 
 taking care of himself. If anything dreadful 
 happened to him it would break the heart of 
 the West." 
 
 " No, it would not. The West would glory 
 in him. Johnny has in him the stuff of heroes 
 and martyrs, and such men are not to be 
 
 313 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 held back. He loved your dear, sweet mother, 
 and the tragedy of it has finally turned his 
 brain, but that had no power to hold him 
 from the work to which he was called in his 
 youth. And how are we to hold him? Have 
 we the right? If we meddle in this he would 
 die, after a few, miserable, wasted years. 
 We could not bear that, Mary. I think we 
 must have the courage to let him go." 
 
 She suddenly surrendered. "I know. I 
 knew it all the time he was talking, but was 
 not reconciled." Then her eyes, too, glowed 
 as if with reflection from Johnny's soul of 
 flame. "Did you ever see any one as jubi- 
 lant? Such light is not to be hidden under a 
 bushel. It is to be set on a hilltop for all the 
 world to witness!" 
 
 Something of Johnny's own spirit sustained 
 them in the months of waiting for the ripen- 
 ing of seed; and any lingering doubts of the 
 wisdom and kindness of their resolve were 
 dispelled as his energy and happiness mounted 
 with the sun. An orchardist, he knew su- 
 premely how to wait, and wings were given 
 to time by his moral necessity of filling every 
 possible hour with useful work. But even 
 if he had not been the busiest person on the 
 
 3U 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 farm, he would not have 1 been impatient to 
 be off. Not since he Left Pittsburg a genera- 
 tion before had he spent the dramatic season 
 of growth in one orchard ; arid this dear plan- 
 tation which he had twice set out for Betty's 
 earthly paradise was haunted, now, by her 
 gentle shade. Companioned by the beloved 
 dead whom he confused with the living, 
 every day of time was but a blissful moment 
 of eternity. 
 
 Morning and evening and in the noon- 
 hour of rest he watched the small, green 
 hips form as the petals fell, and, through 
 genial weeks and months, expand to their 
 full roundness. As the equal nights came on 
 with turbulent weather, he was often awak- 
 ened by the vigorous threshing of the trees 
 and the mellow dropping of the windfalls. 
 The apples filled so with bursting juices that 
 their skins were stretched to a satiny luster, 
 as thin, fine-grained and defensive as gold- 
 beater's parchment; and all the moods of 
 summer and the alchemy of earth and sun 
 were condensed in every little painted sphere, 
 and the very breath of the Creator was hid- 
 den in the seed. 
 
 And then, cider-making time on the pioneer 
 
 315 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 farm! The cattle were out on the dwindling 
 pastures. The corn stood in brown shocks 
 in the fields, with frost-rimed pumpkins lying 
 like harvest moons in the stubble. Multi- 
 colored leaves sifted down through the drowsy 
 air of Indian summer. The small press, a 
 rude, home-made but competent affair, was 
 set up in the orchard, where every tree, so 
 irregularly planted, so individual of growth 
 and habit, had a personality and an intimate 
 history of its own. 
 
 The apples, not sorted as to kind, but only 
 as to perfection and keeping quality, lay in 
 variegated heaps of ruby and russet, green 
 and gold, on the ground. The culls were 
 pared, cored and cut up for the big kettle of 
 cider-apple butter which was made out of 
 doors, over the brick oven or a gipsy fire; or 
 they were tumbled pell-mell into the hopper 
 of the press. As the amber juice gushed out 
 it was drunk at once from a gourd or tin dip- 
 per, boiled and sealed in bottles for use in 
 mince pies, or was turned into the vinegar- 
 barrel. The choicest fruit was stored in bins 
 in cool, dark, cellars, or was buried in pits 
 lined with bright straw. No child needed a 
 light to find his favorite variety. He could 
 
 316 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 burrow and fetch up the most elusive by 
 the feel of it in his hand, and his nose would 
 confirm his judgment. Now the north wind 
 might blow, the robin fly south and Johnny 
 be out on some bleak road, but there would 
 be comfort and pleasure of his providing at 
 the winter fireside. 
 
 The whole family helped him wash the 
 seeds out of the pomace and dry them on the 
 chimney-shelf. From the wagon-gate they 
 watched and waved to him until, with the 
 long stride which carried him so rapidly over 
 great distances, he disappeared around a bend 
 of the road. The hearts of Ethan and Mary 
 went with Johnny along every mile of that 
 brave journey, whose limit was the length 
 of days allotted to him and the goal an or- 
 chard on the utmost horizon. 
 
