Page:The Conquest.djvu/28

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12
THE CONQUEST

"And was Cresap guilty?"

"No," answered George Rogers Clark, "I perceived he was angry to hear it read so before the army and I rallied him. I told him he must be a very great man since the Indians shouldered him with everything that happened."

Little William had fallen asleep, sitting in the lap of his elder brother, but, fixed forever, his earliest memory was of the Dunmore war. There was a silence as they looked at the sleeping child. A little negro boy crouched on the rug and slumbered, too. His name was York.


III

EXIT DUNMORE

On the last day of that same August in which Meriwether Lewis was born and Andrew Lewis was leading the Virginia volunteers against the Shawnees, Patrick Henry and George Washington set out on horseback together for Philadelphia, threading the bridle-paths of uncut forests, and fording wide and bridgeless rivers to the Continental Congress.

It had been nine years since Patrick Henry, "alone and unadvised," had thrilled the popular heart with his famous first resolutions against the Stamp Act. From the lobby of the House of Burgesses, Thomas Jefferson, a student, looked that morning at the glowing orator and said in his heart, "He speaks as Homer wrote." It was an alarm bell, a call to resistance. "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third"—how the staid, bewigged, beruffled old Burgesses rose in horror!—"and George the Third may profit by their example."

"Most indecent language," muttered the Burgesses as they hurried out of the Capitol, pounding their canes on the flagstone floor. But the young men lifted him up,