David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [27]
After four or five weeks of living at the Hartley place and continuing to work for Siler, David found his chance to leave and return home to Tennessee. One day, as he played alongside the road with two local boys, three wagons passed, one driven by a man named Dunn and the others by his two sons. David recognized the Dunns from their frequent rest stops at the Crockett Tavern.10 When they told the boy they were taking their loads of goods to Knoxville, David explained that he, too, wanted to go home. The Dunns invited him to join, with the promise to protect David if they were pursued. With that, he returned to his quarters, gathered his clothing and the little bit of money he had, and waited for morning, when he planned to sneak away and join the Dunns at the tavern, where they spent the night. “I went to bed early that night, but sleep seemed to be a stranger to me,” David recalled. “For though I was a wild boy, yet I dearly loved my father and mother, and their images appeared to be so deeply fixed in my mind, that I could not sleep for thinking of them.”11
Several hours before daybreak, fearful of being discovered but driven by his “childish love of home,” he rose to face a blinding snowstorm and at least eight inches of fresh snow already on the ground. By the time the boy plodded the seven miles to the inn, the snow, according to Crockett, was “about as deep as my knees.” A warm breakfast by the fire revived the chilled boy for the journey ahead. “The thoughts of home now began to take the entire possession of my mind, and I almost numbered the sluggish turns of the wheels, and much more certainly the miles of travel, which appeared to me to count mighty slow.”12
By the time the Dunn wagons pulled up for the night at the home of John Dunn on the Roanoke River, David had grown so impatient with the slow pace that he announced he was going to continue his homeward trek alone on foot. Dunn tried to reason with him, but he would have none of it. “Mr. Dunn seemed very sorry to part with me, and used many arguments to prevent me from leaving him,” related Crockett. “But home, poor as it was, again rushed on my memory, and it seemed ten times as dear to me as it ever had before. The reason was, that my parents were there, and all that I had been accustomed to in the hours of my childhood and infancy was there; and my anxious little hart panted also to be.”13
A determined David set out by himself the next morning, but, near the first ford of the Roanoke River, a man returning from market with a drove of horses overtook him. The man led a saddled horse, which he kindly allowed David to mount and ride, thus sparing the youngster the river’s frigid waters. David rode with the man until they reached a fork in the road and parted. The man and his horses took off for Kentucky, and David trudged the remaining miles to his family, who were overjoyed to see him walk through the tavern door that evening.
Life went reasonably well for David as he returned to his daily chores and frequent hunts for fresh meat. But during the autumn of 1799, John Crockett “took it into his head” to send thirteen-year-old David and his four older brothers to a subscription school at nearby Barton Springs, where Benjamin Kitchen attempted to teach book learning to the few area youngsters desirous of a rudimentary education.14
David’s tenure at Kitchen’s country school, however, was short-lived. Students of all ages, some nearly as old as their teacher, crowded into an airless room and tried to master the three Rs. David had only attended four days of classes and was just beginning to learn his letters when he had a falling-out with “one of the scholars” who was much older and larger than himself. Not wanting