Sometimes it was not Indian warfare but civil strife. One morning as many
as three Daniel Boones appeared on the playground at the same moment; and at
once there was a dreadful fight to ascertain which was the genuine Daniel.
This being decided, the spurious Daniels submitted to be: the one, Simon
Kenton; the other, General George Rogers Clark.
And there was another game of history--more practical in its bearings--which
he had not taught them, but which they had taught him; they had played it
with him that very morning.
When he had stepped across the open to the school, he found that the older
boys, having formed themselves into a garrison for the defence of the
smaller boys and girls, had barricaded the door and barred and manned the
wooden windows: the schoolhouse had suddenly become a frontier station; they
were the pioneers; he was the invading Indians--let him attack them if he
dared! He did dare and that at once; for he knew that otherwise there would
be no school that day or as long as the white race on the inside remained
unconquered. So had ensued a rough-and-tumble scrimmage for fifteen minutes,
during which the babies within wailed aloud with real terror of the battle,
and he received some real knocks and whacks and punches through the
loop-holes of the stockade: the end being arrived at when the schoolhouse
door, by a terrible wrench from the outside, was torn entirely off its
wooden hinges; and the victory being attributed--as an Indian victory always
was in those days--to the overwhelming numbers of the enemy.
With such an opening of the day, the academic influence over childhood may
soon be restored to forcible supremacy but will awaken little zest. Gray was
glad therefore on all accounts that this happened to be the day on which he
had promised to tell them of the battle of the Blue Licks. Thirteen years
before and forty miles away that most dreadful of all massacres had taken
place; and in the town were many mothers who still wept for their sons, many
widows who still dreamed of their young husbands, fallen that beautiful,
fatal August day beneath the oaks and the cedars, or floating down the
red-dyed river. All the morning he could see the expectation of this story
in their faces: a pair of distant, clearest eyes would be furtively lifted
to his, then quickly dropped; or another pair more steadily directed at him
through the backwoods loop-hole of two stockade fingers.
At noon, then, having dismissed the smaller ones for their big recess, he
was standing amid the eager upturned faces of the others--bareheaded under
the brilliant sky of May. He had chosen the bank of the Town Fork, where it
crossed the common, as a place in which he should be freest from
interruption and best able to make his description of the battle-field well
understood. This stream flows unseen beneath the streets of the city now
with scarce rent enough to wash out its grimy channel; but then it flashed
broad and clear through the long valley of scattered cabins and orchards and
cornfields and patches of cane.