 Their forethought went with him, too. 
 Mary had spent time and reflection on a 
 letter to Dr. Hildreth. It was the right of 
 the people of the West, who loved him, to 
 know how it was with Johnny. As capable 
 as he had ever been of doing his beautiful 
 work, his own safety and comfort must now 
 be a charge on those he had served so long 
 and so unselfishly. People were prepared for 
 
 317 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 his changed appearance, his lapse of memory, 
 his extravagant mysticism, and the exagger- 
 ated sympathies which impelled him to strip 
 himself of the necessaries of life. They were 
 asked not to recall to him the sad things 
 which he had forgotten, to indulge his con- 
 soling beliefs, attend to his physical needs, 
 and have the courage and faith to let him go 
 
 on. 
 
 In Marietta the letter passed from hand to 
 hand. Men talked about it in thoughtful 
 groups on the street, and women parted with 
 misty eyes at garden gates. Copies of it 
 were made, and sent on to other towns. 
 Copied again and again, Mary's letter went 
 'round from Pittsburg to the prairies, re- 
 minding every one who had an orchard, and 
 every one for whom he lived only to replant 
 the orchard that had been destroyed, of the 
 debt of love and gratitude that was owed to 
 Johnny. There was no waterway or post- 
 road or wild trail in the region which did 
 not ring with his name; no child who did 
 not listen wide-eyed to his brave and tender 
 story; no family shrine from which a prayer 
 did not go up that his days might be long 
 in the land and his pathway lined with his 
 
 318 
 
THE SHINING GOAI 
 
 own blossoming trees. In thinking of him the 
 social and religious conscience was awakened, 
 and other men and women were stirred to 
 neglected civic and neighborly duties. Thus, 
 while still living, Johnny became a poignant 
 and admonishing memory. 
 
 And if it had been a startling thing to the 
 people of a generation before to see the gentle, 
 zealous and undefended youth, it was now an 
 arresting and uplifting experience to have this 
 fervid and unconsciously aging man come in, 
 erect under his beneficent burden, clad in 
 any insufficient and nondescript way, his 
 white hair streaming in the winter wind. It 
 was as though the bitter frosts which had 
 laid the blight of discouragement on so many 
 had touched Johnny grievously, too, but only 
 to strengthen his purpose and sweeten his 
 spirit. A sermon and a song, he journeyed 
 down the Scioto and Hocking valleys, and 
 up the Muskingum. The grateful affection 
 and respect in which he had always been held 
 deepened to the reverent love which has been, 
 everywhere and in every age of the world, ac- 
 corded to moral superiority. 
 
 His was the honored place at board and 
 fireside where, by many innocent deceptions, 
 
 3 J 9 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 he was persuaded to accept the best. And, 
 although few people had much surplus cloth- 
 ing, warm garments were always found for 
 Johnny. He progressed rapidly and gleaned 
 a great store of seeds, for now children helped 
 him wash them out of the pomace; hero- 
 worshiping farm and village boys tramped 
 with him on every highway, assisting him 
 over many a delaying difficulty, and when 
 his leather bag grew heavy, men discovered 
 that they had errands his way and gave him 
 lifts in wagons. In not a few instances towns 
 and churches took up collections and bought 
 horses and new clothing for him. Such wealth, 
 however, he held only in trust for the next 
 needy stranger he encountered. So, in the 
 course of a few years, people learned to sup- 
 ply his immediate necessities with anything 
 of small value that was serviceable. And in 
 Ohio, at least, where his errand kept him on 
 main-traveled roads in the oldest and most 
 thickly settled districts, he never suffered 
 privation for a longer time than it took him 
 to make the next house. 
 
 One day early in March he reappeared at 
 the old home, "to spend the day with Betty." 
 A neighboring farmer, returning from the 
 
 320 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 nearest village in a wagon, had picked him 
 up on the road, along which he was stagger- 
 ing under the weight of two big bags of seeds. 
 From a last year's scarecrow, fallen in a corn- 
 field, he had taken a crownless hat and a gun- 
 nysack coat. The winter of toil and travel 
 had stripped his spare figure of every ounce 
 of surplus flesh, and from his thin-featured, 
 ascetic face his large dark eyes shone, brilliant 
 and eager, from the urgency within. 
 
 "Johnny dear, you are half frozen!" Mary 
 cried. Quick tears filled her eyes. She never 
 could get used to seeing him come in like this. 
 She did not rest now until he was warmed 
 and fed, and clothed decently in one of Ethan's 
 good suits. He had trifling gifts for the chil- 
 dren — marbles for the boys and bright hair- 
 ribbons for the little girls. It was in this way, 
 and for religious books to distribute among the 
 elders in scantily supplied cabins on the 
 prairies, that he spent the small sums of 
 money which many people slipped into his 
 pockets. 
 
