As the boy grew older, he lost the instinctive sense of fear that was perhaps a part of his natural heritage; for the cry of the Banshee had filled the souls of his Irish forebears with terror in their lowly cabins across the seas. Something of the daring of Sir John and of Richard his son, of the Hawkins kin――slavers, freebooters, sea-scourges, admirals――had come to him on his mother’s side, and now, too, the fighting blood of his father’s race began to show. Davy was scarce six years old when four of his brothers, and a boy named Campbell, left him on the shore of the Nolichucky while they put out into the river in the rude boat that was used in crossing the stream. Had it not been for the bravery of a man named Kendall, who saw their danger, the five boys would surely have gone over the falls a little way below, which would have meant certain death. Davy seems partly to have realized their danger, but said he was too fighting mad at being left behind to care what happened to them. When they were safe again, his greatest satisfaction was in telling them that the scrape they had been in was what they had earned for not taking him along. Like every boy of the frontier, Davy was quick to idealize the great flintlock rifles, powder-horns, and other implements of the hunter. He loved to watch his father mould bullets from the well-nigh priceless supply of lead, or cut and grease “patches” for loading. The boy would sometimes shoulder a stick and imagine himself a hunter, stimulated perhaps by the loan of a powder-horn and a hunting-knife. All this was evidence of what was working in his mind. An old man who knew the boy and always called him the “Corkonian” said that “the only diff’ betwane a crowbar and a gun is thot the gun do have a hole in it, and a stock.” The hunter’s rifle was made from a bar of iron weighing about the same as a crowbar, from eleven to fifteen pounds being the usual weight of the gun. From this it is easy to see that the small boy of 1795 could not take a very active part in the hunting that furnished the greater portion of the supply of food for the pioneer and his family. In talking with General Grant, who had suggested a way in which the reserves might be of use while not needed at the front, Abraham Lincoln once said: “Oh, yes; I see that. As we say out West, if a man can’t skin he can hold a leg for the one that does.” A five-year-old boy might not be able to hunt and kill deer, but he could “hold a leg.” The boy of to-day can go forth with a four-pound “twenty-two” with less fatigue than his grandfather felt in handling a rifle when ten years older. At the age of fifteen a boy might learn to shoot, but he was hardly able to range the mountains for game.