The prior claim

On the banks of the Elkhorn River, not far from Frankfort, stand what is left of two rough stone chimneys, in a still-thriving cornfield. A century and more ago these were the chimneys of the log cabin which Ezra Todd and his groomsmen built for his bride, Polly.

It was furnished in those days, the one room and lean-to of it, with stout puncheon tables and stools, also the handicraft of his groomsmen; with a bed made in the pioneer fashion, a forked branch supporting a pole whose other end stuck into a chink of the logs, a second pole crossing it transversely, and this framework covered by a straw-filled tick and a fine, thick feather bed--for Polly came to her husband with a fair plenishing. There was a spinning wheel, too; and a hooded cradle stood beside the high-backed settle at the hearth, and the board shelves, laid on pegs stuck into the walls, held good earthenware dishes, and even some plates and cups and candlesticks of shining pewter.

At the back was a batten door, thickly studded in nails, that had peepholes on either side, high and low. There was a musket in a rack behind the door, and a flintlock rifle hung beneath the high, paneless window, whose solid wooden shutter, with two small apertures in it, opened inward. It seemed to Ezra Todd, on a particular afternoon early in the past century, as pleasant and as safe a home as man ever prepared reluctantly to leave for the uncertainties and discomforts of Kentucky travel.

His wife waited upon him in silence; a lithe, graceful girl, almost wild in her movements, and barefoot, although dressed otherwise rather finely for a frontier woman, in a sprigged bedgown or overdress, cambric frills to her sleeves and cap. His eyes followed her lovingly, a little anxiously, as she brought him his belt, tied it behind over his fringed leather hunting shirt, handed him the long knife and tomahawk to place in it, and lastly the red handkerchief to bind about his forehead in place of a cap--it was too warm for caps.

“They do say,” he remarked, “that Master Ames in Harrodsburg has got some new sort of cap in his store, made neither of fur nor hide, but of fine light fabric. We grow foppish! What say, Polly mine--shall I return to you tricked out in fancy headgear with a feather in it, like the fellow in the song folks are singing nowadays?” He smiled at her as he sang gaily: “‘Yankee Doodle, bow-wow-wow, Yankee Doodle Dandy----’”

Granny Estill looked up quickly from her knitting--a gray, bent creature, twisted with rheumatism, older than women are nowadays at her age, yet with the youthful, laughing eyes of a girl.

“What a pretty, gay tune it is,” she said, tapping her foot and humming after him. “I do like to hear a new tune now and then. Be sure you bring me one from the town, Ezra.”

He laughed kindly. “Eh, you’ve the gay heart, and the dancing foot still, I’ll be bound, spite of the rheumatics! I wouldn’t trust you at a wedding or a roof-raising. Thank you, my love,” he added, as Polly, still in silence, handed him his musket. “Now the bullet pouch, though I protest it goes against my nature to have you always waiting on me so, for all the world like one of those savage females----”

Granny interrupted. “Let be! A woman likes to wait on her man, son, especially so fine and proper and upstanding a man as you.”

He chuckled. “’Tis easy to see how you managed to capture four husbands for yourself, Mistress Estill! But I did not marry a wife to be a servant to me. I buy my servants,” he added, proudly, “or at least I shall be buying them as I sell the crops. Here in this rough life you women have your full share of the work, without mollycoddling an able-bodied husband into the bargain. I cannot make of our Polly a fine lady--not yet. But I can keep her from wearing herself to the bone in service of mine. Look how thin she is growing! It shames me, Granny. Can you not make her mind her food? I’ve been watching her the past few days, and I declare she does not eat enough to keep a robin alive.”