 After supper, when the children were in 
 bed, Johnny and Mary and Ethan and the 
 little empty rocking-chair gathered around 
 the open fire in the old grouping. While 
 
 321 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 Mary knitted and Ethan shelled seed-corn 
 Johnny read aloud from the New Testament 
 and from the copy of Swedenborg which he 
 always carried in the bosom of his shirt. At 
 the end of every day, whether alone or in 
 company, he had this sweet hour of com- 
 munion and prayer. Wholly preoccupied, 
 then, with the other world, he seemed to 
 lose touch with earthly persons and things. 
 To any audience, and with an astonishing 
 poetic imagery drawn from his intimate knowl- 
 edge and love of the most elusive things of 
 nature, he described his visions and reported 
 his talks with angels. 
 
 These fantastic accounts were listened to 
 everywhere with pleasure, respect and even 
 credulity. Johnny had a personal charm that 
 was felt by every one, and a voice of beauty 
 and persuasion, and when he spoke of his 
 faith or his mission, which was faith trans- 
 mitted into work, his speech was so inspired, 
 his countenance so lighted with the fires of 
 fanaticism, that people quite lost their sober 
 judgment. 
 
 Mary and Ethan were carried away now 
 when he sprang to his feet, swept his halo of 
 silver hair back from his face, and, like any 
 
 322 
 
Ill E SHINING GOAL 
 
 prophet of old, delivered his burning message. 
 He was going into the wilderness, with no 
 
 thought for the morrow, to take eomfort and 
 beauty to brave men, wistful women and 
 defrauded children. Angels would watch over 
 
 SWEPT HIS HALO OF SILVER HAIR BACK FROM HIS FACE, AND, 
 LIKE ANY PROPHET OF OLD, DELIVERED HIS BURNING MESSAGE 
 
 him, ravens feed him, manna fall from the 
 skies. All the days of his life he would walk 
 in safety, blessedness and peace until his 
 task was done. 
 
 Their hearts sank. In the moment of re- 
 action they looked at each other in sick dis- 
 
 3 2 3 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 may. Was this dear visionary, who was 
 "not all here " because a good part of him was 
 already in heaven, to be let go, perhaps to 
 wander about aimlessly in perilous wilds? 
 But almost at once they were reassured. 
 The part of him that was on earth was all 
 practical, informed, efficient. During the win- 
 ter he had read the newspapers and talked 
 with leading men. He had overlooked no 
 detail by which he could give the greatest 
 service to the greatest number in his new 
 field, and with the least danger of his plant- 
 ing being brought to an untimely end. 
 
 Taking a bit of charred wood from the 
 hearth, he sketched a rough map of the old 
 Northwest Territory on Mary's white-pine 
 table. Then, with three swift strokes, he 
 marked the northwestward trend of migra- 
 tion, above the navigable streams of the Ohio 
 River Valley — the National Road which was 
 being pushed through the centrally loca.ted 
 capitals of the three Southern states to the 
 Mississippi; the post-road soon to be opened 
 between Detroit and Chicago; and the hun- 
 dreds of miles of canals that were projected 
 along the Maumee, Miami and Wabash, to 
 connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River. 
 
 3 2 4 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 " Thousands of people are breaking those 
 iron trails to the West and settling near them, 
 and those are the routes I must follow. In 
 another dozen years there will be tens of 
 thousands. Then there will be towns and 
 nurserymen. But in that time a generation 
 of children could grow up without the mem- 
 ories of orchards." 
 
 A dozen years! He was fifty-eight, and 
 in the hard, half-century of pioneering in the 
 Middle West many were old at forty-five. 
 
 When he had gone to his comfortable bed 
 in the loft chamber, Ethan could not contain 
 his pride in him. "He'll do it, Mary. Johnny 
 knows what he is about. He'll live long 
 and finish that task. You might as well try 
 to stop the Holy Ghost." 
 
 Mary had knelt and repeated the prayer 
 she had learned at her mother's knee before 
 she answered. "Whether his life be long or 
 short, he will live the Beatitudes and see 
 God every hour." 
 
 When Johnny rose at an early hour in the 
 morning, Ethan brought a horse to the door 
 for him — a big, strong animal that could 
 carry him and his belongings with ease. He 
 disposed his seeds, and the new tools and 
 
 3 2 5 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 small camping outfit provided for him, on 
 the horse, and spared a moment to give him 
 the pleasure of nosing in a pocket for an 
 apple. But when Ethan urged him to mount 
 he shook his head. That was a heavy enough 
 load for any horse. Not until there were 
 orchards in his new field of labors would he 
 look upon blossoming or fruiting trees again; 
 nor could he stop every spring for a day with 
 Betty. He often saw her, now, in some fa- 
 miliar or angelic guise, but it was only here 
 that he fully recovered her. 
 
 "Is Betty asleep?" 
 
