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The prior claim
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In: Historical Novels·Romance·American Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #71775.
The opening · free to read
By Eleanor Mercein Kelly Illustrations by L. F. Wilford
On the banks of the Elkhorn River, not far from Frankfort, stand what is left of two rough stone chimneys, in a still-thriving cornfield. A century and more ago these were the chimneys of the log cabin which Ezra Todd and his groomsmen built for his bride, Polly.
It was furnished in those days, the one room and lean-to of it, with stout puncheon tables and stools, also the handicraft of his groomsmen; with a bed made in the pioneer fashion, a forked branch supporting a pole whose other end stuck into a chink of the logs, a second pole crossing it transversely, and this framework covered by a straw-filled tick and a fine, thick feather bed--for Polly came to her husband with a fair plenishing. There was a spinning wheel, too; and a hooded cradle stood beside the high-backed settle at the hearth, and the board shelves, laid on pegs stuck into the walls, held good earthenware dishes, and even some plates and cups and candlesticks of shining pewter.
At the back was a batten door, thickly studded in nails, that had peepholes on either side, high and low. There was a musket in a rack behind the door, and a flintlock rifle hung beneath the high, paneless window, whose solid wooden shutter, with two small apertures in it, opened inward. It seemed to Ezra Todd, on a particular afternoon early in the past century, as pleasant and as safe a home as man ever prepared reluctantly to leave for the uncertainties and discomforts of Kentucky travel.
His wife waited upon him in silence; a lithe, graceful girl, almost wild in her movements, and barefoot, although dressed otherwise rather finely for a frontier woman, in a sprigged bedgown or overdress, cambric frills to her sleeves and cap. His eyes followed her lovingly, a little anxiously, as she brought him his belt, tied it behind over his fringed leather hunting shirt, handed him the long knife and tomahawk to place in it, and lastly the red handkerchief to bind about his forehead in place of a cap--it was too warm for caps.
“They do say,” he remarked, “that Master Ames in Harrodsburg has got some new sort of cap in his store, made neither of fur nor hide, but of fine light fabric. We grow foppish! What say, Polly mine--shall I return to you tricked out in fancy headgear with a feather in it, like the fellow in the song folks are singing nowadays?” He smiled at her as he sang gaily: “‘Yankee Doodle, bow-wow-wow, Yankee Doodle Dandy----’”
Granny Estill looked up quickly from her knitting--a gray, bent creature, twisted with rheumatism, older than women are nowadays at her age, yet with the youthful, laughing eyes of a girl.
“What a pretty, gay tune it is,” she said, tapping her foot and humming after him. “I do like to hear a new tune now and then. Be sure you bring me one from the town, Ezra.”
He laughed kindly. “Eh, you’ve the gay heart, and the dancing foot still, I’ll be bound, spite of the rheumatics! I wouldn’t trust you at a wedding or a roof-raising. Thank you, my love,” he added, as Polly, still in silence, handed him his musket. “Now the bullet pouch, though I protest it goes against my nature to have you always waiting on me so, for all the world like one of those savage females----”
Granny interrupted. “Let be! A woman likes to wait on her man, son, especially so fine and proper and upstanding a man as you.”
He chuckled. “’Tis easy to see how you managed to capture four husbands for yourself, Mistress Estill! But I did not marry a wife to be a servant to me. I buy my servants,” he added, proudly, “or at least I shall be buying them as I sell the crops. Here in this rough life you women have your full share of the work, without mollycoddling an able-bodied husband into the bargain. I cannot make of our Polly a fine lady--not yet. But I can keep her from wearing herself to the bone in service of mine. Look how thin she is growing! It shames me, Granny. Can you not make her mind her food? I’ve been watching her the past few days, and I declare she does not eat enough to keep a robin alive.”
“’Tis true she eats too little--but no man can say that of your son, Ezra! Nursing mothers are always thin, be they dog, or cat, or mare, you know that. It may be she is wise to start him on the bottle, though I do not hold with these newfangled notions myself.”
Ezra’s face softened tenderly. “Polly must do as she thinks best there--though a nursing mother should have special reasons for learning to eat.” He waited a moment for Polly to speak, but as she did not do so, he murmured to her in a lower voice, “Barefoot again? Do you not like the pretty shoon I had the cobbler make to your measure? The buckles are of pure silver, lass; I had them from a French trader.”
“Ah, let be!” said Granny again, protectively. “’Tis cruel to try to make a child into a woman all at once. Dearie me! How well I mind that I used to slip away to play with my wooden doll-baby weeks after I wore the cap and shawl myself--till my husband caught me and teased me out of it, because a live one was coming. Polly has had so little childhood, poor lamb! She was but ten when they took her, remember. And for that matter, ’tis a comfort sometimes to feet more broke to shoon than Polly’s to be free of the cramp of sole leather--” She glanced down comically at her own.
“If you spoil her so,” frowned Ezra, “if you encourage her wild ways, how am I ever to make a staid and proper matron of my wife?”
