He jumped from the heavy wagon and ran to a corner of the corncrib,

where he kept a stock of torches. Then he hurried up the steep hill

towards the entrance to the “dry” cave. The big man was panting when he

reached the opening, where he paused a moment to kindle a torch with his

flints. Then he lowered himself into the aperture, shouting at the top

of his voice, “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

It was not until he had gotten into the first chamber that the captives

in the inner room could hear him. Sargeant had been sitting with his

back propped against the cavern wall, while Caroline, very pale and

white-lipped, was lying across his knees, gazing up into the darkness,

imagining that she could see his face.

When they heard the cheery shouts of their deliverer they did not

instantly attempt to scramble to their feet. Instead the young lover

bent over; his lips touched Caroline’s, who instinctively had raised her

face to meet his. As his lips touched hers, he whispered:

“I love you, darling, with all my heart. We will be married when we get

out of here.”

Caroline had time to say: “You are my only love,” before their lips came

together.

They were in that position when the flare of Farmer Harshbarger’s torch

lit up their hiding place. Pretty soon they were on their feet and, with

their rescuer, figuring out just how long they had been in their

prison–their prison of love.

They had gone into the cave on the morning of December 24th; it was now

the morning of the 27th; in fact almost noon. Christmas had come and

gone.

Caroline still had enough strength in reserve to enable her to climb up

the tortuous passage, though her lover did help her some, as all lovers

should.

The farmer’s wife had some coffee and buckwheat cakes ready when they

arrived at the mansion; which the erstwhile captives of Penn’s Cave sat

down to enjoy.

As they were eating, another of Harshbarger’s sons rode up on horseback.

He had been to the post office at Earlysburg. He handed Sargeant a tiny,

roughly typed newspaper published in Millheim. Across the front page, in

letters larger than usual, were the words, “Mexico Declares War on the

United States.”

Sargeant scanned the headline intently, then laid the paper on the

table.

“Our country has been drawn into a war with Mexico,” he said, his voice

trembling with emotion. “I had hoped it might be avoided. I am First

Lieutenant of the Lafayette Greys; I fear I’ll have to go.”

[Illustration: BIG SNYDER COUNTY WILD CAT]

Caroline lost the color which had come back to her pretty cheeks since

emerging from the underground dungeon. She reached over, grasping her

lover’s now clammy hand. Then, noticing that no one was listening, she

said, faintly:

“It is terrible to have you leave me now; but won’t you marry me before

you go? I do love you.” “replied Sargeant, with enthusiasm. “I will have

more to fight for, with you at home bearing my name.”

Love had broken the bonds of caste.

[Illustration]

XXI

_The Silent Friend_

Every one who has hunted in the “Seven Brothers’”, as the Seven

Mountains are called in Central Pennsylvania, has heard of Daniel

Karstetter, the famous Nimrod. The Seven Mountains comprise the Path

Valley, Short Bald, Thick Head, Sand, Shade and Tussey Mountains. Though

three-quarters of a century has passed since he was in his hey-day as a

slayer of big game, his fame is undiminished. Anecdotes of his prowess

are related in every hunting camp; by one and all he has been acclaimed

the greatest hunter that the Seven Brothers ever produced.

The great Nimrod, who lived to a very advanced age, was born in 1818 on

the banks of Pine Creek, a: the Blue Rock, half a mile below the present

town of Coburn. In addition to his hunting prowess, he was interested in

psychic experiences, and was as prone to discuss his adventures with

supernatural agencies as his conflicts with the wild denizens of the

forests. There was a particular ghost story which he loved dearly to

relate.

Accompanied by his younger brother Jacob, he had been attending a dance

one night across the mountains, in the environs of the town of Milroy,

for like all the backwoods boys of his time, he was adept in the art of

terpsichore. The long journey was made on horseback, the lads being

mounted on stout Conestoga chargers.

The homeward ride was commenced after midnight, the two brothers riding

along the dark trail in single file. In the wide flat on the top of the

“Big Mountain” Daniel fell into a doze. When he awoke, his mount having

stumbled on a stone, Jacob was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that his

brother had put his horse to trot and gone on ahead, Daniel dismissed

the matter of his absence from his mind.

As he was riding down the steep slope of the mountain, he noticed a

horseman waiting for him on the path. When they came abreast the other

rider fell in beside him, skillfully guiding his horse so that it did

not encounter the dense foliage which lined the narrow way. Daniel

supposed the party to be his brother, although the unknown kept his

lynx-skin collar turned up, and his felt cap was pulled down level with

his eyes. It was pitchy dark, so to make sure, Daniel called out:

“Is that you, Jacob?”

His companion did not reply, so the young man repeated his query in

still louder tones, but all he heard was the crunching of the horses’

hoofs on the pebbly road.

Daniel Karstetter, master slayer of panthers, bears and wolves, was no

coward, though on this occasion he felt uneasy. Yet he disliked picking

a quarrel with the silent man at his side, who clearly was not his

brother, and he feared to put his horse to a gallop on the steep, uneven

roadway. The trip home never before seemed of such interminable length.

For the greater part of the distance Daniel made no attempt to converse

with his unsociable comrade. Finally, he heaved a sigh of relief when he

saw a light gleaming in the horse stable at the home farm. When he

reached the barnyard gate he dismounted to let down the bars, while the

stranger apparently vanished in the gloom.

Daniel led his mount to the horse stable, where he found his brother

Jacob sitting by the old tin lantern, fast asleep. He awakened him and

asked him when he had gotten home. Jacob stated that his horse had been

feeling good, so he let him canter all the way. He had been sleeping,

but judged that he had been home at least half an hour. He had met no

horseman on the road.

Daniel was convinced that his companion had been a ghost, or, as they

are called in the “Seven Brothers,” a _gshpook_. But he made no further

comment that night.

A year afterwards, in coming back alone from a dance in Stone Valley, he

was again joined by the silent horseman, who followed him to his

barnyard gate. He gave up going to dances on that account. At least once

a year, or as long as he was able to go out at night, he met the ghostly

rider. Sometimes, when tramping along on foot after a hunt, or, in later

years, coming back from market at Bellefonte in his Jenny Lind, he would

find the silent horseman at his side. After the first experience, he

never attempted to speak to the night rider, but he became convinced

that it meant him no harm.

As his prowess as a hunter became recognized, he had many jealous rivals

among the less successful Nimrods. In those old days threats of all

kinds were freely made. He heard on several occasions that certain

hunters were setting out to “fix” him. But a man who could wrestle with

panthers and bears knew no such thing as fear.

One night, while tramping along in Green’s Valley, he was startled by

some one in the path ahead of him shouting out in Pennsylvania German,

“Hands up!” He was on the point of dropping his rifle, when he heard the

rattle of hoof beats back of him. The silent horseman in an instant was

by his side, the dark horse pawing the earth with his giant hoofs. There

was a crackling of brush in the path ahead, and no more threats of _hend

uff_.

The ghostly rider followed Daniel to his barn yard gate, but was gone

before he could utter a word of thanks. As the result of this adventure,

he became imbued with the idea that he possessed a charmed life. It gave

him added courage in his many encounters with panthers, the fierce red

bears and lynxes.

Apart from his love of hunting the more dangerous animals, Daniel

enjoyed the sport of deer-stalking. He maintained several licks, one of

them in a patch of low ground over the hill from the entrance to the

“dry” part of Penn’s Cave. At this spot he constructed a blind, or

platform, between the two ancient tupelo trees, about twenty feet from

the ground, and many were the huge white-faced stags which fell to his

unerring bullets during the rutting season.

One cold night, according to an anecdote frequently related by one of

his descendants, while perched in his eyrie overlooking the natural

clearing which constituted the _lick_, and in sight of a path frequented

by the fiercer beasts, which led to the opening of the “dry” cave, he

saw, about midnight, a huge pantheress, followed by a large male of the

same species, come out into the open.

“The pantheress strolled from the path,” so the story went, "and came

and laid herself down at the roots of the tupelo trees, while the

panther remained in the path, and seemed to be listening to some noise

as yet inaudible to the hunter.