 "Yes, Johnny, she's asleep," Mary man- 
 aged to answer, with a tender smile. 
 
 "Don't waken her." 
 
 He led the horse up to the road. They 
 knew he would walk all that weary way, and 
 that he was not likely to have this good 
 horse for his baggage for any length of time. 
 He would gradually strip himself of every 
 comfort and advantage. So he would go to 
 the end of his earthly journey, keeping only 
 the essential things — his seeds, his tools, his 
 love for Betty and his purpose. 
 
 At Sandusky he left the horse behind for 
 an emigrant family stranded by the loss of an 
 
 326 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 animal on the road, and crossed the cold lake 
 to Detroit on the windy deck of a freight- 
 boat. He had no recollection of having been 
 there since the war of twenty years before, 
 when the place was a lethargic, wilderness 
 fortress and Indian trading-post. These hur- 
 rying crowds enchanted him — so many peo- 
 ple for him to serve! Dragging his roped 
 baggage across the gang-plank, he mounted 
 the steps which led up from the dock. 
 
 Without help it would be difficult to go 
 on. But help came to Johnny, now, when it 
 was needed, and his relations with men were 
 on the simple religious basis of the duty and 
 joy of giving and receiving. With entire 
 confidence he stood still and looked out over 
 bobbing hats, piles of goods and a confusion 
 of tangled trucks and teams, until he caught 
 the serene and kindly eye of a French Recollet 
 friar. The Franciscan missionary was evi- 
 dently just starting on a journey, for he rode 
 one pony and led another. Making his way 
 through the press, he dismounted. It was a 
 friend, whose face and name and habit of 
 life were erased from his memory, who laid a 
 fraternal hand on Johnny's shoulder. 
 
 "We go the same way, man frire, and 
 22 327 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 upon much the same errand. So put your 
 belongings on my extra animal and we will 
 walk in company." Thinking it well that, 
 in the midst of their temporal concerns, men 
 should be reminded of their blessings, he 
 raised his hand and voice. ' ' Let us give thanks 
 to Our Lady that Johnny Appleseed moon 
 has risen on the woods and prairies." 
 
 A cheer went up from those within hearing 
 and hats were thrown in the air. Johnny did 
 not know that the hope of orchards had been 
 cruelly dashed from the lips of the people of 
 this region once, nor that the promise of his re- 
 turn had been glad tidings to settlers and an 
 inducement to new-comers. The extravagant 
 welcomes and consideration which greeted 
 him seemed only the natural response to his 
 own love and elation. Now his way to join 
 the procession which was moving across the 
 marshy ground to the West, was lined with 
 cheers, hand-clasps, uncovered heads, lifted 
 babies and faces which, at the sight of his 
 white hair and eyes of consecrated and ardent 
 youth, paid the silent tributes of hearts made 
 suddenly humble. A hush fell upon the 
 crowd for a moment as that passionate pil- 
 grim disappeared in the forest. 
 
 328 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 There were more people in the country 
 than he had expected to find, and more corn 
 and cattle. In many districts game practi- 
 cally disappeared after the winter of the d< 
 snow, and in the hard years which followed 
 farming was pursued with desperate energy. 
 But, except on the road westward from De- 
 troit, where the horn of the stage-coach to 
 Chicago presently woke the echoes of the 
 woods, it was another decade before traveling 
 became safer or easier. Until the National 
 Road and canals were opened, little could be 
 brought into the country or sent out; and 
 until near the middle of the century people 
 who had settled at any distance from navi- 
 gable water continued to live in the most 
 primitive way. 
 
 In later years, and by chroniclers who suf- 
 fered none of the hardships of the first gener- 
 ation in that region, much was made of 
 Johnny's bare or bark-sandaled feet and his 
 scant and nondescript garments. But very 
 few people wore shoes in the summer months, 
 and most were reduced to odd makeshifts 
 in the way of clothing. What they had they 
 shared with Johnny. And while he always 
 gave away the best that was given to him, 
 
 329 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 his condition was not piteous and all his ec- 
 centricities were endearing. The hemp -bag 
 shirt and pasteboard hat in which he ap- 
 peared at times, were robe and crown for a 
 new St. John of the wilderness. 
 
 As far as was possible he was watched and 
 guarded, for in the care of himself Johnny 
 was "plumb foolish." Sublimely delivered 
 from fear, he waded bare-legged across any 
 snake-infested swamp which lay in his path; 
 and, filled with reverence and compassion 
 for all life, he refused to build a camp-fire 
 where ants had their underground villages 
 or moths were flying. He had been known 
 to feed a sick wolf which followed him like 
 a dog, and to put out a fire he had made 
 against a hollow log in which he discovered 
 a hibernating bear, and to sleep near by in 
 the dark. 
 
