CHAPTER I
CAUGHT IN HIS OWN TRAP

“Paddle harder, brother. The current is stronger than I ever knew it to be before.”

“But, Bob, we must be very near the place where we always land when we come over to look after our traps?”

“Once we are in the lee of that point ahead, Sandy, we can go ashore. The river is so high that it’s hard to recognize the old landmarks.”

“Both together, then, Bob. There! that looks like business! and, just as you say, our dugout can lie safely under the shelter of that tongue of land, while we’re off ’tending our traps. Another week, and we must stop setting any snares, for the fur will be getting poor; so Pat O’Mara said the last time he came to the settlement.”

Five minutes later, the two Armstrong boys sprang ashore on the Ohio side of the river, at a little distance below the spot where, across the now unusually wide stream, their parents, together with other bold pioneers from Virginia, had, not more than a year before, started a frontier settlement.[1]

The clumsy, but staunch boat, fashioned from the trunk of a tree, was drawn partly out of the water. They had made the passage of the river with considerable hard labor, because of the vast volume of water which the heavy spring rains had brought out of the hills all the way up to and beyond old Fort Duquesne.[2]

Both boys were dressed after the fashion of that time among hunters and trappers, who, scorning the homespun clothes of the Virginia settlers, found garments made of buckskin, not unlike those worn by many of the Indians, to give them the best service when roaming the great forests that stretched from the Alleghanies, off to the border of the mighty Mississippi, in the “Land of the Setting Sun.”

Having picked up their guns, the brothers started through the thick woods; but not before Sandy, the younger, had cast a last wistful look back at the swollen waters of the Ohio, that, seen in the dull light of the overcast afternoon, flowed steadily toward the west. Truth to tell, that unknown western region was drawing the thoughts of the pioneer boy very much of late; and, even as he tramped along at the side of Bob, his first words told how he envied the rushing waters that were headed into the country he longed to see.

“Abijah Cook is back at the settlement for a short spell, I heard Mr. Harkness say,” he remarked, with a long sigh that caused his brother to turn an uneasy glance in his direction.

“And has he given up ranging the woods with young Simon Kenton?” the older boy asked.

“Oh! no; but he brought his winter’s catch of pelts in for Mr. Harkness to dispose of, when he found the chance,” Sandy replied.

“And I suppose the old woodranger has been talking again about the region of the Mississippi,” remarked Bob, who could guess what was on the mind of his brother.

“Well,” Sandy went on, “Abijah has seen that wonderful country, and he knows how different it is from this hilly place, where the corn washes down the sides of the slopes whenever a big rain comes. Out there it is mostly prairie, and the soil, he says, is black and rich. It will grow maize twice as high as your head. The stories he tells of what he saw on those prairies fairly make my heart