THE FRONTIERSMEN
by
CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK
Author of _A Spectre of Power_, _The Prophet of the Great Smoky
Mountains_, _In the Tennessee Mountains_, etc.
1904
CONTENTS
THE LINGUISTER
A VICTOR AT CHUNGKE
THE CAPTIVE OF THE ADA-WEHI
THE FATE OF THE CHEERA-TAGHE
THE BEWITCHED BALL-STICKS
THE VISIT OF THE TURBULENT GRANDFATHER
NOTES
THE LINGUISTER
The mental image of the world is of individual and varying compass. It
may be likened to one of those curious Chinese balls of quaintly carved
ivory, containing other balls, one within another, the proportions ever
dwindling with each successive inclosure, yet each a more minute
duplicate of the external sphere. This might seem the least world of
all,--the restricted limits of the quadrangle of this primitive
stockade,--but Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane had known no other than
such as this. It was large enough for her, for a fairy-like face, very
fair, with golden brown hair, that seemed to have entangled the
sunshine, and lustrous brown eyes, looked out of an embrasure (locally
called "port-hole") of the blockhouse, more formidable than the swivel
gun once mounted there, commanding the entrance to the stockade gate.
Her aspect might have suggested that Titania herself had resorted to
military methods and was ensconced in primitive defenses. It was even
large enough for her name, which must have been conferred upon her, as
the wits of the Blue Lick Station jocularly averred, in the hope of
adding some size to her. It was large enough also for the drama of
battle and the tragedy of bloody death--both had befallen within its
limits.
There had been a night, glooming very dark in the past, an unwary night
when the row of log houses, all connected by the palisades from one to
the other, presenting a blank wall without, broken only by loopholes for
musketry, had been scaled by the crafty Cherokees, swarming over the
roofs, and attacking the English settlers through the easy access of the
unglazed windows and flimsy batten doors that opened upon the
quadrangle. Although finally beaten off, the Indians had inflicted great
loss. Her father had been one of the slain settlers who thus paid
penalty for the false sense of security, fostered by long immunity. Even
more troublous times came later,--the tumult of open war was rife in all
the land; the station was repeatedly attacked, and although it held out
stanchly, fear and suspense and grief filled the stockade,--yet still
there was space for Cupid to go swaggering hither and thither within the
guarded gates, and aim his arrows with his old-time dainty skill, albeit
his bow and quiver might seem somewhat archaic in these days of powder
and lead. For Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane spent much of her time in
the moulding of bullets. Perhaps it was appropriate, since both she and
her young pioneer lover dealt so largely in missiles, that it was thus
the sentimental dart was sped. Lead was precious in those days, but
sundry bullets, that she had moulded, Ralph Emsden never rammed down
into the long barrel of his flintlock rifle. Some question as to whether
the balls had cooled, or perhaps some mere meditative pause, had carried
the bits of lead in her fingers to her lips, as they sat together on the
hearth and talked and worked in the fire-lit dusk for their common
defense. He was wont to watch, lynx-eyed, the spot where these
consecrated bullets were placed, and afterward carried them in a
separate buckskin bag over his heart, and mentally called them his
"kisses;" for the youths of those days were even such fools as now,
although in the lapse of time they have come to pose successfully in the
dignified guise of the "wise patriots of the pioneer period." More than
once when the station was attacked and the women loaded the guns of the
men to expedite the shooting, she kept stanchly at his elbow throughout
the thunderous conflict, and charged and primed the alternate rifles
which he fired.[1] Over the trigger, in fact, the fateful word was
spoken.
"Oh, Nan," he exclaimed, looking down at her while taking the weapon
from her hand in the vague dusk where she knelt beside him,--he stood on
the shelf that served as banquette to bring him within reach of the
loophole, placed so high in the hope that a chance shot entering might
range only among the rafters,--"How quick you are! How you help me!"
The thunderous crash of the double volley of the settlers firing twice,
by the aid of their feminine auxiliaries, to every volley of the
Indians, overwhelmed for the moment the tumult of the fiendish whoops in
the wild darkness outside, and then the fusillade of the return fire,
like leaden hail, rattled against the tough log walls of the station.
"Are you afraid, Nan?" he asked, as he received again the loaded weapon
from her hand.
"_Afraid?_--No!" exclaimed Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane--hardly taller
than the ramrod with which she was once more driving the charge home.
He saw her face, delicate and blonde, in the vivid white flare from the
rifle as he thrust it through the loophole and fired. "You think I can
take care of you?" he demanded, while the echo died away, and a lull
ensued.
"I know you can," she replied, adjusting with the steady hand of an
expert the patching over the muzzle of the discharged weapon in the
semi-obscurity.