"Daniel soon heard a distant roaring; it seemed to come from the very

summit of the Brush Mountain, and immediately the pantheress answered

it. The the panther on the path, his jealousy aroused, commenced to roar

with a voice so loud that the frightened hunter almost let go his trusty

rifle and held tighter to the railing of his blind, lest he might tumble

to the earth. As the voice of the animal that he had heard in the

distance gradually approached, the pantheress welcomed him with renewed

roarings, and the panther, restless, went and came from the path to his

flirtatious flame, as though he wished her to keep silence, as though to

say, ‘Let him come if he dares; he will find his match’.

"In about an hour a panther, with mouse-color, or grey coat, stepped out

of the forest, and stood in the full moonlight on the other side of the

cleared place, the moonbeams illuminating his form with a glow like

phosphorescence. The pantheress, eyeing him with admiration, raised

herself to go to him, but the panther, divining her intent, rushed

before her and marched right at his adversary. With measured step and

slow, they approached to within a dozen paces of each other, their

smooth, round heads high in the air, their bulging yellow eyes gleaming,

their long, tufted tails slowly sweeping down the brittle asters that

grew about them. They crouched to the earth–a moment’s pause–and then

they bounded with a hellish scream high in the air and rolled on the

ground, locked in their last embrace.

"The battle was long and fearful, to the amazed and spellbound witness

of this midnight duel. Even if he had so wished, he could not have taken

steady enough aim to fire. But he preferred to watch the combat, while

the moonlight lasted. The bones of the two combatants cracked under

their powerful jaws, their talons painted the frosty ground with blood,

and their outcries, now gutteral, now sharp and loud, told their rage

and agony.

"At the beginning of the contest the pantheress crouched herself on her

belly, with her eyes fixed upon the gladiators, and all the while the

battle raged, manifested by the slow, catlike motion of her tail, the

pleasure she felt at the spectacle. When the scene closed, and all was

quiet and silent and deathlike on the lick, and the moon had commenced

to wane, she cautiously approached the battle-ground and, sniffing the

lifeless bodies of her two lovers, walked leisurely to a nearby oak,

where she stood on her hind feet, sharpening her fore claws on the bark.

"She glared up ferociously at the hunter in the blind, as if she meant

to vent her anger by climbing after him. In the moonlight her golden

eyes appeared so terrifying that Daniel dropped his rifle, and it fell

to the earth with a sickening thud. As he reached after it, the flimsy

railing gave way and he fell, literally into the arms of the pantheress.

At that moment the rumble of horses’ hoofs, like thunder on some distant

mountain, was heard. Just as the panther was about to rend the helpless

Nimrod to bits, the unknown rider came into view. Scowling at the

intruder, mounted on his huge black horse, the brute abandoned its prey

and ambled off up the hill in the direction of the dry cave.

"Daniel seized his firearm and sent a bullet after her retreating form,

but it apparently went wild of its mark. Meanwhile, before he had time

to express his gratitude to the strange deliverer, he had vanished.

"Daniel was dumbfounded. As soon as he had recovered from the

blood-curdling episodes, he built a small fire near the mammoth

carcasses, where he warmed his much benumbed hands. Then he examined the

dead panthers, but found that their hides were too badly torn to warrant

skinning.

"Disgusted at not getting his deer, and being even cheated out of the

panther pelts, he dragged the ghastly remains of the erstwhile kings of

the forest by their tails to the edge of the entrance to the dry cave.

There he cut off the long ears in order to collect the bounty, and then

shoved the carcasses into the opening. They fell with sickening thuds

into the chamber beneath, to the evident horror of the pantheress, which

uttered a couple of piercing screams as the horrid remnants of the

recent battle royal landed in her vicinity.

“Then Jacob shouldered his rifle and started out in search of small game

for breakfast. That night he went to another of his licks on Elk Creek,

near Fulmer’s Sink, where he killed four superb stags,” so the story

concludes.

But to his dying day he always placed the battle of the panthers first

of all his hunting adventures. And his faith in the unknown horseman as

his deliverer and good genius became the absorbing, all-pervading

influence of his life.

XXII

_The Fountain of Youth_

Old Chief Wisamek, of the Kittochtinny Indians, had lost his spouse. He

was close to sixty years of age, which was old for a redman, especially

one who had led the hard life of a warrior, exposed to all kinds of

weather, fasts and forced marches. Though he felt terribly lonely and

depressed in his state of widowerhood, the thought of discarding the

fidelity of the eagle, which, if bereaved, never takes a second mate,

and was the noble bird he worshipped, seemed repugnant to him until he

happened to see the fair and buxom maid Annapalpeteu.

He was rheumatic, walking with difficulty; he tired easily, was fretful,

all sure signs of increasing age; but what upset him most was the sight

of his reflection in his favorite pool, a haggard, weazened, wrinkled

face, with a nose like the beak of an eagle, and glazed eyes as

colorless as clay. When he opened his mouth the reflected image seemed

to be mostly toothless, the lips were blue and thin. He had noticed that

he did not need to pluck the hairs from his skull any more to give

prominence to his warrior’s top-knot; the proud tuft itself was growing

sparse and weak; to keep it erect he was now compelled to braid it with

hair from a buffalo’s tail.

Brave warrior that he was, he hated to pay his court to the lovely

Annapalpeteu when on all sides he saw stalwart, six-foot youths, masses

of sinews and muscle, clear-eyed, firm-lipped, always ambitious and

high-spirited, more suited to be her companions.

But one afternoon he saw his copper-colored love sitting by the side of

the Bohundy Creek, beating maize in a wooden trough. Her entire costume

consisted of a tight petticoat of blue cloth, hardly reaching to the

knees, and without any ruffles. Her cheeks and forehead were neatly

daubed with red. She seemed very well content with her coadjutor, a

bright young fellow, who, except for two wild cat hides appropriately

distributed, was quite as naked as the ingenuous beauty. That

Annapalpeteu had a cavalier was now certain, and immediately it rankled

what flames remained in his jaded body; he must have her at any cost.

Down by the Conadogwinet, across the Broad Mountain, lived Mbison, a

wise man. Old Wisamek would go there and consult him, perhaps obtain

from him some potion to permanently restore at least a few of the fires

of his lost youth. Though his will power had been appreciably slackening

of late years, he acted with alacrity on the idea of visiting the

soothsayer. Before sundown he was on his way to the south, accompanied

by several faithful henchmen. Carrying a long ironwood staff, he moved

on with unwonted agility; it was very dark, and the path difficult to

follow, when he finally consented to bivouac for the night. The next

morning found him so stiff that he could hardly clamber to his feet. His

henchmen assisted him, though they begged him to rest for a day. But his

will forced him on; he wanted to be virile and win the beautiful

Annapalpeteu.

The journey, which consumed a week, cost the aged Strephon a world of

effort. But as he had been indefatigable in his youth, he was determined

to reach the wise man’s headquarters walking like a warrior, and not

carried there on a litter like an old woman. Bravely he forged ahead,

his aching joints paining miserably, until at length he came in sight of

his Promised Land.

The soothsayer, who had been apprised of his coming by a dream, was in

front of his substantial lodge-house to greet him. Seldom had he

received a more distinguished client than Wisamek, so he welcomed him

with marked courtesy and deference.

After the first formalities, the old chief, who had restrained himself

with difficulty, asked how he could be restored to a youthful condition,

so that he could rightfully marry a beautiful maiden of eighteen

summers. The wise man, who had encountered similar supplicants in the

past, informed him that the task was a comparatively easy one. It would

involve, however, however, first drinking the waters of the Warm Springs

(in what is now Perry County), then another journey across mountains.

Wisamek shouted for joy when he heard these words, and impatiently

demanded where he would have to go to be finally restored to youth.

“Across many high mountain ranges, across many broad valleys, across

many swift streams, through a country covered with dark forests and

filled with wild beasts, to the northwest of here, is a wonderful

cavern. In it rises a deep stream of greenish color, clear as crystal,

the fountain of youth. At its heading you will find a very old man,

Gamunk, who knows the formula. Give him this talisman, and he will allow

you to bathe in the marvelous waters and be young again.”

With the final words he handed Wisamek a red bear’s tooth, on which was

cleverly carved the form of an athletic youth. The old chief’s hands

trembled so much that he almost dropped the precious fetich. But he soon

recovered his self-control and thanked the wise man. Then he ordered his

henchmen to give the soothsayer gifts, which they did, loading him with

beads, pottery, wampum and rare furs.

