STUMBLIN' AROUND (Daniel Boone and the Howards of NC) Dwaine H. Howard was recently working in the Huntsville, Alabama, library and care across a tart titled "THE LONG HUNTER" - A New Life of Daniel Boone. (Auth: Lawrence Elliott, Beaders Digest press). In Chapter 3, it says: "That winter (1762), the abandoned, weed-grown cabins along the Yadkin (River, Yadkin Co., NC) came alive again. The Boones came back, Daniel, and Rebecca, Sarah, Squire and all their kin. There were crackling fires on hearths that had long been cold, and children played in the dooryards and the ran want to work clearing away the wild growth in their deserted fields. But the Indian wars had lasted a long time and the frontier still flared with unrest, the fragile social order tearing apart. Now in every border settlement there were those without heart for the clogging, sweaty work of pioneering: and in the troubled tires, their instincts prevailed. Along the Yadkin, even after the war was over, there were some who continued their "vicious habits and became pests to society". Bands of desperadoes. hidden away in strongholds in the hills, raided farms and robbed storekeepers, Local government, chaotic and sometimes itself corrupt, seemed incapable of protecting the settlers from even the most outrageous crimes. Two men kidnapped the daughter of a farm family and the father was forced to appeal to his neighbors for help; Daniel Boone led the group that rescued her. Not long after a man named CORNELIUS HOWARD, a respected member of the community was found to be in league with a ring of freebooters that had been preying on the settlers for two years. A neighbor had chanced on a treasure of stolen tools and farm implements in his barn. Boone was badly shaken. Howard was married to Rebecca's sister, Mary: he himself had been hunting with the man. But when an angry crowd case for the purpose of hanging Howard from his own rafter, Boone persuaded them otherwise. They would rake the culprit lead then to the gang's hideout, he said: perhaps they could recover more of their lost property. Soon Boone was bound into the hills at the head of a party of seventy, Howard unhappily shoving the way. At the cleverly reeked hideout, more than twenty miles from the settlements, they surprised the thieves and quickly overpowered then. They found heaps of farm equipment, dry goods, log chains and household articles: in a nearby meadow were dozens of rustled horse and cattle. The ringleader's wife. a tornado of a woman named Owens, turned violent with rage when she realized that it was Howard who had given then away. She went for a concealed pistol and would have killed his on the spot if someone hadn't wrenched it away from her. She cursed and called Howard a Judas, vowing revenge. All the gang members were taken to prison in Salisbury and soon condemned to the gallows. But Howard, who had helped the settlers break the ring, and Mrs. Owens, who was after all, a woman, were eventually freed. And one day while "Judas" Howard. as he came to be known, was leading his horse across a stream, he was shot dead from the bordering woods. No one ever doubted who dispatched him."