A blood-curdling shout came from the Cherokees in the woods with a
deeper roar of musketry at closer quarters; and a hollow groan within
the blockhouse, where there was a sudden commotion in the dim light,
told that some bullet had found its billet.
"They are coming to the attack again--Hand me the
rifle--quick--quick--Oh, Nan, how you help me! How brave you are--I love
you! I love you!"
"Look out now for a flash in the pan!" Peninnah Penelope Anne merely
admonished him.
Being susceptible to superstition and a ponderer on omens, Ralph Emsden
often thought fretfully afterward on the double meaning of these words,
and sought to displace them in their possible evil influence on his
future by some assurance more cheerful and confident. With this view he
often earnestly beset her, but could secure nothing more pleasing than a
reference to the will of her grandfather and a protestation to abide by
his decision in the matter.
Now Peninnah Penelope Anne's grandfather was deaf. His was that hopeless
variety of the infirmity which heard no more than he desired. His
memory, however, was unimpaired, and it may be that certain
recollections of his own experiences in the past remained with him,
making him a fine judge of the signs of the present. Emsden, appalled by
the necessity of shrieking out his love within the acute and
well-applied hearing facilities of the families of some ten
"stationers," to use the phrase of the day, diligently sought to decoy,
on successive occasions, Richard Mivane out to the comparative solitudes
of the hunting, the fishing, the cropping. In vain. Richard Mivane
displayed sudden extreme prudential care against surprise and capture by
Indians, when this was possible, and when impossible he developed
unexpected and unexampled resources of protective rheumatism. The young
lover was equally precluded from setting forth the state of his
affections and the prospects of his future in writing. Apart from the
absurdity of thus approaching a man whom he saw twenty times a day, old
Mivane would permit no such intimation of the extent of his
affliction,--it being a point of pride with him that he was merely
slightly hard of hearing, and suffered only from the indistinctness of
the enunciation of people in general. And indeed, it was variously
contended that he was so deaf that he could not hear a gun fired at his
elbow; and yet that he heard all manner of secrets which chanced to be
detailed in his presence, in inadvertent reliance on his incapacity, and
had not the smallest hesitation afterward in their disclosure, being
entitled to them by right of discovery, as it were.
Emsden, in keen anxiety, doubtful if his suit were seriously
disapproved, or if these demonstrations were only prompted by old
Mivane's selfish aversion to give away his granddaughter, finally
summoned all his courage, and in a stentorian roar proclaimed to the old
gentleman his sentiments.
Richard Mivane was a man of many punctilious habitudes, who wore cloth
instead of buckskin, however hard it might be to come by, and silver
knee-buckles and well-knit hose on his still shapely calves, and a
peruke carefully powdered and tended. He had a keen, wrinkled, bloodless
face, discerning, clever, gray eyes, heavy, overhanging, grizzled
eyebrows, and a gentlemanly mouth of a diplomatic, well-bred,
conservative expression.
It was said at Blue Lick Station that he had fled from his own country,
the north of England, on account of an affair of honor,--a duel in early
life,--and that however distasteful the hardships and comparative
poverty of this new home, it was far safer for him than the land of his
birth. His worldly position there gave him sundry claims of superiority,
for all of which his hardy pioneer son had had scant sympathy; and Ralph
Emsden, in the difficult crisis of the disclosure of the state of his
affections, heaved many a sigh for this simple manly soul's untimely
fate.
The elder Mivane, with his head bent forward, his hand behind his ear,
sat in his arm-chair while he hearkened blandly to the sentimental
statements which Emsden was obliged to shout forth twice. Then Richard
Mivane cleared his throat with a sort of preliminary gentlemanly
embarrassment, and went fluently on with that suave low voice so common
to the very deaf. "Command me, sir, command me! It will give me much
pleasure to use my influence on your behalf to obtain an ensigncy. I
will myself write at the first opportunity, the first express, to
Lieutenant-Governor Bull, who is acquainted with my family connections
in England. It is very praiseworthy, very laudable indeed, that you
should aspire to a commission in the military service,--the provincial
forces. I honor you for your readiness to fight--although, to be sure,
being Irish, you can't help it. Still, it is to your credit that you are
Irish. I am very partial to the Irish traits of character--was once in
Ireland myself--visited an uncle there"--and so forth and so forth.
And thus poor Ralph Emsden, who was only Irish by descent, and could not
have found Ireland on the map were he to hang for his ignorance, and had
been born and bred in the Royal province of South Carolina,--which
country he considered the crown and glory of the world,--was constrained
to listen to all the doings and sayings of Richard Mivane in Ireland
from the time that he embarked on the wild Irish Sea, which scrupled not
to take unprecedented liberties with so untried a sailor, till the
entrance of other pioneers cut short a beguiling account of his first
meeting with potheen in its native haunts, and the bewildering pranks
that he and that tricksy sprite played together in those the
irresponsible days of his youth.