 But no harm ever befell him, a thing to 
 be accounted for only by his own belief that 
 he was under Divine protection. His en- 
 durance, too, was nothing less than a miracle. 
 Year after year, while he withered and 
 wrinkled like any winter apple losing its 
 juices by slow evaporation, but sound and 
 sweet to the last, he covered hundreds of 
 
 330 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 miles of country, and was never known to 
 be ill. When the earth stiffened with frost 
 he went out to his gleaning of seeds through 
 Toledo, and he returned to his plan ting through 
 Detroit, Fort Wayne or the Quaker settle- 
 ments of eastern Indiana before ever a prairie 
 furrow was turned up to the sun. In his an- 
 nual rounds one of his sources of happiness was 
 to note how the children, colts and calves, and 
 his own little trees, playing in wind and sun, 
 grew tall and strong to take up the sober 
 duties and higher joys of life. 
 
 Before the first of Johnny's trees in that 
 region were in bearing, beard had started 
 through the tanned cheek of "Billy" grown to 
 young William W r orth. When he had fenced 
 in a quarter-section of prairie on the river- 
 bank north of Fort Wayne, broken the sod 
 for corn and built a little white cot, he asked 
 Johnny to plant an orchard for Madeleine 
 Bourie. The house was of the style that was 
 dear to the French trader from the province 
 of Quebec. Long and low, its roof, which 
 sloped out over a narrow front veranda, was 
 set with tiny dormer windows. When its 
 clapboards were whitewashed, honeysuckles 
 and Prairie Queen roses trained up the porch 
 
 33i 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 posts, and Lombardy poplars planted to flank 
 the picket-gate, it was a pleasant home in- 
 deed to come upon at the end of a day's 
 journey. Johnny always slept there one night 
 when he passed through the town. And for 
 Madeleine, who had the brown hair, blue 
 eyes and engaging manners of her Norman 
 race, he laid out a garden and orchard pat- 
 terned after the old home of his heart in Ohio. 
 Suddenly, in a thousand scattered places, 
 Johnny's earliest trees bloomed and fruited. 
 The wilderness fell back, abashed. Birds and 
 bees came in from the woods. Cabins which 
 had been but rude and unloved shelters in 
 bitter lands of exile, were transformed into 
 homes overnight, and people took root in wild 
 soil tamed by these domestic trees. His or- 
 chards bore other crops besides apples — 
 beauty, contentment, the hope of better days, 
 the social gathering, memories. Year after 
 year his trees increased in number and in 
 value, for grafting-buds were taken from old 
 orchards in Detroit, Piqua and Dayton, and 
 gradually carried westward. When the new 
 trade routes were opened Johnny had nur- 
 series in market-towns to turn over to other 
 men. The dozen years were more than gone, 
 
 332 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 and he had finished tin's task. But there were 
 other fields for his planting— farther horizons. 
 
 He was seventy-two years old when, in the 
 
 spring of 1847, his eager feet took the path of 
 blossoms up the Valley of the Maumee toward 
 the new goal. Early in March he stopped 
 at the old home for his day with Betty, so 
 buoyant, so full of happy plans for his new 
 undertaking in the northwestern corner of 
 Indiana, that, although he was looking very 
 old and feeble, Mary and Ethan gave up 
 their intention of trying to persuade him to 
 remain with them and end his days in com- 
 fort. His comfort, his spiritual necessity, was 
 in his continuing task. For him time was 
 merged in eternity. When his work on earth 
 was done there would be orchards for his 
 planting and nurturing in the Garden of God. 
 In going up through the Black Swamp, 
 in a soft and foggy thaw, he had a mild at- 
 tack of malaria. He managed to reach Toledo, 
 but only to lie in bed there for a month. Be- 
 wildered by the prostration which had so 
 slight a cause, and by the trembling weakness 
 and shortness of breath that paralyzed effort 
 when he was up again, he crept out into the 
 
 333 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 warm sunshine of a late April day, to look 
 upon trees that were on the point of bursting 
 into bloom. 
 
 The planting season would be over before 
 he could reach his new field, and friends 
 pleaded with him to remain where he was 
 for the summer to recover his strength. He 
 did consent to send his seeds and tools to 
 Fort Wayne by canal-boat, but, for himself, 
 he meant to walk. A leisurely tramp up that 
 happy valley in apple-blossom-time would be 
 a holiday, and it would set him on his feet 
 again for his summer of exploration. 
 
