1 By Rule and Compass

They were dividing lands—enough for a nation—with a rule and compass, and their faces showed their feelings as they bent over the map and cut off a principality for each. Jasper’s lips were quite white—it was a curious trick that he had when he was deeply moved—and Mr. Carew watched the lines on the paper with an intent gaze. I knew that avarice and ambition were working somewhere back of his eyes, and, for the moment, I wondered that a man who had so much should crave so much more.

“Our grant covers all the region here along the Miami and the Little Wabash,” said Mr. Carew, turning to me, “and I am told that the soil is most fertile, is it not?”

“There is none better,” I replied.

“We shall take it at once and have it surveyed. It is well to attend to these matters promptly,” said Jasper.

“But you forget that the land is occupied already,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken, unless asked a question.

Mr. Carew looked up from the map, and there was inquiry in the gaze that he turned upon me.

“The tribes,” I added. “It is their home and hunting ground. They are numerous and warlike. You remember Harmar?”

Mr. Carew made a gesture of contempt.

“The affair of Harmar was nothing, and these tribes are nothing,” he said. “St. Clair will brush them out of the way. He is coming with an army, you know, and we shall concern ourselves no further about savages.”

I shook my head, but I did not speak, knowing how vain my words would be; and they, turning back to the map, began to divide anew the lands which another race held. I saw the same look upon the faces of them all—Jasper, Mr. Carew, the large man Curry, and the slim-faced lawyer Knowlton. It was a fine map, in beautiful blues and reds and yellows, but it seems to me that any map of the West should be all red. We had to colour it thus to buy it.

I watched them a little as they parcelled so easily among themselves the country that others would have to water with their blood, and then I felt the eyes of Rose Carew upon me.

“You think they are making the division too soon,” she said, knowing that the others, their souls gripped by earth-hunger, would not hear.

“They have bought, from those who can not sell, something which they can not take,” I replied.

“You know this wilderness?”

“As well as any man, I suppose. Their rule and compass go through it without a halt, but they in person can not do as much.”

She had regarded me before with curiosity, and the same question was in her look now. I saw that my manner and speech, contrasting with my garb—half wild, half civilized—puzzled her, but I did not seek to change either gesture or accent.

“And your name is Lee, too,” she said, “the same as Captain Lee’s?”

“Lee is a common name in both East and West, and its ownership means nothing.”

Jasper looked covertly at me, with his sly and hateful smile, but I ignored him.

“Will you come to the door, Miss Carew?” I asked.

She glanced at her father and his friends.

“They will not miss you at this moment,” I said.

Nor would they. There was nothing in the world just then so beautiful to them as the vivid blues and reds and yellows of their map. Miss Carew sighed a little as she read the emotions of her father, and then came with me.

“Do you see that woman passing?” I said. “She had a husband and children once; the tomahawk took them. And the boy there; he is the only one left of his name; the tribes slew all the others, but spared him for ransom. And yonder is another woman waiting for her husband to come back from the forest; he will never come. I know where his bones lie, but I dare not tell her.”

“Why do you speak to me of these dreadful things?” she asked, the colour leaving her face.

I was silent then, because I was thinking of her father as he apportioned to himself the soil on which our powerful foe lived; but when I looked into this girl’s pure eyes I knew that I could not cite such a contrast to her. Instead I said:

“It is well to know what a new land costs us. And no one can say that we shall keep it even at such a price.”

“You are a prophet of evil,” she said.

“Some one should be so, when others think to wish a thing is to have it. The arm of the nation is weak, and it is a long way across the mountains.”

Perhaps I should not have spoken in such a manner to a young girl, but I knew how the land about me had been harried and torn. Moreover, I felt a certain sense of anger in the presence of these people from the East, who would not understand us, and dismissed all our troubles and triumphs alike as trifles. This was to them but the back door of the nation, and yet ruin may come in as readily by the back as the front door.

“I do not like to hear of these slaughters and captures,” she said. “They were so strange and far away when I was at home in Philadelphia that one never thought much of them. They have scarcely seemed real.”

“That is just the trouble,” I replied.

As she stood there, in rich attire, her face unburned by the sun, she typified this difference. What the West suffered was in truth far away and unreal to her.

Mr. Carew, raising his head from the map, called his daughter, and she turned back, but before going asked me:

“Shall we see you once more while we are in Danville, Mr. Lee?”

“I do not know,” I replied.

“Come again,” she said, “and tell me of this wilderness. It has its romance.”

“A romance when seen from afar,” I replied. But I promised to come.

I was followed from the house by Jasper, though not knowing it until he stood beside me, with his hand lightly touching my arm.

“You create difficulties for us, John,” he said.

“One can not create that which exists already,” I replied.

“But St. Clair will brush them out of the way, as Mr. Carew told you. Remember that these tribes have not yet had to face our best.”

“The best are always ourselves.”

He laughed lightly.

“It is true. I too shall go with St. Clair, and so certain am I of the result that I have been, as you saw, selecting my share of that wilderness through which you roam. Yet I avow that I did not expect to meet you here when I came across the mountains. May I ask what you are doing in Kentucky, Cousin John?”

“There were cities of refuge in the olden times,” I said, “and there are countries of refuge now. It is to one such that I have come.”

He looked thoughtful, puckering his thin lips, and not speaking for another minute or two, although he kept by my side. I wondered why he had not denounced me, especially when he found me in the company set aside for himself.

“It behooves you to walk in a straight path, John,” he said at length, “and I shall keep silent about you if you do as you should.”

His tone was patronizing, and therefore most insulting, but I did not reply. Yet I resolved that my actions should not wait upon his pleasure, whatsoever the result.

“I have chosen a course,” I said, “and I shall follow it.”

“Are you averse to telling it?”

“Not at all. I have decided to serve with St. Clair.”

He puckered his lips again.

“It is dangerous,” he said. “I advise you not to do so.”

“I thank you for your advice,” I replied, “but my mind is quite made up.”

He changed the subject, though I was sure that it was still in his mind, and began to talk to me of his prosperity, no sense of delicacy keeping him back. He and Mr. Carew were fast friends, he said, and they had obtained great land grants in the West, where climate and soil alike were of the best. He was to become the richest man in America, and soon he should want a wife. Then he spoke of Rose Carew, and I could have wished her a better fate.

I own that I felt much bitterness at this moment. The contrast between Jasper’s career and mine seemed so great that the spirit in me was not improved when he went back to Mr. Carew and his daughter.

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