Emsden told no one, not even Peninnah Penelope Anne, of his
discomfiture; but alack, there were youngsters in the family of
unaffected minds and unimpaired hearing. This was made amply manifest a
day or so afterward, when he chanced to pause at the door of the log
cabin and glance in, hoping that, perhaps, the queen of his dreams might
materialize in this humble domicile.
The old gentleman slept in his chair, with dreams of his own, perchance,
for his early life might have furnished a myriad gay fancies for his
later years. The glare of noonday lay on the unshaded spaces of the
quadrangle without; for all trees had been felled, even far around the
inclosure, lest thence they might afford vantage and ambush for musketry
fire or a flight of arrows into the stockade. Through rifts in the
foliage at considerable distance one could see the dark mountain looming
high above, and catch glimpses of the further reaches of the Great Smoky
Range, blue and shimmering far away, and even distinguish the crest of
"Big Injun Mountain" on the skyline. The several cabins, all connected
by that row of protective palisades from one to another like a visible
expression of the chord of sympathy and mutual helpful neighborliness,
were quiet, their denizens dining within. At the blockhouse a guard was
mounted--doubtless a watchful and stanch lookout, but unconforming to
military methods, for he sang, to speed the time, a metrical psalm of
David's; the awkward collocation of the words of this version would
forever distort the royal poet's meaning if he had no other vehicle of
his inspiration. There were long waits between the drowsy lines, and in
the intervals certain callow voices, with the penetrating timbre of
youth, came to Emsden's ear. His eyes followed the sound quickly.
The little sisters of Peninnah Penelope Anne were on the floor before a
playhouse, outlined by stones and sticks, and with rapt faces and
competent fancies, saw whatsoever they would. In these riches of
imagination a little brother also partook. A stick, accoutred in such
wise with scraps of buckskin as to imitate a gallant of the place and
period, was bowing respectfully before another stick, vested in the
affabilities of age and the simulacrum of a dressing-gown.
"I love your granddaughter, sir, and wish to make her my wife," said the
bowing stick.
"Command me, sir; command me!" suavely replied the stick stricken in
years.
The scene had been an eye-opener to the tender youth of the little
Mivanes; the pomp and circumstance of a sentimental disclosure they
would never forget.
Emsden, as hardy a pioneer as ever drew a bead on a panther or an
Indian, passed on, quaking at the thought of the wits of the Station as
he had never yet feared man, and his respected Irish blood ran cold. And
when it waxed warm with wrath once more it came to pass that to utter
the simple phrase "Command me" was as much as a man's life was worth at
Blue Lick Station.
Emsden thought ruefully of the girl's mother and wondered if her
intercession would avail aught with the old autocrat. But he had not yet
ventured upon this. There was nothing certain about Mrs. Mivane but her
uncertainty. She never gave a positive opinion. Her attitude of mind was
only to be divined by inference. She never gave a categorical answer.
And indeed he would not have been encouraged to learn that Richard
Mivane himself had already consulted his daughter-in-law, as in this
highhanded evasion of any decision he felt the need of support. For once
the old gentleman was not displeased with her reply, comprehensive,
although glancing aside from the point. Since there were so many young
men in the country, said Mrs. Mivane, she saw no reason for despair!
With this approval of his temporizing policy Richard Mivane left the
matter to the development of the future.
Emsden's depression would have been more serious had he not fortunately
sundry tokens of the old man's favor to cherish in his memory, which
seemed to intimate that this elusiveness was only a shrewd scheme to
delay and thwart him rather than a positive and reasonable disposition
to deny his suit. In short, Emsden began to realize that instead of a
damsel of eighteen he had to court a coquette rising sixty, of the
sterner sex, and deafer than an adder when he chose. His artful quirks
were destined to try the young lover's diplomacy to the utmost, and
Emsden appreciated this, but he reassured himself with the reflection
that it was better thus than if it were the girl who vacillated and
delighted to torture him with all the arts of a first-class jilt. He was
constantly in and out of the house almost as familiarly as if he were
already betrothed, for in the troublous period that seemed now closing,
with its sudden flights, its panics, its desperate conflicts with the
Indians, he had been able to give an almost filial aid to Richard Mivane
in the stead of the son whom the old man had lost.