Despite the invitation to remain until he was completely rested, Wisamek

determined to depart at once for the warm springs and the fountain of

youth. He drank the warm water copiously, enjoying the beautiful

surroundings at the springs. He was so stimulated by his high hope and

the mineral waters that he climbed the steep ridges, crossed the

turbulent streams and put up with the other inconveniences of the long

march much better than might have been the case. During the entire

journey he sang Indian love songs, strains which had not passed his lips

in thirty years.

His followers, gossiping among themselves, declared that he looked

better already. Perhaps he would not have to bathe in the fountain after

all. He might resume his youth, because he willed it so. Indians were

strong believers in the power of mind over matter.

When he reached the vicinity of the cave he was fortunate enough to meet

the aged Indian who was its guardian. Though his hair was snow white and

he said he was so old that he had lost count of the years, Gamunk’s

carriage was erect, his complexion smooth, his eyes clear and kindly. He

walked along with a swinging stride, very different from Wisamek’s

mental picture of him. The would-be bridegroom, who handed him the

talisman, was quick to impart his mission to his new-found friend.

“It is true,” he replied, “after a day and a night’s immersion in the

cave’s water you will emerge with all the appearance of youth. There is

absolutely no doubt of it. Thousands have been here before.”

With these reassuring words Wisamek again leaped for joy, gyrating like

a young brave at a cantico.

The party, accompanied by the old guardian, quickly arrived at the

cave’s main opening, where beneath them lay stretched the calm,

mirror-like expanse of greenish water.

“Can I begin the bath now?” asked the chief, impatiently. “I am anxious

to throw off the odious appearance of age.” “replied the old watchman,

who took him by the hand, leading to the ledge where it was highest

above the water. “Jump off here,” he said quietly. Wisamek, who had been

a great swimmer in his youth and was absolutely fearless of the water,

replied that he would do so. “But remember you must remain in the water

without food until this hour tomorrow,” said the guardian.

As he leaped into the watery depths the chief shouted he would remain

twice as long if he could be young again. Wisamek was true to his

instructions; there was too much at stake; he dared not falter.

The next morning his henchmen were at the cave’s mouth to greet his

reappearance. They were startled to see, climbing up the ledge with

alacrity, a tall and handsome man, as young looking as themselves. There

was a smile on the full, red lips, a twinkle in the clear eye of the

re-made warrior as he stood among them, physically a prince among men.

The homeward journey was made with rapidity. Wisamek traveled so fast

that he played out his henchmen who were half his age.

Annapalpeteu, who was seated in front of her parents’ cabin weaving a

garment, noticed a youth of great physical beauty approaching, at the

head of Chief Wisamek’s clansmen. She wondered who he could be, as he

wore Wisamek’s headdress of feathers of the osprey or “sea eagle.” When

he drew near he saluted her, and, not giving her time to answer,

joyfully shouted: “Don’t you recognize me? I am your good friend

Wisamek, come back to win your love, after a refreshing journey through

the distant forests.”

Annapalpeteu, who was a sensible enough girl to have admired the great

warrior for his prowess, even though she had never thought of him

seriously as a lover, was now instantly smitten by his engaging

appearance. The henchmen withdrew, leaving the couple together. They

made marked progress with their romance; words of love were mentioned

before they parted.

It was not long before the betrothal was announced, followed shortly by

the wedding festival. At the nuptials the bridegroom’s appearance was

the marvel of all present. It was hinted that he had been somewhere and

renewed his youth, but as the henchmen were sworn to secrecy, how it had

been done was not revealed.

The young bride seemed radiantly happy. She had every reason to be; the

other Indian maids whispered from lip to lip, was she not marrying the

greatest warrior and hunter of his generation, the handsomest man in a

hundred tribes? Secretly envied by all of her age, possessing her

stalwart prize, the fair bride started on her honeymoon, showered with

acorns and good wishes.

So far as is known the wedding trip passed off blissfully. There were

smiles on the bright faces of both bride and groom when they returned to

their spacious new lodge-house, which the tribe had erected for them in

their absence, by the banks of the sparkling Bohundy. But the course of

life did not run smoothly for the pair. Though outwardly Wisamek was the

handsomest and most youthful-looking of men, he was still an old man at

heart. Annapalpeteu was as pleasure-loving as she was beautiful. She

wanted to dance and sing and mingle with youthful company. She wanted

her good time in life; her joy of living was at its height, her sense of

enjoyment at its zenith.

[Illustration: BLACK BEAR, KILLED IN SUGAR VALLEY]

On the other hand, Wisamek hated all forms of gaieties or youthful

amusements. He wanted to sit about the lodge-house in the sun, telling

of his warlike triumphs of other days; he wanted to sleep much, he hated

noise and excitement.

Annapalpeteu, dutiful wife that she was, tried to please him, but in due

course of time both husband and wife realized that romance was dying,

that they were drifting apart. Wisamek was even more aware of it than

his wife. It worried him greatly, his dreams were of an unhappy nature.

He pictured the end of the trail, with his wife, Annapalpeteu, in love

with some one else of her own age, some one whose heart was young. He

had spells of moodiness and irritability, as well as several serious

quarrels with his wife, whom he accused of caring less for him than

formerly.

The relations became so strained that life in the commodious lodge-house

was unbearable. At length it occurred to Wisamek that he might again

visit the fountain of youth, this time to revive his soul. Perhaps he

had not remained in the water long enough to touch the spirit within. He

informed his spouse that he was going on a long journey on invitation of

the war chief of a distant tribe, and that she must accompany him. He

was insanely jealous of her now. He could not bear her out of his sight.

He imagined she had a young lover back of every tree, though she was

honor personified.

The trip was made pleasantly enough, as the husband was in better

spirits than usual. Annapalpeteu enjoyed the waters of the warm springs,

would liked to have tarried. He thought he saw the surcease of his

troubles ahead of him!

When he reached the Beaver Dam Meadows, at the foot of Egg Hill, near

the site of the present town of Spring Mills, beautiful level flats

which in those days were a favorite camping ground for the red men, he

requested the beautiful Annapalpeteu to remain there for a few days,

that he was going through a hostile country, he would not jeopardize her

safety. He was going on an important mission that would make her love

him more than ever when he returned. In reality no unfriendly Indians

were about, but in order to give a look of truth to his story he left

her in charge of a strong bodyguard.

Wisamek’s conduct of late had been so peculiar that his wife was not

sorry to see her lord and master go away. Handsome though he was, a

spiritual barrier had arisen between them which grew more insurmountable

with each succeeding day. Yet, on this occasion, when he was out of her

sight, she felt apprehensive about him. She had a strange presentiment

that she would never see him again.

Wisamek was filled with hopes; his spirits had never been higher, as he

strode along, followed by his henchmen. When he reached the top of the

path which led to the mouth of the enchanted cave he met old Gamunk, the

guardian. The aged redman expressed surprise at seeing him again.

“I have come for a very peculiar reason,” he said. “The bath which I

took last year outwardly made me young, but only _outwardly_. Within I

am as withered and joyless as a centenarian. I want to bathe once more,

to try to revive the old light in my soul.”

Gamunk shook his head. “You may succeed; I hope you will. I never heard

of any one daring to take a second bath in these waters. The tradition

of the hereditary guardians, of whom I am the hundredth in direct

succession, has it that it would be fatal to take a second immersion,

especially to remain in the water for twenty-four hours.”

Then he asked Wisamek for the talisman which gave him the right to

bathe. Wisamek drew himself up proudly, and, with a gesture of his hand

indicating disdain, said he had no talisman, that he would bathe anyhow.

He advanced to the brink and plunged in. Until the same hour the next

day he floated and paddled about the greenish depths, filled with

expectancy. For some reason it seemed longer this time than on the

previous visit.

At last, by the light which filtered down through the treetops at the

cave’s mouth, he knew that the hour had come for him to emerge–emerge as

Chief Wisamek–young in heart as in body. Proudly he grasped the rocky

ledge and swung himself out on dry land. He arose to his feet. His head

seemed very light and giddy. He fancied he saw visions of his old

conquests, old loves. There was the sound of music in the air. Was it

the martial drums, played to welcome the conqueror, or the wind surging

through the feathery tops of the maple and linden trees at the mouth of

the cave? He started to climb the steep path. He seemed to be treading

the air. Was it the buoyant steps of youth come again? He seemed to

float rather than walk. The sunlight blinded his eyes. Suddenly he had a

flash of normal consciousness. He dropped to the ground with a thud like

an old pine falling. Then all was blackness, silence. Jaybirds

complaining in the treetops alone broke the stillness.