 What a transformation had been wrought 
 in this valley by the courage and faith and 
 killing labor of two generations of men! It 
 thrilled Johnny's heart to think of the share 
 he had had in that brave work. Even a dec- 
 ade before this hundred-mile depression had 
 been all but impassable in the spring; and 
 a flatboat voyage down the dark-walled, 
 sluggish flood in the autumn, when he had 
 put in his seeds, had been a dismal experience. 
 Now, Toledo had pulled itself up out of the 
 mud, and, a garden-girt city of four thousand 
 people, stood on its green peninsula, between 
 the shipping on the bay and the barges on 
 
 334 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 the canal, taking its rich toll of travel and 
 trade. There were still stretches of swampy 
 woods that came right down to the towpath, 
 
 but for the most part the low plain lay open 
 to the view. From high banks along the 
 rapids a wayfarer could look down upon 
 miles of foaming waters, and running back 
 from every busy little bowered town, the 
 prairies stretched from swell to swell, be- 
 tween belts of woodland, with corn-fields, 
 meadows and comfortable homes hidden in 
 bloom. 
 
 Going up that valley was like a vision of 
 the road to heaven and w T hat lay at the end 
 of it, which had once enchanted him. Along 
 the bank of a full-flowing river he had fol- 
 lowed a path of blossoms, until he had come 
 to gleaming gates of morning opening on 
 limitless fields of spring, with mounds and 
 banks of bloom on every horizon. And in a 
 secluded paradise of ordered loveliness he had 
 found Betty, restored to her youthful beauty, 
 and weaving garlands for the shining heads of 
 the little children gathered around her. 
 
 Every hour he was obliged to rest. Kind 
 people, he noticed, were very apt to join him 
 and to keep him company for a stage of the 
 
 335 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 journey. If alone, he gathered the harvest 
 of the poetic eye and ear. He ate in any 
 doorway, slept wherever he happened to be 
 at nightfall — for every roof was a home for 
 him; but he was off again before any one 
 else was stirring. Little ones sent to call him 
 to breakfast ran back, disappointed. 
 
 "Oh, mother, Johnny's gone!" 
 
 The older people looked at each other 
 across cheerful tables sadly. Many who 
 watched Johnny moving slowly up the valley, 
 as if in a happy dream, did not expect ever 
 to see him again; and they waited anxiously 
 to hear that he had reached Fort Wayne. 
 
 It was near sunset one evening, when the 
 blossoms were white with age, that Made- 
 leine Worth, busy in her kitchen, heard the 
 picket-gate click on the latch. She ran down 
 the path to meet Johnny. Although weary 
 and faint that he tottered to a fall, his eyes 
 still had that undying look of his far-away 
 youth, as of one who sees only the distant 
 and splendid goal. 
 
 "Did my seeds come?" 
 
 "A week ago. You should have come with 
 them. We have been afraid — Dear friend, 
 you have been ill!" 
 
 336 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 "It was nothing — not worth mentioning. 
 I will be better soon." 
 
 Under cover of clasping her firm young 
 hands about his arm as fondly as any grand- 
 
 
 j>j» •••:'" .••'• ■',•'■'' • • 
 
 
 ;? 
 
 ' H 
 
 HIS EYES STILL HAD THAT UNDYING LOOK OF HIS FAR-AWAY 
 YOUTH, AS OF ONE WHO SEES ONLY THE DISTANT AND 
 SPLENDID GOAL 
 
 daughter, Madeleine helped him up the steps. 
 He sank breathlessly into the armed chair of 
 hickory splints. In a moment she brought 
 
 337 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 out a bowl of hot milk, and said that he should 
 have fresh eggs and wheat-bread toast and 
 apple-blossom honey for his supper, because 
 he was "company." Tucking bright calico 
 cushions around him, she left him and, with 
 misty eyes, returned to her work of preparing 
 the evening meal. 
 
 He sat there blissfully, watching the loos- 
 ened petals blow before the wind, and lis- 
 tening to the vesper songs of the birds and 
 the laughing chatter of the very young chil- 
 dren who had a bark playhouse in the or- 
 chard. He was never alone now. Old friends 
 returned, thronging the sacred room of mem- 
 ory, as he looked out between the sentinel 
 poplars, across the green and flowery prairie 
 to the setting sun. He was asleep when 
 William came in from the fields. 
 
 The boy who had said, "You lean on me, 
 Johnny; I'm strong," was now a man to 
 lean upon. A stalwart pioneer of the second 
 generation, in his youthful prime, he looked 
 down upon Johnny, sunk among the cushions 
 — wasted to emaciation, bleached to trans- 
 parency, worn out by his half- century-long 
 labor of love! William could not eat his 
 supper for the lump in his throat. He made 
 
 338 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 up his mind that Johnny's wanderings should 
 come to an end. He would be unable to travel 
 at all for some days, and he and his clever 
 Madeleine must find a way to keep him al- 
 together. 
 