Richard Mivane had always felt himself an alien, a sojourner in this new
land, and perchance he might not have been able even partially to
reconcile himself to the ruder conditions of his later life if the
bursting of a financial bubble had not swept away all hope of returning
to the status of his earlier home in England when the tragedy of the
duel had been sunk in oblivion. The frontier was a fine place to hide
one's poverty and fading graces, he had once remarked, and thereafter
had seemed to resign himself to its hardships,--indeed, sometimes he
consigned his negro body-servant, Cæsar, to other duties than his
exclusive attendance. He had even been known to breakfast with his head
tied up in a handkerchief when some domestic crisis had supervened, such
as the escape of all the horses from the pinfold, to call away his
barber. As this functionary was of an active temperament and not at all
averse to the labor in the fields, he proved of more value thus utilized
than in merely furnishing covert amusement to the stationers by his
pompous duplication of his master's attitude of being too cultured,
traveled, and polished for his surroundings. He was a trained valet,
however, expert in all the details of dressing hair, powdering, curling,
pomatuming, and other intricacies of the toilet of a man of fashion of
that day. Cæsar had many arts at command touching the burnishing of
buckles and buttons, and even in clear-starching steinkirks and the
cambric ruffles of shirts. As he ploughed he was wont to tell of his
wonderful experiences while in his master's service in London (although
he had never crossed the seas); and these being accepted with seeming
seriousness, he carried his travels a step farther and described the
life he remembered in the interior of Guinea (although he had never seen
the shores of Africa). This life so closely resembled that of London
that it was often difficult to distinguish the locality of the
incidents, an incongruity that enchanted the wags of the settlement, who
continually incited him to prodigies of narration. The hairbreadth
escapes that he and his fellow-servants, as well as the white people,
had had from the wrath of the Indians, whom the negroes feared beyond
measure, and their swift flights from one stockade to another in those
sudden panics during the troubled period preceding the Cherokee War,
might have seemed more exciting material for romancing for a venturesome
Munchausen, but perhaps these realities were too stern to afford any
interest in the present or glamour in the past.
It was somewhat as a prelude to the siege of Fort Loudon by the
Cherokees in 1760 that they stormed and triumphantly carried several
minor stations to the southeast. Although Blue Lick sustained the
attack, still, in view of the loss of a number of its gallant defenders,
the settlers retreated at the first opportunity to the more sheltered
frontier beyond Fort Prince George, living from hand to mouth, some at
Long Cane and some at Ninety-Six, through those years when first
Montgomerie and then Grant made their furious forays through the
Cherokee country. Emsden, having served in the provincial regiment,
eagerly coveted a commission, of which Richard Mivane had feigned to
speak. Now that the Cherokees were ostensibly pacified,--that is,
exhausted, decimated, their towns burned, their best and bravest slain,
their hearts broken,--the fugitives from this settlement on the
Eupharsee River, as the Hiwassee was then called, gathered their
household gods and journeyed back to Blue Lick, to cry out in the
wilderness that they were "home" once more, and clasp each other's hands
in joyful gratulation to witness the roofs and stockade rise again,
rebuilt as of yore. Strangely enough, there were old Cherokee friends to
greet them anew and to be welcomed into the stockade; for even the rigid
rule of war and hate must needs be proved by its exceptions. And there
were one or two pensive philosophers among the English settlers vaguely
sad to see all the Cherokee traditions and prestige, and remnants of
prehistoric pseudo-civilization, shattered in the dust, and the
tremulous, foreign, unaccustomed effort--half-hearted, half-believing,
half-understanding--to put on the habitude of a new civilization.
"The white man's religion permits poverty, but the Indian divides his
store with the needy, and there are none suffered to be poor," said
Atta-Kulla-Kulla, the famous chief. "The white men wrangle and quarrel
together, even brother with brother; with us the inner tribal peace is
ever unbroken. The white men slay and rob and oppress the poor, and with
many cunning treaties take now our lands and now our lives; then they
offer us their religion;--why does it seem so like an empty bowl?"
"Atta-Kulla-Kulla, you know that I am deaf," said Richard Mivane, "and
you ask me such hard questions that I am not able to hear them."
It is more than probable that these stationers in the vanguard of the
irrepressible march of western emigration had been trespassers, and thus
earned their misfortunes, in some sort, by their encroachment on Indian
territory; although since the war the Cherokee boundaries had become
more vague than heretofore, it being considered that Grant's operations
had extended the frontier by some seventy miles. It may be, too, that
the Blue Lick settlers held their own by right of private purchase; for
the inhibition to the acquisition of land in this way from the Indians
was not enacted till the following year, 1763, after the events to be
herein detailed, and, indeed, such purchases even further west and of an
earlier date are of record, albeit of doubtful legality.
