D'Ri and I Read online

  Produced by Al Haines. Thanks to Dave Maddock for the Lilypond work.

  D'RI AND I

  A TALE of DARING DEEDS in the SECOND WAR with the BRITISH.

  Being the Memoirs of Colonel Ramon Bell, U.S.A.

  BY IRVING BACHELLER, author of "Eben Holden."

  1901

  TO MY WIFE

  PREFACE

  This is a tale of the adventurous and rugged pioneers, who,unconquered by other foes, were ever at war with the ancientwilderness, pushing the northern frontier of the white man fartherand farther to the west. Early in the last century they hadstriped the wild waste of timber with roadways from Lake Champlainto Lake Ontario, and spotted it with sown acres wide and fair; andstill, as they swung their axes with the mighty vigor of greatarms, the forest fell before them,

  In a long valley south of the St. Lawrence, sequestered by river,lake, and wilderness, they were slow to lose the simplicity, thedialect, and the poverty of their fathers.

  Some Frenchmen of wealth and title, having fled the Reign ofTerror, bought a tract of wild country there (six hundred andthirty thousand acres) and began to fill it with fine homes. Itwas said the great Napoleon himself would some day build a chateauamong them. A few men of leisure built manor-houses on the riverfront, and so the Northern Yankee came to see something of thesplendor of the far world, with contempt, as we may well imagine,for its waste of time and money.

  Those days the North country was a theatre of interest and renown.Its play was a tragedy; its setting the ancient wilderness; itspeople of all conditions from king to farm hand. Chateau andcabin, trail and forest road, soldier and civilian, lake and river,now moonlit, now sunlit, now under ice and white with snow, were ofthe shifting scenes in that play. Sometimes the stage was overrunwith cavalry and noisy with the clang of steel and the roar of thecarronade.

  The most important episodes herein are of history,--so romantic wasthe life of that time and region. The marriage is almost literallya matter of record.

  A good part of the author's life has been spent among the childrenof those old raiders--Yankee and Canadian--of the north and southshores of the big river. Many a tale of the camp and the nightride he has heard in the firelight of a winter's evening; longfamiliar to him are the ruins of a rustic life more splendid in itsday than any north of Virginia. So his color is not all of books,but of inheritance and of memory as well.

  The purpose of this tale is to extend acquaintance with the plainpeople who sweat and bled and limped and died for this Republic ofours. Darius, or "D'ri" as the woods folk called him, was apure-bred Yankee, quaint, rugged, wise, truthful; Ramon had thehardy traits of a Puritan father, softened by the more romantictemperament of a French mother. They had no more love of fightingthan they had need of it.

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. XIX. XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII. XXIV. XXV. XXVI. XXVII.

  [Transcriber's Note: The chapters in the original text were numbered,but had no titles.]

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  LOUISE

  D'RI AND I

  I COULD NOT TELL WHICH OF THE TWO GIRLS I LOVED THE BETTER

  HE WOULD HAVE FOUGHT TO THE DEATH IF I HAD BUT GIVEN HIM WORD

  "COME, NOW, MY PRETTY PRISONER"

  "WE 'LL TEK CARE O' THE OL' BRIG"

  WE WERE BOTH NEAR BREAKING DOWN

  "THEN I LEAVE ALL FOR YOU"