His bodyguards, who were waiting for him at old Gamunk’s lodge-house,

close to where the hotel now stands, became impatient at his

non-appearance, as the hour was past. Accompanied by the venerable

watchman they started down the path. To their horror they saw the dead

body of a hideous, wrinkled old man, all skin and bones, like a

desiccated mummy, lying stretched out across it, a few steps from the

entrance to the cave. When they approached closely they noticed several

familiar tattoo marks on the forehead, which identified the body as that

of their late master, Wisamek.

Frightened lest they would be accused of his murder, and shocked by his

altered appearance, the bodyguards turned and took to their heels. They

disappeared in the trackless forests to the north and were never seen

again.

Old Gamunk, out of pity for the vain-glorious chieftain, buried the

remains by the path near where he fell. As for poor Annapalpeteu, the

beautiful, she waited patiently for many days by the Beaver Dam, but her

waiting was in vain. At length, concluding that he had been slain in

battle in some valorous encounter, she started for her old home on the

Bohundy.

It is related that on the way she met and married a warrior of her own

age, living happily ever afterwards in a comfortable cabin somewhere in

the majestic Bower Mountains. In him she found the loving response, the

congeniality of pleasures which had been denied the dried, feeble soul

of Wisamek, who bathed too often in the fountain of youth.

[Illustration]

XXIII

_Compensations_

It seemed that Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf were born to be

engaged in rivalry, although judging by their antecedents, the former

was in a class beyond, McMeans being well-born, of old Scotch-Irish

stock, a valuable asset on the Allegheny. Wellendorf, of Pennsylvania

Dutch origin, of people coming from one of the eastern counties, was

consequently rated much lower socially, had much more to overcome in the

way of life’s obstacles. The boys were almost of school age; Wellendorf,

if anything, was a month or two older. In school in Hickory Valley

neither was a brilliant scholar, but they were evenly matched, and

although not aspiring to lead their classes, felt a keen rivalry between

one another.

When school days were over, and they took to rafting as the most obvious

occupation in the locality, their rivalries as to who could run a fleet

quickest to Pittsburg, and come back for another, was the talk of the

river. In love it was not different, and despite the talk in McMean’s

family that he should marry Anna McNamor, daughter of his father’s

life-long friend, Tabor McNamor, the girl showed an open preference for

Oscar Wellendorf.

The old Scotch-Irish families were, as the London Times said in

commenting on some of the characteristics of the late Senator Quay

(inherited from his mother, born Stanley) “clannish to degree,” and

Anna’s “people” were equally anxious that she marry one of her own

stock, and not ally herself with the despised and socially insignificant

“Dutch”. Old Grandmother McClinton called attention to the fact that the

headstrong beauty was not without a strain of “Dutch” blood herself, for

her great, great grandmother had been none other than the winsome

Madelon Ury, a Swiss-Huguenot girl of Berks County, who, when surprised

in the field hoeing corn by a blood-thirsty Indian, had dropped her hoe

and taken to her heels. She ran so fast over the soft ground that she

would have escaped her moccasined pursuer had she not taken time to

cross a stone fence. This gave the red man the chance to throw his

tomahawk, striking her in the neck, and she fell face downward over the

wall. Just as her foe was overtaking her, Martin McClinton, a sword

maker from Lancaster, who was passing along the Shamokin trail en route

to deliver a sabre to Colonel Conrad Weiser, at Heidelberg, rushed to

her rescue and shot down the Indian, so that he fell dead across his

fair victim.

McClinton extricated the tomahawk from her neck, bound up the wound with

his own neckerchief and carried her to her parent’s home, near the

Falling Springs. He remained until the wound healed, when he married

her. Later the pair migrated west of the Alleghenies.

Madelon McClinton was very dark, with an oval face and aquiline

features, possibly having had a strain of Pennsylvania Jewish blood to

account for her brunette type of beauty. She always wore a red scarf

wrapped about her neck, being proud and sensitive of the ugly long white

scar left by the Indian’s weapon.

This ancestress, so Grandmother McClinton thought, was responsible for

Anna’s affinity for the rather prosaic Dutchman Wellendorf. Although the

girl was open in her preference for Oscar, she did not make a decision

as to matrimony for some time. When Wellendorf was absent, she was nicer

to McMeans than anyone else. However, if Oscar appeared on the scene,

she had eyes and ears for no other.

On one occasion when the two young men started down the river on their

rafts, proudly standing at the steering oars in the rear, for the

Allegheny pilots rode at the back of the rafts, whereas those on the

Susquehanna were always at the front. Anna was at the water’s edge,

under a huge buttonwood tree–or, as Wellendorf called it in the breezy

vernacular of the Pennsylvania Dutch, a “wasserpitcher”–and waved a red

kerchief impartially at both.

McMean’s raft on this trip was of “pig iron”, that is unpeeled hemlock

logs, as heavy as lead, and became submerged when he had only gotten as

far as the mouth of French Creek. He had to run ashore to try and devise

ways and means to save it from sinking altogether, while Wellendorf

floated along serenely on his raft of white pine, and was to Pittsburg

and back home before McMeans ever reached the “Smoky City.” “John C.

French tells us, "White Pine (pinus strobus) was King, and his dusky

Queen was a beautiful Wild Cherry, lovely as Queen Alliquippa of the

redmen. Rafting lumber from Warren County began about 1800, and it

reached its maximum in the decade, 1830 to 1840. The early history of

Warren County abounds in very interesting incidents, along the larger

Allegheny River, from rafts of pine lumber assembled to couple up for

Pittsburg fleets.

"After the purchase of Louisiana, in 1804, the hardy lumbermen decided

to extend their markets for pine beyond Pittsburg, Wheeling, Cincinnati

and Louisville–to go, in fact, to New Orleans with pine and cherry

lumber. So large boats were built in the winter of 1805 and 1806 at many

mills. Seasoned lumber of the best quality was loaded into the flat

boats and they untied on April 1, 1806, for the run of two thousand

miles, bordered by forests to the river’s edge.

"It was in defiance to ‘All Fools’ Day’, but they went through and sold

both lumber and boats. For clear pine lumber, $40.00 was the price per

one thousand feet received at New Orleans–just double the Pittsburg

price at that date. For three years thereafter the mills of Warren

County sent boats to New Orleans loaded with lumber, and the men

returned on foot. Joseph Mead, Abraham Davis and John Watt took boats

through in 1807, coming back via Philadelphia on coastal sailing ships.

"The pilots and men returned by river boats or on foot, as they best

could. The markets along the Ohio from Pittsburg to St. Louis soon took

all the lumber from the Allegheny mills, and the longer trips were

gladly discontinued.

"It was in 1850 that there came the first lumber famine at Pittsburg.

Owing to the low price of lumber and an unfavorable winter for the

forest work, few rafts of lumber and board timber went down the

Allegheny on the spring freshets, but the November floods brought one

hundred rafts that sold for more favorable prices than had previously

prevailed. Clear pine lumber sold readily for $18.00 and common pine

lumber for $9.00 per one thousand feet.

"The renown of these prices stimulated lumbering on the Allegheny

headwaters and the larger creeks. So the demand for lumber was supplied

and the railroads soon began to bring lumber from many sawmills. The

board timber was hewed on four sides, so there were only five inches of

wane on each of the four corners. These rafts of round-square timber

were sold by square feet to Pittsburg sawmills.

"Rafts of pine boards at headwater mills were made up of platforms, 16

feet square and from 18 to 25 courses thick, 9 pins or “grubs” holding

boards in place as rafted. Four or five platforms were coupled in tandem

with 3 feet “cribs” at each joint, making an elastic piece 73 feet or 92

feet long for a 4 or 5 platform piece as the case might be, 10 feet

wide.

"At Larrabee or at Millgrove four of these pieces were coupled into a

Warren fleet, 32 feet wide, 149 feet or 187 feet long.