Now that peace in whatever maimed sort had come to this stricken land
and these adventurous settlers, who held their lives, their all, by such
precarious tenure, internecine strife must needs arise among them; not
the hand of brother against brother,--they were spared that grief,--but
one tender, struggling community against another.
And it came about in this wise.
One day Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane, watching from the "port-hole" of
the blockhouse, where the muzzle of that dog of war the little swivel
gun had once been wont to look forth, beheld Ralph Emsden ride out from
the stockade gate for a week's absence with a party of hunters; with
bluff but tender assurance he waved his hat and hand to her in farewell.
"Before all the men!" she said to herself, half in prudish dismay at his
effrontery, and yet pleased that he did not sheepishly seek to conceal
his preference. And although the men (there were but two or three and
not half the province, as her horror of this publicity would seem to
imply) said with a grin "Command me!" they said it _sotto voce_ and only
to each other.
Spring was once more afoot in the land. They daily marked her advance as
they went. Halfway up the mountains she had climbed: for the maples were
blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes even more
splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant ranges, the elms
had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all bore
great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready for
kindling for some great festival. It is a wonderful thing to hear a wind
singing in myriads of their branches at once. The surging tones of this
oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented ravines
and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Now and again the
flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects.
The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the
tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be crushed
unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating
of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in
due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer's heart not
less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil had hardly yet
begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each of the
stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and
caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.
One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His
name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by
the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was
something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation.
He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,--a type rare in this
region,--coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers
established in Georgia.
We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which
imply a personal and unpleasant reflection. Xerxes Alexander Anxley
disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for
these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the
rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of
secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste;
for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather
around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the
juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the
elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He
even disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his
sincerity.
This man Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic
countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come
suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable,
seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their
inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was
reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings,
worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth was shut hard and fast
upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of
them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and
his words were usually framed to doubt one's state of grace and to
contravene one's tenets as to final salvation. He rode much of the time
with the reins loose on his horse's neck, and perhaps no man in the
saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of
Cromwell's troopers. His theological disputations grated peculiarly upon
Emsden's mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that
followed.
"If I hadn't been so traveled that day,--dragged through hell and
skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,--I wouldn't
have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce,"
Emsden afterward declared.
For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the
"old trading path," as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds
racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting
as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the
wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir
near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head. Just above him, on a rugged
slope where no trees grew save a scraggy cedar here and there amidst the
shelving ledges of rock outcropping through the soft verdant turf, he
saw a stealthy, furtive shape; he was aware of a hasty cowed glance over
the shoulder, and then a stretching of supple limbs in flight. Before he
himself hardly knew it the sharp crack of his rifle rang out,--the aim
was almost instinctive.
And it was as true as instinct,--a large black wolf, his pelt glossy and
fresh with the renewal of the season, lay stretched dead in an instant
upon the slope. Emsden sprang from his horse, tossed the reins to "X,"
and, drawing his knife, ran up the steep ascent to secure the animal's
skin.
Only vaguely, as in a dream, he heard a sudden deep roar, beheld a
horned creature leaping heavily upon its fore quarters, tossing its hind
legs and tail into the air. Then an infuriated bull, breaking from the
bushes, charged fiercely down upon him. Emsden threw himself into a
posture of defense as instantly as if he had been a trained bullfighter
and the arena his wonted sphere, holding the knife close in front of
him, presenting the blade with a quick keen calculation for the animal's
jugular. The knife was Emsden's only weapon, for his pistols were in the
holster on the saddle, and his discharged rifle lay where he had flung
it on the ground after firing. He had only time to wonder that his
comrades vouchsafed him no assistance in his extremity. Men of such
accurate aim and constant practice could easily risk sending a
rifle-ball past him to stop that furious career. He could see the pupil
of the bull's wild dilated eyes, fiery as with a spark of actual flame.
He could even feel the hot puffs of the creature's breath upon his
cheeks, when all at once the horned head so close above his own swerved
aside with a snort from the dead body of the wolf at his feet. The bull
passed him like a thunderbolt, and he heard the infuriated stamping
which fairly shook the ground in the thicket below, where this king of
the herds paused to bellow and paw the earth, throwing clods high above
the environing copse.
The woods seemed full of maddened, frightened cattle, and Emsden's horse
was frantically galloping after the cavalcade of hunters and their
pack-train, all the animals more or less beyond the control of the men.
He felt it an ill chance that left him thus alone and afoot in this
dense wilderness, several days' travel from the station. He was hardly
sure that he would be missed by his comrades, themselves scattered, the
pack-horses having broken from the path which they had traveled in
single file, and now with their burdens of value all foolishly careering
wildly through the woods. The first prudential care of the hunters he
knew would be to recover them and re-align the train, lest some
miscreant, encountering the animals, plunder the estrays of their loads
of hard-won deerskins and furs.
