Page:The Conquest.djvu/88

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

"The property destroyed was of great amount, and the quantity of provisions burned surpassed all idea we had of the Indian stores," Clark said in after years.

This second destruction of their villages and cornfields chilled the heart of the Indians. Their power was broken. Never again did a great army cross the Ohio.

But standing again on the ruins of Old Chillicothe, "I swear vengeance!" cried the young Tecumseh.

And Clark, the Long Knife, mourned in his heart.

"This might have been avoided! this might have been avoided! Never shall we have peace on this frontier until Detroit is taken!"


XIX

EXIT CORNWALLIS

"The boy cannot escape me!"

Lafayette was all that lay between Cornwallis and the subjugation of Virginia. The lithe little Frenchman, only twenty-three years old, danced ever on and on before him, fatiguing the redcoats far into the heats of June.

The Virginia Legislature adjourned to Charlottesville. In vain Cornwallis chased the boy and sent Tarleton on his raid over the mountains, "to capture the Governor."

Like a flash he came, the handsome, daring, dashing Colonel Tarleton, whose name has been execrated for a hundred years.

Virginia was swept as by a tornado. Never a noise in the night, never a wind could whistle by, but "Tarleton's troop is coming!"

"Tarleton's troop!" Little John Randolph, a boy of eight, his mother then lying in childbed, was gathered up and hurried away ninety miles up the Appomattox.

"Tarleton's troop!" Beside the dead body of her husband sat the mother of four-year-old Henry Clay,