"Four Warren pieces or fleets were put together at Warren to make up a

Pittsburg fleet. At Pittsburg four or more Pittsburg fleets were coupled

to make an Ohio River fleet. Some became very large, often covering

nearly two acres of surface, containing about 1,500,000 feet of lumber

at Cincinnatti or at Louisville. They each had a hut for sheltering the

men and for cooking their food. They often ran all night on the Ohio. To

find where the shore was on a very dark night, the men would throw

potatoes, judging from the sound how far away the river bank was and of

their safe or dangerous position. These men were of rugged bodies and of

daring minds.

"A small piece, in headwaters and creeks, had an oar or sweep at each

end of the piece to steer the raft with. Each oar usually had two men to

pull it. An oar-stem was from 28 to 35 feet long, 8″ by 8″, and tapered

to 4″ by 4″, shaved to round hand-hold near the end toward center of

raft. The oar blade was 12′, 14′ or 16′ long, and 18″ to 20″ wide, a

pine plank, 4″ thick at the oar-stem socket, and 1″ thick at the

out-end, tapered its whole length.

"There were other sizes of stem and blade, but the above indicates the

power that guided a raft of lumber along the flood-tides, crooked

streams, and over a dozen mill dams to the broader river below.

"From the Allegheny boats or scows, 30 feet long and 11 feet wide,

carried loads of baled hay, butter, eggs and other farm produce to the

oil fields of Venango County in the ’60’s, sold there and took oil in

barrels to the refinery at Pittsburg. Then sold the scows to carry coal

or goods down the Ohio.

"Mr. Westerman built five boats at Roulette about 1870, 40 feet long and

12 feet wide, loaded them with lumber and shingles and started for

Pittsburg, but the boats were too long for the dams and broke up at

Burtville, the first dam.

"Much of the pine timber of the west half of Potter county was cut in

sawlogs and sent to mills at Millgrove and Weston’s in log drives down

the river and Oswayo Creek into the State of New York. The lumber was

shipped via the Genesee Valley Canal to Albany and New York City and

other points on the Hudson River.

"The first steamboat to steam up the river from Warren was in 1830. It

was built by Archibald Tanner, Warren’s first merchant, and David Dick

and others of Meadville. It was built in Pittsburg; the steamer was

called Allegheny. It went to Olean, returned and went out of commission.

"The late Major D. W. C. James furnished the incident of the Allegheny

voyage. A story was told by James Follett regarding the trip of the

Allegheny from Warren, which illustrates the lack of speed of steamboats

on the river at that early day.

"While the steamer was passing the Indian reservation, some twenty odd

miles above Warren, the famous chief, Cornplanter, paddled his canoe out

to the vessel and actually paddled his small craft up stream and around

the Allegheny, the old chief giving a vigorous war hoop as he

accomplished the proud feat.

"Chief Cornplanter, alias John O’Bail, first took his young men to

Clarion County, about 1795, to learn the method of lumbering, and in

1796 he built a sawmill on Jenneseedaga Creek, later named Cornplanter

Run, in Warren County, and rafted lumber down the Allegheny to Pittsburg

for many years.

"Many tributary streams, such as Clarion, Tionesta and Oswayo,

contributed rafts each year to make up the fleets that descended the

Allegheny River from 1796 to 1874, our rafting days.

"We must mention the Hotel Boyer, on the Duquesne Way, on the Allegheny

River bank, near the “Point” at Pittsburg, where the raftsmen and the

lumbermen foregathered, traded, ate and drank together, after each trip.

Indians were good pilots, but must be kept sober on the rafts.

‘Bootleggers’ along the river often ran boats out to the rafts and

relieved the droughty crews by dispensing bottles of ‘red-eye’ from the

long tops of the boots they wore."

Of the big trees in the Allegheny country, Dr. J. T. Rothrock, “Father

of Pennsylvania Forestry,” has said: "About 1860, when I was with a crew

surveying the line for the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, we had some

difficulty in getting away from a certain location. A preliminary line

came in conflict with an enormous original white pine tree, and the

transitman shouted ‘cut down that tree’. After it was felled another

nearby was found to be in the way, and was ordered out. The stump of the

first tree, four feet above the ground measured 6 feet, 3 inches in

diameter; of the second tree a trifle over 6 feet. Such was the

wastefulness of the day."

As soon as Oscar returned he saw Anna forthwith. She was in a

particularly pliant mood, and in response to his direct question if she

would marry him, replied she would, and the couple boarded the train at

Warren for Buffalo City, where they were married.

When Andrew McMeans came back from his protracted expedition they were

already home from their honeymoon, and residing with the elder McNamors

in the big brick house, overlooking the Bend. Andrew McMeans felt his

jilting deeply; it was the first time that any real disappointment had

come in the twenty-one years of his life; he had imagined that, despite

her predilection for Wellendorf, he would yet win her, and his pride as

well as his heart was lacerated. Outwardly he revealed little, but

inwardly a peculiar melancholy such as he had never felt before overcame

him, and like Lincoln, after the death of Ann Rutledge, he realized that

he must either “die or get better.”

Anna seemed happy enough in her new life, and liked to flaunt her

devotion to Oscar whenever her rejected lover was about. Ordinarily this

might have wounded him still deeper, but he was absorbing fresh

anxieties, reading Herbert Spencer, whose abominable agnosticism soon

wrecked his faith, and bereft of love and the solace of immortality, he

became the most wretched of men.

It was five years after Anna’s elopement, and when she was twenty-one

years old, that one morning she started for Endeavor to get the mail and

make some purchases at the country store. It was a cold, raw day in the

early spring, and the wild pigeons were flying. The beechwoods on both

sides of the road were alive with gunners, old and young. Some one fired

a shot which hurtled close to the nose of the old roan family horse, a

track horse in his day, and he took the bit in his teeth and ran away

madly, with the buggy careening after him. Anna, standing up in the

vehicle, was sawing on the lines until he crashed into a big ash tree

and fractured the poor girl’s skull. She was picked up by some of the

hunters and carried home unconscious the next thing was to get the news

to her husband. Oscar at that time had just finished a raft on West

Hickory Creek, while his old time rival, McMeans, was completing one on

East Hickory, which stream flowed into “The Beautiful River”, almost

directly opposite to the West Hickory Run.

About the moment that Anna received her cruel death stroke, the two

rafts were being launched simultaneously, with much cheering on both

banks, for partisanship ran high among dwellers on either side of the

river. Members of the family hurried to the river side to watch for the

Wellendorf raft, to “head him off” before it was too late. It was

several hours after the accident when the two rival rafts, with the

stalwart young pilots at the sterns, swept around the Bend, traveling

“nip and tuck”. It promised to be an evenly matched race, barring

accidents, clear to Pittsburg. The skippers of the contending yachts for

the American Cup could not have been more enthused for their races than

were Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf.

In front of the McNamor homestead several women were to be seen running

up and down the grassy sward, frantically waving red and green shawls.

What could they mean? They were so vehement that Oscar divined something

was wrong, and steered ashore, followed by McMeans, who, noting the

absence of Anna from the signaling party, feared that a mishap had

befallen her.

Both young men jumped ashore almost simultaneously, leaving their rafts

to their helpers. The worst had happened–Anna was in the house with a

fractured skull, and the doctors said she could not live the night. If

anything, McMeans turned the paler of the two. The men said little as

they followed the women up the boardwalk to the house.

That night McMeans, who asked to be allowed to remain until the outcome

of the case, for the river had lost its attractions, was sitting in the

kitchen with Grandmother McClinton. The raw air had blown itself into a

gale after sundown, and during the night the fierce wind beat about the

eaves and corners of the house like an avenging fury. The old tall

clock, made years before by John Vanderslice, of Reading, on top of

which was a stuffed Colishay, or gray fox, with an uncommonly fine

brush, was striking twelve. Amid the storm a wailing voice joined in the

din, incessantly, so that there was no mistaking it, the Warning of the

McClintons.

[Illustration: RUINS OF FORT BARNET. BUILT IN 1740. (Photograph Taken

1895.)]

The old grandmother watched McMeans’ face until she saw that he

understood. Then she nodded to him. "It is strange how that thing has

followed the McClinton family for hundreds of years. In Scotland it was

their ‘Caointeach’, in Ireland their ‘Banshee’, in Pennsylvania their

‘Token’ or ‘Warning’. It never fails."

