The picture which Frew had drawn of Virginia as a smiling
garden on the edge of a burning pit was stamped on my memory. I had
seen on my travels the Indians that dwelled in the Tidewater, remnants
of the old great clans of Doeg and Powhatan and Pamunkey. They were
civil enough fellows, following their own ways, and not molesting their
scanty white neighbours, for the country was wide enough for all. But
so far as I could learn, these clanlets of the Algonquin house were no
more comparable to the fighting tribes of the West than a Highland
caddie in an Edinburgh close is to a hill Macdonald with a claymore.
But the common Virginian would admit no peril, though now and then some
rough landward fellow would lay down his spade, spit moodily, and tell
me a grim tale. I had ever the notion to visit Frew and finish my
education.
It was not till the tobacco ships had gone and the autumn had grown
late that I got the chance. The trees were flaming scarlet and saffron
as I rode west through the forests to his house on the South Fork
River. There, by a wood fire in the October dusk, he fed me on wild
turkey and barley bread, and listened silently to my tale.
He said nothing when I spoke of my schemes for getting the better of
the Englishman and winning Virginia to my side.
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