The True Account by Howard Frank Mosher Read Free Book Online Page B

you were headed
west
—there is a somewhat similar ruse in his beloved
Don Quixote
—that you might get him safely home to Vermont?”
    In fact, I did
not
think any such thing. But all I could say in response to this most handsome offer was, “It is possible.”
    â€œWell, let us try and see what happens,” the President said.
    He returned to my uncle and informed him that while the official expedition commanded by Captain Lewis would get under way very soon, he would
not stand in our way
if we wished to strike out on our own, and that he hoped the private would permit him to outfit us for our own epic journey, wherever it led. He then conducted us to some stone stables behind his house, where he presented me with a tall bay stallion named Bucephalus, after that fabled steed of Alexander’s, and my uncle with a deaf white mule called Rosinante in honor of the Knight of La Mancha’s mount. With which the private was much delighted, though he immediately rechristened the mule Ethan Allen. The President also provided us with saddles and two twenty-dollar gold pieces; and, shaking hands very warmly, wished us the best of luck in Louisiana.
    Saluting our benefactor and thanking him profusely, but reminding him that he would pay no fealty to any man, or call any man liege, my uncle with all his fantastical appurtenances and I with my gun and paints and tube of canvases headed back down Mr. Jefferson’s little mountain and due west toward the Blue Ridge. A few minutes later we stopped to watch the last rays of the sun sparkle on the dome of Monticello. My uncle said that though he disagreed with the appointment of a young upstart to lead the official expedition, he was much pleased with the President’s promise
not to stand in our way,
which he saw as an endorsement of our own expedition. I then suggested that the route to St. Louis lay to the north, but he briskly told me that we must go due
west,
into the mountains, to elude any pursuers who might still be on the track of a “runaway uncle.”

 
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
THE NATCHEZ TRACE

11
    O UR PASSAGE over the mountains of western Virginia was very hard and very slow and most of all very wet. The road was little more than a wretched swamp, through which my uncle’s mule and my horse picked their way, up to their fetlocks in mud. Usually they warned us well in advance of the approach of other travelers, tossing their heads and softly braying or nickering. At first when this happened, my uncle insisted that we rein our mounts off the track and wait out of sight until the wayfarers passed. It soon occurred to him, however, that if we were detected, this evasive conduct would seem suspicious; so, by the second or third day out of Monticello, he stopped avoiding the few people we encountered and merely kept his face turned aside and did not tarry to visit—though he and his costume drew many a long look. Fortunately, no one seemed much inclined to question us, perhaps because we were well armed—I with my flintlock rifle and the private with his arquebus.
    I would not wish you to think that my uncle allowed my education to suffer merely because we were away from home. One morning the schoolmaster taught me the first thirty lines of the Prologue to Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,
which he said was an appropriate poem for “two young blades” off on a springtide pilgrimage of their own. Another day he drilled me in the rudiments of Italian and Russian; on another, the dynasties of ancient Cathay. Each day, too, he encouraged me to stop and draw some of the many varieties of birds, both native and migratory, that were then in those mountains. Once we tarried for more than an hour while I sketched a fierce battle between a nesting pair of scarlet tanagers and a bold young blacksnake attacking their eggs; with some help from my uncle, who wished to assist the birds without harming the snake (or getting too close to it, if I