As McMeans listened to the terrible shrieks of anguish, which sometimes

drowned the storm, he shivered with pity for the lost soul out there in

the cold, giving the death message, so melancholy and sad, and perhaps

unwillingly. Anna lay upstairs in her room, facing the river, or

windward side of the house, and the Warning was evidently somewhere

below her window, where the water in waves like the sea, was

over-running the banks.

On a kitchen chair still lay a red Paisley shawl that had been used to

signal to Wellendorf earlier in the day. It seemed ample and warm.

Picking it up, McMeans went to the kitchen door, which he opened with

some effort in the force of the gale, and, walking around the house,

laid it on one of the benches at the front door, saying, “Put on this

shawl, and come around to the leeward side of the house.”

When he returned, he said to Grandmother McClinton, “That Token’s voice

touched me somehow tonight. Something tells me she hated her task, is

cold and miserable. I left the shawl on the front porch and told her to

come out of the wind.”

After that they both noticed that the unhappy wailings ceased, there was

nothing that vied with the storm.

“Perhaps you have laid her,” said Grandmother McClinton. “Anna may now

pull through.”

But these words were barely out of her mouth, when Oscar Wellendorf,

pale as a ghost, appeared in the kitchen to say that Anna had just

passed away. Andrew felt her death keenly, but he was also satisfied

that perhaps he had by an act of kindness, removed the Warning of the

McClintons. He was more convinced when a year later Anna’s father joined

the majority, then her mother, with no visits from the mournful-voiced

Warning.

Five years more rolled around, and Andrew McMeans, still unmarried, and

cherishing steadfastly the memory of his beloved Anna, embarked his

fleet for Pittsburg. It was a morning in the early spring, the air was

soft and warm, and the shad flies were flitting about. He arrived in

safety, but was some time collecting his money, as he was dealing with a

scamp, and meanwhile put up at a boarding house on the river front, near

the Hotel Boyer. The afternoon after his arrival he was sitting on the

porch of his lodgings, gazing out at the rushing, swirling river, which

ran bank full, on a bench similar in all ways to the one on which he had

laid the shawl to warm the freezing back of the Warning of the

McClintons. Somehow he fell to thinking about that ghost, and its

disappearance, and of Anna McNamor; how much he would give if only he

could see her again.

He recalled how the old grandmother had told him that some families

married out of the Warning, while others married into it, much as he had

heard was the case with the Assembly Ball in Philadelphia. The McClinton

Warning had evidently clung to the female line, as it had been very much

in evidence when Anna McNamor’s time had come.

Something made him look up the street. Coming slowly towards him was a

slender school girl, with a little green hat perched on her head, the

living image of Anna, dead for five years! He almost fell off the bench

in surprise, to note the same slim oval face, the aquiline features, and

hazel eyes that he had known and loved so well. She paused for a moment

in front of the house next door, holding her school books in her arms,

while she looked out at the raging river. The spring breezes blowing her

short skirts showed her slim legs encased in light brown worsted

stockings. Then she went indoors.

It did not take him long to seek his landlady and learn that she was a

flesh and blood, sure enough girl, Anna Harbord by name, whose mother,

widow of Mike Harbord, an old time riverman, also ran a boarding house.

It was not many days before some errand brought the girl to the house

where McMeans was stopping, and matters fortuitously adjusted themselves

so that he met her.

He was struck by her similarity to the dead girl, even the tones of her

voice, and it seemed strange she should have such a counterpart. She

appeared friendly disposed towards him from the start, and it was like a

compensation sent after all his years of disappointment and loneliness.

She was then sixteen years old, and must have been eleven when her

“double” passed away.

As their acquaintance grew into love, and all seemed so serene, as if it

was to be, Andrew McMeans gradually regaining his faith, human and

divine, felt he owed his happiness to the Warning of the McClintons’,

whose misery he had appeased by taking the cloak out to her, while

engaged in her disagreeable duty of fortelling the coming dissolution of

the unfortunate girl.

McMeans and Anna Harbord married. They decided to remain in Pittsburg,

and he became in a few years a successful and respected business man.

If few persons had been kind to ghosts, certainly he had profited by his

interest in the welfare of the “Warning of the McClintons”. The girl’s

mother informed him that in the early spring, about five years before,

her daughter had been seized with a cataleptic attack, had laid for days

unconscious, and when she came out of it, her entire personality, even

the color of her eyes, had changed. Could it have been, the young

husband often thought, as he sat gazing at his bride with undisguised

admiration, some act of the grateful “Warning,” in sending Anna

McNamor’s soul to enter the body of this girl in Pittsburg, and

reserving her for him, safe and sound from Wellendorf and all harm,

until his travels brought her across his path! Human personality, he

reasoned, is merely a means to an end. The unfinished life of Anna

McNamor could not go on, like a flower unfolding, until her fragrance

had been spent on the one who needed it most. Then he would shudder at

the idea that if the school girl, who stopped to look at the flooded

river, had started on again, passing him by, never to see her again. He

would feel that he had been dreaming perhaps, until, touching his wife’s

soft creamy cheeks, would realize that she was actually there, and his.

Through her his soul took on new light, and from a vigorous young

woodsman, he was slowly but surely passing into an intellectual

existence. He had been strangely favored by the mainsprings of destiny,

and why should he not give the world all that was best in him. Life,

ruthless though it seems, has always compensations, and if we live

rightly and truly, the debt will be owing us, whereas most of us through

mistakes and misdeeds, have a great volume of retribution coming in an

inevitable sequence.

XXIV

_A Misunderstanding_

It was the night before Christmas in the little mountain church near

Wolfe’s Store. The small, low-roofed, raftered chapel was illumined as

brightly as coal oil lamps in the early stage of their development could

do it; a hemlock tree, decked out with candles and tinsel stood to one

side of the altar, an almost red-hot ten-plate stove on the other, while

the chancel and rafters were twined and garlanded with ground pine and

ilex, or winter berries. In one of the rear pews sat a very good looking

young couple, a former school teacher revisiting the valley, and his

favorite pupil. Lambert Girtin and Elsie Vanneman were their names.

The young man, who was a veteran of the Civil War, possessed the right

to wear the Congressional medal, and while teaching at the little red

school house on the pike near the road leading to Gramley’s Gap, had

noticed and admired the fair Elsie, so different from the rest of his

flock. She was the daughter of a prosperous lumberman, a jobber in

hardwoods, and her mother was above the average in intelligence and

breeding, yet Elsie in all ways transcended even her parents.

She had seemed like a mere child when he left her at the close of the

term the previous Christmas, but he could not evict her image from his

soul. It was mainly to see her, though he would have admitted this to no

one, that induced him to revisit the remote valley during the following

holiday season. The long drive in the stage through drifted roads had

seemed nothing to him, he was so elated at the thought of reviving old

memories at the sight of this most beloved of pupils.

In order not to arouse any one’s suspicions, he did no more than to

inquire how she was at the general store and boarding house where he

stopped.

“You would never know her,” exclaimed old Mother Wolfe, the landlady.

“Why, she’s a regular young lady, grown a head taller,” making a gesture

with her hand to denote her increased stature.

On Christmas Eve there was to be the usual entertainment at the Union

Church, and Lambert Girtin posted himself outside the entrance to wait

for the object of his dreams. The snow was drifted deep, and it was

bitterly cold, yet social events were so rare in the mountains that

almost every one braved the icy blasts to be present. It was not long

before he was rewarded by a sight of Elsie Vanneman. It _was_ remarkable

how tall she’d grown! As he expressed it to himself, “An opening bud

became a rose full-blown” in one short year!

She of course recognized him, and greeted him warmly, and they entered

the church together. Inside by the lamplight he had a better chance to

study her appearance more in detail than by the cold starlight on the

church steps. She had grown until she was above the middle height, yet

had literally taken her figure and her grace with her. She was slender,

yet shapely, dainty and graceful in the extreme. Her violet eyes were

even more deeply pensive than of yore, her cheeks were pink and white,

her lips red and slightly full. Her hair was a golden or coppery brown,

and shone like those precious metals in the reflected light of the lamps

and the stove; the slight upward turn of her nose still remained.