The presence of cattle suggested to Emsden the proximity of human
dwellings, and yet this was problematic, for beyond branding and
occasional saltings the herds ranged within large bounds on lands
selected for their suitability as pasturage. The dwellings of these
pioneer herdsmen might be far away indeed, and in what direction he
could not guess. Since the Cherokee War, and the obliteration of all
previous marks of white settlements in this remote region, Emsden was
unfamiliar with the more recent location of "cow-pens," as the ranches
were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of
the settlers' stations. Nothing so alters the face of a country as the
moral and physical convulsion of war. Even many of the Indian towns were
deserted and half charred,--burned by the orders of the British
commanders. One such stood in a valley through which he passed on his
homeward way; the tender vernal aspect of this green cove, held in the
solemn quiet of the encircling mountains, might typify peace itself. Yet
here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of
the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in
the absolute solitude,--the great ribs of dead chargers, together with
broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a
burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at
the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this
sequestered bosky nook.
Something of a job this transit was, for with the spring freshets the
water was high and the current strong, and he was compelled to use only
one hand for swimming, the other holding high out of the water's reach
his powder horn. For, despite any treaties of peace, this was no country
for a man to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical
wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades' curiosity
concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it,
a perpetual conundrum.
He had never, however, made so lonely a journey. Not one human being did
he meet--neither red man nor white--in all the long miles of the endless
wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding
woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went.
Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that
were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to go and leave the
majestic peace of the zenith. The stars scintillated in the dark night
as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far spaces of the
heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to cook the supper
that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach of wolf or
panther while he slept. He was doubtless in jeopardy often enough, but
chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical till the fourth
day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the partners of
the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.
They waited for no reproaches for their desertion. They were quick to
upbraid. As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment,
and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust
back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he
listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and
leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an
intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how
the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of
the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the
misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could
be seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset
rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of
the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the
colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a
second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley.
The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly
wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the
embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown
hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain.
"Looking out for me, I wonder?" he asked himself, and as this glow of
agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with questions
angrily admonished his silence.
"He has seen a wolf! He has seen a wolf! 'Tis plain!" cried old Mivane,
as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad
pioneers. "One would know that without being told!"
"You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the
cow-pens on the Keowee River can't round them up again!" cried one of
the settlers.
"The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!" declared another
pessimistically.
"And it was _you_ that shot the wolf!" cried "X" rancorously.
"The herders are holding _us_ responsible and have sent an ambassador,"
explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, "to inform us
that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass
down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle."
"Gadso! they can't _all_ be lost!" exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.
"No, no! the herders go too far for damages--too far! They are putting
their coulter _too_ deep!" said a farmer fresh from the field. He had
still a bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust
in his hand and fingered the kernels.
"They declare they'll seize our skins," cried another
ambiguously,--then, conscious of this, he sought to amend the
matter,--"Not the hides we wear,"--this was no better, for they were all
arrayed in hides, save Richard Mivane. "Not the hides that we were born
in, but our deerhides, our peltry,--they'll seize the pack-train from
Blue Lick, and they declare they'll call on the commandant of Fort
Prince George to oppose its passing with the king's troops."
An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,--save for the fresh notes of
a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the tower of the blockhouse,
above which the rainbow glowed in the radiant splendors of a misty amber
sky.
"The king's troops? Would the commandant respond?" anxiously speculated
one of the settlers.
The little handful of pioneers, with their main possessions in the fate
of the pack-train, looked at one another in dismay.
"And tell me, friend Feather-pate, why did it seem good to you to shoot
a wolf in the midst of a herd of cattle?" demanded Richard Mivane.
Ralph Emsden, bewildered by the results of this untoward chance, and the
further catastrophe shadowed forth in the threatened seizure of the
train, rallied with all his faculties at the note of scorn from this
quarter.
"Sir, I did not shoot the wolf among the cattle. There was not a horn
nor a hoof to be seen when I fired."
Mivane turned to "X" with both hands outstretched as much as to say,
"Take _that_ for your quietus!" and shouldering his stick, which had an
ivory head and a sword within, strode off after his jaunty fashion as if
there were no more to be said.
It was now Alexander Anxley's turn to sustain the questioning clamor. "I
will not deny"--"That is, I said"--"I meant to say,"--but these
qualifications were lost in the stress of Emsden's voice, once more
rising stridently.
