VII


Past the Big Pine, swerving with a smile his horse aside that he
might not obliterate the foot-print in the black earth, and down
the mountain, his brain busy with his big purpose, went John Hale,
by instinct, inheritance, blood and tradition--pioneer.

One of his forefathers had been with Washington on the Father's
first historic expedition into the wilds of Virginia. His great-
grandfather had accompanied Boone when that hunter first
penetrated the "Dark and Bloody Ground," had gone back to Virginia
and come again with a surveyor's chain and compass to help wrest
it from the red men, among whom there had been an immemorial
conflict for possession and a never-recognized claim of ownership.
That compass and that chain his grandfather had fallen heir to and
with that compass and chain his father had earned his livelihood
amid the wrecks of the Civil War. Hale went to the old
Transylvania University at Lexington, the first seat of learning
planted beyond the Alleghanies. He was fond of history, of the
sciences and literature, was unusually adept in Latin and Greek,
and had a passion for mathematics. He was graduated with honours,
he taught two years and got his degree of Master of Arts, but the
pioneer spirit in his blood would still out, and his polite
learning he then threw to the winds.

Other young Kentuckians had gone West in shoals, but he kept his
eye on his own State, and one autumn he added a pick to the old
compass and the ancestral chain, struck the Old Wilderness Trail