How demure, earnest and sincere she was! In the intervening year he had

never seen her like in Bellefonte, Altoona or Pittsburg. She seemed to

be happy to be with him again, minus the restraint existing between a

pupil and teacher. Instinctively their fingers touched, and they held

hands during most of the evening.

Towards the end of the sermon, which was long and loud, and gave the

young couple plenty of opportunity to advance their love making

unnoticed, Girtin whispered to her: “Have you an escort home, dear

Elsie?”

The answer was a hesitating “Yes.”

The young man felt his heart give a jolt, then almost stop throbbing,

and an instant hatred of some unknown rival made his blood boil

furiously. How could she act that way? She had, even as his pupil, been

indifferent to all of the opposite sex except him, and during the period

of their separation her sprightly letters had borne evidence of tender

sentiments, to the utter exclusion of all others. Had he not believed in

her, he would not have taken that long journey back into the mountains,

that many might have been glad to quit for good. Her beauty and her

grace had haunted him, and he had determined to wed her, until this sign

of duplicity had been sprung on him. Of course she did not know he was

coming, and had made the fatal arrangements before; yet, if she cared

for him as he did for her, she would not be making engagements with the

boys, especially at her tender age.

He tried to console himself by noticing a shade of regret flit over her

blushing face after she said the fateful words, but until the close of

services he was ill at ease and scarcely opened his mouth. At the

benediction he managed to stammer “Good evening,” and was out of the

church in the frosty starlight night before any one else.

With long strides he walked up the snowy road ahead of the crowd who had

followed him. The sky was very clear, and the North Star, “The Three

Kings,” or Jacob’s Rake, Job’s Coffin, and other familiar

constellations, were glimmering on the drifted snow. Instead of

observing the stars, had he looked back he would have seen that the

“escort” she referred to was none other than a girl friend, Katie Moyer,

and both, Elsie in particular, would have been only too happy to have a

sturdy male companion to see them through the snow banks.

As a result of his disappearance, Elsie was as unhappy and silent as

Girtin had been, as she floundered about in the drifts. Despite her

gentle, sunny nature, she was decidedly out of sorts when she reached

home at the big white house near the Salt Spring. She gave monosyllabic

answers to her parents in response to their queries as to how she had

enjoyed the long-looked for Christmas entertainment. She did not sleep

at all that night, but tossed about the bed, keeping her friend awake,

and on Christmas Day was in a rebellious mood. Her mother reminded her

how ungrateful she was to be so tearful and sullen in the face of so

many blessings and gifts.

There was no stage or sleigh out of the valley on Christmas Day, else

Girtin would have departed. He moped about all day, telling those who

asked the matter that he was ill. Elsie, knowing that he was still in

the valley, hoped up to bedtime that he would at least come to pay her a

brief Christmas call, but supper over, and no signs of him, she was

uncivil to her mother to such a degree that her friend openly said that

she was ashamed of her.

Though Katie and she were rooming together, it did not deter her mother,

goaded by the remarks of the younger children to visit her room while

they were undressing, saying “that she deserved a good dose of the gad,”

and, ordering her to lay face downward on the bed, administered a good,

old-fashioned spanking with the flax-paddle. After this humiliating

chastisement in the presence of her friend, the unhappy girl cried and

sobbed until morning.

It was a wretched ending for what might have been a memorable Christmas

for Lambert Girtin and Elsie Vanneman.

The next morning the young man managed to hire a cutter and was driven

to Bellefonte, leaving the valley with deep regrets. Through friends in

the valley he learned afterwards that Elsie had gone as a missionary to

China.

Life ran smoothly in some ways for Lambert Girtin, for he became

uniformly successful as a business man. The oil excitement was at its

height, and he was sent by a large general supply house in Pittsburg to

open a store in Pithole City, “the Magic City,” to the success of which

he contributed so much that he was given an interest in the concern.

At heart he was not happy. He could never focus his attentions on any

woman for long, as in the background he always saw the slender form, the

blushing face, the pansy-like eyes and the copper-brown, wavy hair of

his mountain sweetheart, Elsie Vanneman. Her loveliness haunted him, and

all others paled beside her. He was in easy circumstances to marry;

friends less opulent were taking wives and building showy homes with

Mansard roofs, along the outskirts of the muddy main thoroughfare of

Pithole City, where landscape gardening often consisted of charred,

blackened pine stumps and abandoned oil derricks.

Sometimes, in his spiritual loneliness, he betook himself to strange

companions. One of these was a Chinese laundryman, a prototype of Bret

Harte’s then popular “Heathen Chinee,” who seemed to be a learned

individual, despite his odd appearance. Girtin, who had read of the

exploits of the Fox sisters and other exponents of early spiritualism,

was unprepared for the learning and insight possessed by this

undistinguished Celestial.

Drawn to him at first because he could possibly tell about conditions in

China, where Elsie was supposed to be, he became gradually more and more

absorbed by the laundryman’s philosophic speculations. The fellow

confided at length that he was married, and had five children at

Tien-Tsin, to whom he was deeply attached. He would have died of a

broken heart to be so far away from them but for the power he had

developed by concentrating on the image of his native mountains, which

yearning was reciprocated, and at night he claimed that his spirit was

drawn out of his body and “hopped” half the span of the globe to the

side of his loved ones. There must be something after all in the old

Scotch quotation, “Oh, for my strength, once more to see the hills.”

Girtin expressed a strong desire to be initiated into these compelling

mysteries. In order to cultivate his psychic sense, the Chinaman induced

him to smoke opium, which, while repellent to Girtin, he undertook in

order to reach his desired object. If he had been a man of any mental

equilibrium, he would have secured a leave of absence from business and

gone to China and claimed the fair Elsie, if she was still unmarried. He

would not do that because he was still tortured by the memory of her

preferring another at the moment when his hopes had been highest, yet he

wanted to see her, hoping that he could do so without her knowing it.

The results attained were beyond his expectations. He quickly mastered

his soul and “hopped” to the interior of China. Elsie was there,

surrounded by her classes; at twenty-one more wondrously lovely and

beautiful than when he had parted from her that frosty night, with the

Dipper and Jacob’s Rake shining so clearly in the heavens.

Though there were many missionaries and foreign officials who would have

courted her, her dignity and quiet reserve were impenetrable. Was she so

because of the love for the youth who was to escort her home from church

that night, or did she cherish the memory of her whilom schoolmaster

admirer? These were the thoughts that annoyed him by day, the “hang

over” of his spiritual adventures at night.

The opium and the intense mental concentration were taking a lot out of

him. He became sallow and irritable, and neglected many business

opportunities. One of the head partners of the firm in Pittsburg was

going to Pithole City “to have it out with him,” as the mountain folks

would say. Before he could reach the scene word was telegraphed that

Lambert Girtin, frightfully altered in appearance, was found dead one

morning in a bunk back of the Charley Wah Laundry at Pithole.

He had no relatives in the town, and his sisters, who could not come on,

telegraphed to bury him in the new Mount Moriah Cemetery, now all

overgrown and abandoned, like Pithole itself! There could be no doubt as

to his death, as Bill Brewer, just coming into fame as the “Hick

Preacher,” officiated at the obsequies. So Lambert Girtin was quickly

forgotten in most all quarters. If he was remembered for a time, it was

in the remote valley in which he had taught school, and where news of

his early demise occasioned profound regret.

Years passed, and Elsie Vanneman, after giving some of the best years of

her life to missionary activities in various parts of China, resigned

her position, in consequence of a shattered nervous system, caused by

overwork during a great earthquake, where she ministered to thousands of

refugees, and started for home. Her parents had died while she was in

the “Celestial Kingdom,” but she had a number of brothers and sisters

who were glad to welcome her, and with whom she planned a round of

visits.

She was only thirty when she returned, a trifle paler and a few small

lines around her mouth, but otherwise a picture of saintliness and

loveliness. One of the first bits of news she heard on reaching the

valley was of the ignominious end of Lambert Girtin in a Chinese

laundryman’s shack–"a promising career cut short," all allowed.

It was shocking to Elsie, as she had dreamed of this young man nearly

every night from a certain period of her stay in China. She was on the

street during the great quake, and as the earth cracked and swallowed

countless victims, she fancied she saw a European, the counterpart of

Girtin, plunged into the deadly abyss. She had come home with the

intention of learning definite news of him, and if he was not the

earthquake victim, and still lived, perhaps to renew their old-time

interests.

