It was a brilliant little
cavalcade; the horses, their heads up to scent the breeze from the
fragrant wilderness, and the men, as eager to start, everyone with a
long slender-barreled Kentucky rifle on his shoulder, the fringed and
brilliantly colored deerskin hunting shirt falling almost to his knees,
and, below that deerskin leggings and deerskin moccasins adorned with
many-tinted beads. It was a vivid picture of the young West, so young,
and yet so strong and so full of life, the little seed from which so
mighty a tree was soon to grow.
All of them stopped again, as if by an involuntary impulse, at the edge
of the forest, and waved their hands in another, and, this time, in a
last good-by to the watchers at the fort. Then they plunged into the
mighty wilderness, which swept away and away for unknown thousands of
miles.
They talked for a while of the journey, of the things that they might
see by the way, and of those that they had left behind, but before long
conversation ceased. The spell of the dark and illimitable woods, in
whose shade they marched, fell upon them, and there was no noise, but
the sound of breathing and the tread of men and horses.
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