"Not a horn nor a hoof to be seen till after I had fired. I didn't know
there were any cow-pens about--didn't use to be till after you had
crossed the Keowee. But if there _had_ been, is a man to see a wolf pull
down a yearling, say, and not fire a rifle because Madam Cow will take
the high-strikes or Cap'n Bull will go on the rampage? Must I wait till
I can make a leg,"--he paused to execute an exaggerated obeisance,
graceful enough despite its mockery,--"'Under your favor, Cap'n Bull,'
and 'With your ladyship's permission,' before I kill the ravening brute,
big enough to pull down a yearling? Don't talk to me! Don't talk to me!"
He held out the palms of his hands toward them in interdiction, and made
as if to go--yet went not!
For a reactionary sentiment toward him had set in, and there were those
fair-minded enough, although with their little all at stake, to admit
that he had acted with reasonable prudence, and that it was only an
unlucky chance which had sent the panic through the herds with such
disastrous effect.
"The herders should not stop the pack-train, if I had my will," declared
one of the settlers with a belligerent note.
"No, no," proclaimed another; "not if it takes all the men at Blue Lick
Station to escort it!"
"Those blistered redcoats at Fort Prince George are a deal too handy to
be called on by such make-bates as the herders on the Keowee River."
"Fudge! The commandant would never let a bayonet stir."
"Gad! I'd send an ambassador for an ambassador. Tit for tat," declared
Emsden. "I'd ask 'em what's gone with all our horses,--last seen in
those desolated cow-pens,--that the voice of mourning is now lifted
about!"
There was a chuckle of sheer joy, so abrupt and unexpected that it rose
with a clatter and a cackle of delight, and culminated in a yell of
pleasurable derision.
Now everybody knew that the horses bought in that wild country would,
unless restrained, return every spring to "their old grass," as it was
called,--to the places where they had formerly lived. When this annual
hegira took place in large numbers, some permanent losses were sure to
ensue. The settlers at Blue Lick had experienced this disaster, and had
accepted it as partly the result of their own lack of precaution during
the homing fancy of the horses. But since the herders manifested so
little of the suavity that graces commercial intercourse, and as some of
the horses had been seen in their cow-pens, it was a happy thought to
feather the arrow with this taunt.
"And who do you suppose will promise to carry such a message to those
desperate, misguided men, riding hither an' thither, searching this wild
and woeful wilderness for hundreds o' head o' cattle lost like needles
in a hayrick, and eat by wolves an' painters by this time?" demanded "X"
derisively.
"I promise, I promise!--and with hearty good will, too!" declared
Emsden. "And I'll tell 'em that we are coming down soon armed to the
teeth to guard our pack-train, and fight our way through any resistance
to its passage through the country on the open trading-path. And I'll
acquaint the commandant of Fort Prince George of the threats of the
herders against the Blue Lick Stationers, and warn him how he attempts
to interfere with the liberties of the king's loyal subjects in their
peaceful vocations."
Thus Emsden gayly volunteered for the mission.
The next morning old Richard Mivane, thinking of it, shook his head over
the fire,--and not only once, but shook it again, which was a great deal
of trouble for him to take. Having thus exerted his altruistic interest
to the utmost, Richard Mivane relapsed into his normal placidity. He
leaned back in his arm-chair, the only one at the station, fingering his
gold-lined silver snuffbox, with its chain and ladle, his eyes dwelling
calmly on the fire, and his thoughts busy with far away and long ago.
He was old enough now to enter into the past as a sort of heritage, a
promised land which memory had glozed with a glamour that can never
shine upon the uncertain aspects of the future. The burning sense of
regret, the anguish of nostalgia, the relinquishment of an accustomed
sphere, its prospects and ideals, the revolt against the uncouth and
rude conditions of the new status, the gradual reluctant naturalization
to a new world,--these were forgotten save as the picturesque elements
of sorrow and despair that balanced the joys, the interest, the
devil-may-care joviality, the adventure, the strange wild
companionship,--all that made the tale worth rehearsing in the flare and
the flicker of the fireside glow.
The rains had come. The dark slate-tinted clouds hung low over the
station, but every log house, freshly dight with whitewash of the marly
clay, after the Indian method, still shone in the shadow as if the sun
were upon it. The turf was green, despite the passing of many feet, and
where a slight depression held water, a few ducks, Carolina bred, were
quacking and paddling about; now and then these were counted with great
interest, for they had a trick of taking to the woods with others of
their kind, and relapsing to savagery,--truly distressing to the
domestic poultry prospects of the station. The doors of the Mivane cabin
were all ajar,--the one at the rear opening into a shed-room, unfloored,
which gave a vista into more sheds, merely roofed spaces, inclosed at
either end. A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the
bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house,
fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat,
giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman,
neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an
expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many
self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and
appropriated the knotty points of the discourse.