Granny’s eyes twinkled. “Are you so sure you want her to be a staid and proper matron? Isn’t a sweetheart better?”
But the man’s face did not relax. “Look what happened on the day of the christening! When the neighbors came in from near and far, did they find the young mother in her rightful place in the chimney settle, dressed in the quilted paduasoy petticoat my mother brought over the mountains? They did not. They found her paddling the stream, her kirtle tucked up to her bare knees, her hair unbound like a maiden’s, dipping the babe in the water and him as naked as a newborn pig! What a sight for God-fearing folk on the Sabbath day!”
Granny chuckled aloud, and Ezra laughed too, a little reluctantly, as he could not help himself.
“Oh, I dare say it was a pretty enough sight. But what conduct for young Mistress Todd, matron of a year’s standing, mother of a son, wife of one of the coming men of the country--ahem!” He strutted a little, boyishly, his eye on Polly, trying to make her smile; but she did not smile. “Perhaps,” he added, sobering, “it was the Indian form of christening--but we are not savages.”
Granny put a quick, warning finger to her lips, and Ezra added, more gently:
“There, there. I do not wish to be always scolding, only to make my little wife more like other women. People are happier when they are like to those about them--isn’t it so, Granny? And sometimes I have a fear that my Polly is not as happy with us as I had hoped to make her. Eh, child?”
With a hand under her chin, he lifted her face till their eyes met. She returned his look, long and steadily. But she did not speak. He let her go, with a deep sigh.
“I had thought the child would loosen her tongue by this.” He spoke as if she were not present. “But no matter. Too little speech in a wife is better than too much, they say.”
“She is a still woman, Ezra,” said Granny. “Some are born so. It does not mean that they are always sad women.” She added in a low voice to Polly, as the girl passed, “Speak to him, child! You will not let your man go into the wilderness without a word?”
Polly went to her husband obediently, and said with a sudden effort, “Stay!”
“Why, my pretty; why my own dear! You do not want me to leave you, then? Yet it was you who bade me go. And so I passed my word, and Neighbor Cook is waiting to ride on with me, and I have told others that I would surely be at the meeting of Court in Harrodsburg. To tell the truth, I thought our son might be proud, some day, to know that his father was one of those to bring the law into Kentucky.
“It will not be for long, Polly only a matter of a week or two--but ’tis the longest and farthest we have been separated since I found you; which makes it hard both.”
He kissed her hungrily, kisses which, after a moment of passivity, she returned, almost with violence. Granny knitted obliviously, smiling to herself. He put his wife from him at last with an effort, muttering:
“I must go now, or--I cannot---- Eh, well, black Ben shall sleep in the lean-to each night I am gone, and ’tis many a day since the savages ventured close to a settlement, thank God! You will be safe, at least. You are not afraid?”
Polly shook her head.
“Of course not”--he laughed shortly--“you who have known so much worse than loneliness! Remember there are neighbors within gunshot, and you have Granny for company--Granny and our son. Polly!” He was eying her closely, and asked again, “You are not afraid?”
“Don’t you see,” suggested Granny, “’tis you she fears for, son, you going, out alone into the wilderness? Ah, ’tis the hardest thing a woman has to bear, the waiting!”
“But things are not as they were in your waiting days, Granny,” he said gently. “The wilderness has shrunk away from us, back to beyond the Ohio water. There are cabins and farms and settlements now, all along the road to Harrodsburg; and one or two houses as fine as any in Virginia.”
“You do not pass at all through Indian country?” she questioned.
“There is no Indian country,” he answered, with pride, “not in all Kentucky! ’Tis ours at last, thanks to you and my own parents and others who paid the price.”
“Ay, paid the price for something they never got,” muttered the old woman, bitterly. “No matter, if only their children get it! But ’tis time indeed the law came into Kentucky. Many a stranger lays claim to his acres here who neither earned nor bought them.”
“And that’s why I’m reading law by firelight, me and many others. No smug liar with a warrant in his hand is going to take from me the land that is mine by right of conquest. Ours is the prior claim here, Granny Estill!”
“Ay, ours is the prior claim. Unless,” she murmured, “’twere the red men’s, maybe--do ’e think?”
“Stuff and nonsense! What put that thought into your head? The Cherokees and the Iroquois have no real rights here. They’ve used the land merely, enjoyed it--free of cost. And for long enough. They’ve not earned it as we have, bought it with their blood and their sweat, watered it with their women’s tears, enriched it with the blood of their children, such little precious bodies as this of ours--” He stopped by the cradle, gazing down, his natural orator’s voice sinking to an abrupt pause.
“Eh, have they not?” asked Granny, innocently. “It seems that the red folk may have suffered somewhat, too.”
Ezra glanced at her uncomfortably. “You’re old, and the old get queer notions. The savages have suffered no more than they deserve to suffer; as none should know better, surely, than Mistress Estill!”
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