As this message passed among the settlers, their faces grew sober in the firelight. There was not a soul among them but believed that Jimmy’s father had been killed by the Indians, and the message sounded like an ill omen. Gravely, almost solemnly, the party broke up.
“Don’t worry, Uncle Amasa,” said Marion, moving away with the old man. “Jimmy can take care of himself. He’s made for the wilderness. He’ll come back, or we may pick him up in some town along the way. He is in no danger that you haven’t been in and come out of—remember that.”
“I know,” said Uncle Amasa. “I know; but I’d ruther he had taken his chances along with ye, and seen some of the doin’s down to New Orleans. It would have been a sight safer. There’s been treachery in this, Marion; there’s been treachery, or the boy wouldn’t have written that message. It’s uncanny. The lad is being led to his death.”
“No such thing,” said Marion, stoutly. But his heart misgave him, and he determined to watch closely, as he went down the river, for the runaway.
Daybreak saw the clumsy craft with its heterogeneous cargo float slowly forth from the shadows of the creek mouth to the tune of a mighty creaking of its great sweeps, till it was caught by the river current outside, and the long trip of two thousand miles began.
With the river running five or six miles an hour, it would seem that a hundred miles a day might be made; but snags and shifting mud banks rendered it hazardous to float by night, save when the moon was full. Slack water, too, at the numerous bends, and the necessity of frequently crossing over to avoid islands and rafts of drift, consumed much time, so that often twenty miles in a day was as much as could be accomplished with a due regard for safety.
They tied up the first night in a creek mouth on the Virginia bank, fifteen miles below Blennerhassett’s Island, having spent an hour there, viewing the mansion and the flower gardens.
For this beautiful island, so sadly associated with the early history of the Ohio, was then in the heyday of its prosperity. Harman Blennerhassett and his accomplished wife had come there five years previously, and wonderful accounts of their luxurious home, their wealth and culture had spread up and down the two great rivers, from Pittsburgh to New Orleans.