In the outer shed, Cæsar, clad like the Indians and the pioneers in
buckskin, was mending the plough-gear, and talking with great loquacity
to another negro, of the type known then and later as "the new nigger,"
the target of the plantation jokes, because of his "greenness," being of
a fresh importation. He possibly remembered much of Africa, but he
accepted without demur and with admiring and submissive meekness stories
of the great sights that Cæsar protested he had seen there,--Vauxhall
Gardens and Temple Bar (which last Cæsar thought in his simplicity was
a bar for the refreshment of the inner man) and a certain resort
indisputably for that purpose called White's Chocolate House,--all
represented as pleasantly and salubriously situated in the interior of
Guinea. But after all, if a story is well told, why carp at slight
anachorisms?
Richard Mivane's attention had been diverted from the thread of his own
reminiscences by the fact that the little flax-wheel of Peninnah
Penelope Anne had ceased to whirl, and the low musical monody of its
whir that was wont to bear a pleasant accompaniment to the burden of his
thoughts was suddenly silent. He lifted his eyes and saw that she was
gazing dreamily into the flare of the great fire, the spinning-wheel
still, the end of the thread motionless in her hand. The burnished waves
of her golden brown hair were pushed a bit awry, and her face was so wan
and thoughtful that even her dress of crimson wool did not lessen its
pallor. The voices of the three children on the floor grated on the old
man's mood as they were busied in defending a settler's fort, insecurely
constructed of stones and sticks, and altogether roofless, garrisoned by
a number of pebbles, while a poke full of wily Indian kernels of corn
swarmed to the attack.
"Why is my pretty pet so idle?" he asked, for while the wheel should
whirl he could dream.
She made no answer, only turned her troubled, soft hazel eyes upon him.
"And have you seen a wolf, too, that you have lost your tongue?"
At the word "wolf" she burst into tears. And then, discarding all
caution in the breaking down of her reserve, she sprang up, overturning
the wheel and rushing to his chair.
Now Richard Mivane had never encouraged his grandchildren to clamber
over his chair. He protested great fear of the sticky fingers of the
more youthful in contact with his preternaturally fine clothes; he
declared they reminded him of squirrels, which he detested; he was not
sure they did not look like rats. All this was of great effect; for his
many contemptuous whimsical prejudices were earnestly respected.
For instance, whenever 'possum was served at the pioneer board they who
partook carried their plates for the purpose to a side table. "The look
of the animal's tail is enough for me--it curls," he would say.
"So does a pig's tail curl," his son used to remonstrate sensibly.
"Not having kept a straight course so long,--then twirling up
deceitfully like a second thought. This fellow is a monstrosity,--and
his wife has a pocket for a cradle,--and I don't know who they are nor
where they came from,--they were left over from before the Flood,
perhaps,--they look somehow prehistoric to me. I am not acquainted with
the family."
And turning his head aside he would wave away the dainty, the delight of
the pioneer epicure time out of mind.
The diplomatic reason, however, that Richard Mivane was wont to shove
off his grandchildren from the arm of that stately chair was that here
they got on his blind side,--his simple, grandfatherly, affectionate
predilection. The touch of them, their scrambling, floundering, little
bodies, their soft pink cheeks laid against his, their golden hair in
his clever eyes, their bright glances at close range,--he was then like
other men and could deny them nothing! His selfishness, his vanity, his
idleness, his frippery were annulled in the instant. He was resolved
into the simple constituent elements of a grandfather, one part doting
folly, one part loving pride, and the rest leniency, and he was as wax
in their hands.
None of them had so definitely realized this, accurately discriminating
cause and effect, as Peninnah Penelope Anne. She felt safe the moment
that she was perched on the arm of her grandfather's chair, her soft
clasp about his stiff old neck, her tears flowing over her cheeks, all
pink anew, escaping upon his wrinkled, bloodless, pale visage and taking
all the starch out of his old-fashioned steinkirk. He struggled futilely
once or twice, but she only hugged him the closer.
"Oh, don't let him go! Oh, don't let him go!" she cried.
"The wolf that we were talking about? By no means! Lovely creature that
he is! We'll preserve, if you like, wolves instead of pheasants! I
remember a gentleman's estate in Northumberland--a little beyond the
river"--
"Oh, grandfather, don't let him go!" she sobbingly interrupted. "It was
he who shot the wolf and stampeded the herds, and the cow-drivers will
quarrel with him when they would not have angry words with another
ambassador. They will kill him! They will kill him!"
"What for? Poaching?--shooting their wolf?"