"White men and friends." They proved to be Squire Boone and another
adventurer from North Carolina. The younger Boone had made that long
pilgrimage through the trackless woods, led by an instinct of doglike
affection, to find his elder brother and share his sylvan pleasures
and dangers. Their two companions were soon waylaid and killed, and
the Boones spent their long winter in that mighty solitude
undisturbed. In the spring their ammunition, which was to them the
only necessary of life, ran low, and one of them must return to the
settlements to replenish the stock. It need not be said which assumed
this duty; the cadet went uncomplaining on his way, and Daniel spent
three months in absolute loneliness, as he himself expressed it, "by
myself, without bread, salt, or sugar, without company of my fellow-
creatures, or even a horse or dog." He was not insensible to the
dangers of his situation. He never approached his camp without the
utmost precaution, and always slept in the cane-brakes if the signs
were unfavorable. But he makes in his memoirs this curious reflection,
which would seem like affectation in one less perfectly and simply
heroic: "How unhappy such a situation for a man tormented with fear,
which is vain if no danger comes, and if it does, only augments the
pain. It was my happiness to be destitute of this afflicting passion,
with which I had the greatest reason to be afflicted." After his
brother's return, for a year longer they hunted in those lovely wilds,
and then returned to the Yadkin to bring their families to the new
domain. They made the long journey back, five hundred miles, in peace
and safety.

For some time after this Boone took no conspicuous part in the
settlement of Kentucky. The expedition with which he left the Yadkin
in 1773 met with a terrible disaster near Cumberland Gap, in which his
eldest son and five more young men were killed by Indians, and the