followed the rivers to their headwaters. The headwaters had sent
them forth toward the foot-hills, where they made their,
clearings and built their cabins in the shadow of the blue wall
that for a time marked the furthest goal of their desires. But
only for a time. Crossing the mountains they found the
headwaters once more, and following the streams out of the hills
saw the roaring torrents become great placid rivers.

Carrington's father had put the mountains at his back thirty
years before. The Watauga settlements had furnished him a wife,
and some four years later Bruce was born on the banks of the
Ohio. The senior Carrington had appeared on horseback as a
wooer, but had walked on foot as a married man, each shift of
residence he made having represented a descent to a lower social
level. On the death of his wife he had embarked in the river
trade with all that enthusiasm and hope he had brought to
half-a-dozen other occupations, for he was a gentleman of
prodigious energy.

Bruce's first memories had to do with long nights when he perched
beside his father on the cabin roof of their keel-boat and
watched the stars, or the blurred line of the shore where it lay
against the sky, or the lights on other barges and rafts drifting
as they were drifting, with their wheat and corn and whisky to
that common market at the river's mouth.

Sometimes they dragged their boat back up-stream, painfully,
laboriously; three or four months of unremitting toil sufficed
for this, when the crew sweated at the towing ropes from dawn
until dark, that the rich planters in Kentucky and Tennessee