 Rested and refreshed, Johnny's soul of 
 flame burned with its old heat and brightness 
 for an hour. People were going into north- 
 western Indiana, settling on the sand-dunes 
 and in the oak-openings of the old lands of 
 the Pottawatomies ; around the shores of the 
 many lovely lakes that dotted the northern 
 prairies, and on the rich plains which bor- 
 dered the southern margin of that million- 
 acre mystery, the swamps of the Kankakee. 
 Most of them would be sixty miles from any 
 outlet. He might go on to the vast prairies 
 of eastern Illinois. In another dozen years — 
 
 He wanted to take a blanket to the orchard, 
 but clouds had spread across the sky and the 
 soft wind felt like rain, so he was persuaded 
 to sleep on a pallet on the porch floor. Once 
 in the night William came out with an extra 
 covering, and found him asleep. 
 
 Before daylight he awoke suddenly. In 
 his dream he had heard the old boat-bugle 
 of early days on the Ohio River — distant, 
 
 339 
 
JOHNNY APPLESEED 
 
 ineffable, such as had seemed to call the soul 
 of Mary Lake to life everlasting. It was not 
 yet morning, but the rain had ceased. He 
 could have an hour in the orchard before 
 starting on the journey to his new field of 
 labor. When his heart had quieted down 
 from its wild beating he took up his seeds 
 and tools and went down the steps into the 
 odorous darkness. 
 
 He may have slept, to dream again, for he 
 thought himself in another, dearer orchard. 
 Some happy memory made him smile when 
 the breeze shook down a shower of drops and 
 of cool, scented petals on his upturned face. 
 At the back of the house the meadow sloped 
 to the grassy bank of the river. He could 
 see the stream which still lay dark, and the 
 rosy drift of dawn which bloomed above it. 
 
 The first rays of morning light were re- 
 flected from the fluttering leaves of the wet 
 poplars. The prairie was spread out, gray, 
 then silver, with beaded rain. There was a 
 twittering in the tree-tops. A meadow-lark 
 fluted from the pasture. Madeleine, coming 
 out to call Johnny to breakfast, saw his 
 empty bed, with startled blue eyes that filled 
 with tears. 
 
 340 
 
THE SHINING GOAL 
 
 "Oh, Billy, he's gone!" 
 
 But no trail was broken across the drenched 
 grass of the prairie, where the rising sun 
 awoke a sea of sparkles. 
 
 Johnny was gone, to an eternal day with 
 Betty, and to plant orchards in the Garden 
 of God. 
 
 ^sf^> 
 
ZANE GREY'S NOVELS 
 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset I Dunlap's 
 
 THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS 
 
 Colored frontispiece by W. li tanton. 
 
 M st of the action <>f this story I ve near the turbulent 
 
 Mexican border of the pn A New York 
 
 a ranch which becomes the center of fr- 
 
 cowboys defend her property from bandits, and her superinten . 
 rescues her when she is captured by them. A surprising cui 
 brings the story to a delightful close. 
 
 DESERT GOLD 
 Illustrated by Douglas Duer. 
 
 Another fascinating story of the Mexican border. Two men, 
 lost in the desert, discover gold when, overcome by weakne 
 can go no farther. The rest of the story describes the recent uprising 
 along the border, and ends with the finding of the gold which the 
 two prospectors had willed to the girl who is the story's heroine. 
 
 RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE 
 
 Illustrated by Douglas Duer. 
 
 A picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago ••• 
 Mormon authority ruled. In the persecution of Jane* Witherste' 
 rich ranch owner,' we are permitted to see the methods employed by 
 the invisible hand of the Mormon Church to break her will. 
 
 THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN 
 
 Illustrated with photograph reproductions. 
 
 This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo 
 Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the 
 Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful count Dow 
 
 crags, deep canons and giant pines." It is a fascinating Stc I 
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT 
 
 Jacket in color. Frontispiece. 
 
 This big human drama is played in the Painted Deser - 
 
 lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to lo 
 
 young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, dem.. 
 
 that the girl shall become the second wife of one of the Mormons- 
 Well, that's the problem of this sensational, big selling story. 
 
 BETTY ZANE 
 
 Illustrated by Louis F. Grant. 
 
 This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beauti- 
 ful young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the brav 
 Life along the frontier, attacks by Indians, Betty's heroic 
 of the beleaguered garrison at Wheeling, the burning of the > 
 and Betty's final race for life, make up this never-to-1 >■ 
 
 Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York 
 
THE NOVELS OF 
 
 CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM 
 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunfap's list. 
 
 JEWEL: A Chapter in Her Life. 
 Illustrated by Maude and Genevieve Covrles. 
 
 A sweet, dainty story, breathing the doctrine of love and patienry 
 and sweet nature and cheerfulness. 
 
 JEWEL'S STORY BOOK. 
 
 Illustrated by Albert Schmitt. 
 
 A sequel to "Jewel" and equally enjoyable. 
 
 CLEVER BETSY. 
 
 Illustrated by Rose O'Neill. 
 
 The "Clever Betsy" was a boat— named for the unyielding spin- 
 ster whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsys a 
 clever group of people are introduced to the reader. 
 
 SWEET CLOVER : A Romance of the White City. 
 
 A story of Chicago at the time of the World's Fair. A sweet hu 
 man story that touches the heart. 
 
 THE OPENED SHUTTERS. 
 
 Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher. 
 
 A summer haunt on an island in Casco Bay is the background 
 fo* this romance. A beautiful woman, at discord with life, is brought 
 to realize, by her new friends, that she may open the shutters of her 
 soul to the blessed sunlight of joy by casting aside vanity and self 
 love. A delicately humorous work with a lofty motive underlying it all. 
 
 THE RIGHT PRINCESS. 
 
 An amusing story, opening at a fashionable Long Island resort, 
 where a stately Englishwoman employs a forcible New England 
 housekeeper to serve in her interesting home. How types so widely 
 apart react on each other's lives, all to ultimate good, makes a story 
 both humorous and rich in sentiment. 
 
 THE LEAVEN OF LOVE. 
 
 Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher. 
 
 At a Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and 
 oeautiful but _ disillusioned, meets 3. girl who has learned the art of 
 living — of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story 
 hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by 
 this glimpse into a cheery life. 
 
 Ask for compete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction 
 
 Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St. , New York 
 
CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS 
 
 May be h:J wheravar books are sold. Ask for Grossat & Dunlap's list 
 
 Wl< TTY WENT TO COLLEG E, By Jean Webster. 
 
 Illustrated by C. D. Williams. 
 
 One of the best stories of life in a girl's college that has ever boen 
 written. It is bright, -whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughable 
 and thoroughly human. 
 
 JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster. 
 
 Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. 
 
 Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to ingenious 
 mischief for its own sake, with a disregard for pretty convention which 
 is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows. 
 
 THE POOR LITTLE RTCII GIRL, By Eleanor Gates. 
 
 With four full page illustrations. 
 
 This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate chil- 
 dren whose early days are passed in the companionship of a governess, 
 seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural love and tender- 
 ness. A charming play as dramatized by the author. 
 
 REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas 
 
 Wiggin. 
 
 One of the most beautiful studies of childhood — Rebecca's artistic, 
 unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of 
 austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenominal 
 dramatic record. 
 
 NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA, By Kate Douglas Wiggin. 
 
 Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. 
 
 Additional episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that 
 carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday. 
 
 REBECCA MARY , By Annis Hamilton Donnell. 
 
 Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green. 
 
 This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesque 
 little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pa- 
 thos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing. 
 
 EMMY LOU: Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin 
 
 Illustrated by Charles Louis Ilinton. 
 
 Emmy Lou Is in lovable, because she is so absolutely real. 
 
 She is just a bewitchingly innocent, hugable little maid. The book is 
 wonderfully human. 
 
 Ash for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Coftyriglxed Fiction 
 
 Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St.. New York 
 
STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY 
 
 GENE STRATTON-PORTER 
 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list 
 
 THE HARVESTER. 
 
 LADDIE. 
 
 Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer. 
 
 This is a bright, cheery tale with the 
 scenes laid in Indiana. The story is told 
 by Little Sister, the youngest member of 
 a large family, but it is concerned not so 
 much with childish doings as with the love 
 affairs of older members of the family. 
 Chief among them is that of Laddie, the 
 older brother whom Little Sister adores, 
 and the Princess, an English girl who has 
 come to live in the neighborhood and about 
 whose family there hangs a mystery. 
 There is a wedding midway in the book 
 and a double wedding at the close. 
 Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs. 
 
 "The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and 
 fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother 
 Nature herself. If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure 
 of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his 
 "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that 
 this is the highest point of life which has come to him — there begins 
 a romance of the rarest idyllic quality. 
 FRECKLES , Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford. 
 
 Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the way in 
 which he takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms inthe 
 great Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets 
 him succumbs to the charm of his engaging personality; and his 
 love-story with "The Angel" are full of real sentiment.' 
 
 A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST. 
 
 Illustrated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda. 
 
 The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable 
 type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and 
 kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the 
 sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from 
 barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards of high courage. 
 AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. 
 Illustrations in colors by Oliver Kemp. 
 
 The scene of this charming love story is laid in Central Indiana. 
 The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing 
 love. The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting of 
 nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear it to all. 
 
 Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, New York 
 
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