She had been so upset by his failure to call, or even to write, after

the Christmas eve at the little country church, that she had never

communicated with him again. Her dreams had been most vividly realistic,

as if he had been really near to her in China, and she could not make

herself believe that he was dead in Pithole City, Pennsylvania.

Owing to this piece of bad news, she did not remain as long in the

valley as she had planned, and almost from the day of her arrival had

pined to be back in the Far East. The valley seemed dull, anyway;

saw-mills were making it as treeless as China; she hated to see Luther

Guisewhite destroy those giant original white pines, which reared their

black-topped spiral heads along the foot of the mountains on the winter

side; the wild pigeons no longer darkened the sky with their impressive

flights, the flying squirrels were being shot out in Fulmer’s Sink, near

her old home; her parents were gone–everything was different.

Unsettled and dissatisfied, especially after a visit to the girl who had

accompanied her home on the eventful Christmas Eve, now the mother of

eight handsome children, she decided to return to China. The vast herds

of buffaloes that had impeded the progress of her train on her first

journey westward were gone. The Indians who occasionally furnished a

touch of color to the prairie landscape, likewise had disappeared.

Civilization was spreading through the Great West.

She timed her arrival in San Francisco so as to be there shortly after

the arrival of a ship from China, so as to go back on its return

journey. She would have several days to wait in the City of the Golden

Gate but it was quaint and picturesque, the time would pass quickly.

One evening–she was not afraid, as she knew the language and customs of

the Celestials–she decided to take a stroll through the famous Chinese

Quarter. As she was walking along, her head down, her mind abstracted

and noticing little, some one touched her on the arm. Looking around, as

if to resent a familiarity, to her bewilderment she beheld her long-lost

friend, Lambert Girtin.

“Lambert Girtin!” she said, in amazed tones.

“Elsie Vanneman–it is surely you?” he replied.

“Of all people, after all these years! I had been hearing that you died

five years ago in the oil regions somewhere; what _are_ you doing?”

The ex-schoolmaster took hold of both of her hands, there in the

crowded, moving throngs of Chinatown, saying: “I came in from China

today, after what I thought was a hopeless search for you. Years ago,

after our separation, a Chinaman showed me how to visit China in my

dreams, and be close to you. It took a whole lot of mental

concentration, was pulling me down physically. I kept it up too long,

for one night I dreamed I was in a terrible earthquake. It was so vivid

that my physical as well as my spiritual being was translated to China,

and I found myself there penniless. But, search as I may, I could not

find you. If I died in the oil regions, it must have been another

physical self, shed as a snake does his skin, for the Lambert Girtin who

stands before you is fully alive, and resolved never to part from you

again.”

[Illustration:

JESSE LOGAN, PENNSYLVANIA INDIAN CHIEF

(Photograph Taken 1915 by P. C. Hockenberry)

]

Old memories came to Elsie Vanneman, conquering her fears, and her face

flushed as in schoolgirl days: "You speak of our ‘separation’–pray, tell

me more about it; why did you leave me so abruptly and run away that

Christmas Eve after meeting? I could never understand why you did not

even come to wish me a ‘Merry Christmas’ the next day. Why didn’t you

ever write me a line? What did I do to merit such neglect?"

“What did _you_ do?” replied Girtin, drawing her aside from the passing

stream of pig-tailed humanity into a shadowy doorway. “It doesn’t seem

very serious now, but it hurt me a whole lot at the time. You told me

you had an engagement with some one to see you in from church, and I was

angry and jealous, for I had been imagining that your thoughts had only

been of me, that you cared for no one else.” “replied the girl with

alacrity.

Girtin turned as pale as death; his sufferings, mental and physical, his

wanderings, physical and actual, his wasted years, all had been caused

by a misunderstanding. He was at a loss for words for some time, but he

held on to Elsie’s hands, looking into her beautiful, ethereal face, the

vari-colored light of a Chinese lantern shining down on her coppery-gold

hair.

“Do you care for me at all, _now_?” he said, at length.

“Yes, I think I do; I must, or I would not have came back all the way

from China to hunt _you_,” she answered.

“Then we have both suffered,” he said, sadly. “What shall we do now?”

“she said.

“That’s where I want to go,” he replied, “if I can ever live down that

dying story in Pithole City.” “said Elsie. "There was a case in our

valley of a soldier reported as killed at Gettysburg; they sent his body

home, began paying his widow a pension; she married a former sweetheart,

and then, worse than ‘Enoch Arden,’ he appeared as if from the grave. He

had no explanations to make, and our mountain people asked no questions,

all having faith in supernatural things. Neither will I ask any of you.

I have seen too much in the east to make me disbelieve anything, or that

we can die two or three times under stress of circumstances, shedding

our physical selves–to use your words–as snakes do their skins. I am

only happy I did not marry some one else, as I was tempted to do when I

imagined you were engulfed in the earthquake."

That night in Chinatown for once a misunderstanding ended happily.

XXV

_A Haunted House_

When Billy Cloyd prospered in the lumber and milling business, he

determined to erect a mansion overlooking the arrowy waters of the

Sinnemahoning that would reflect not only his success, but the social

status of his family as well. Accordingly Williamsport architects who

made a specialty of erecting houses for the wealthy lumbermen of that

community were commissioned to prepare plans for what was to be the

grandest private dwelling on the outposts of civilization, a structure

which would outdo the already famous club house built for the use of the

stockholders of the Philadelphia Land Company at Snow Shoe, or the

offices of the agents of the Queen of Spain at Reveltown and Scootac.

The result was a large, square house, along Colonial lines, with a

spacious doorway, above which was a transom of antique colored glass

brought all the way from the home of one of his ancestors at Old

Carlisle. Windows were numerous, commanding views up and down the

beautiful, billowy stream, then teeming with fish and aquatic bird life.

The surrounding mountains were covered with virgin pine forests, while

the great hemlocks, oaks and birches hung over the water’s edge. There

was a clearing in which the mansion stood, the chief feature of which

was an old-fashioned garden of carefully laid design, with plenty of

columbine, called by the mountain folks “church bells,” and eglantine,

with boxwoods from the “Quaker City,” purchased from the heirs of

“Eaglesfield.”

The dark forest came to the back of the garden, and stood black in the

gorge of Mill Creek near the projected flouring and fulling mills, to

the east of the mansion; the ever-busy saw-mill, the chief symbol of the

prosperity of Castlecloyd, as the domain was called, was situated near

the mouth of the creek. There was barely a distance of two hundred yards

from the sloping banks of the Sinnemahoning to where the forest and the

steep mountains began, consequently the mansion, mills, workshops,

stables and mill hands’ and woodsmen’s houses were all close together.

Along the water’s edge carpenters were steadily at work building arks

and flats which carried the products of the mills to the terminus of the

railroad at Lock Haven, or to Sunbury or Harrisburg.

Now all is changed. The view from the portico and the lawn of

Castlecloyd is upon a stream flowing with a liquid the color and texture

of ink, frowning with fine yellow bubbles; not, a living fish has been

seen, according to the present occupant of the premises, the venerable

Seth Nelson, Jr., since 1899, when the paper mill at Austin sent down

its first installment of vile pollution. Then the fish leaped on the

shore in frightful agony, dying out of water, but away from the

insidious poisoning of the acids.

The water birds are gone; they cannot drink the polluted water, and give

the region a wide berth. Instead of cooling zephyrs, when the wind blows

off the creek towards the house, there comes a stench worse than a

week-old battlefield in Flanders.

No forests of virgin timber are to be seen, if you strain your eyes

looking up or down stream, nothing but charred, brown wastes, the

aftermath of killing forest fires which followed the lumbering

operations. Here and there on some inaccessible cliff a lone original

white pine or hemlock has its eyrie, but even there the fires are

finding them, and they are all scorched and shaky at the butts, and go

down easily in sharp gales. Altar Rock, famed in song and story, still

has one pine standing on its top, but it is dead, and will soon share

the fate of its mate, which was blown down over twenty years ago.

The entire scene is one of loneliness and desolation, yet a quiet,

peaceful home for the octogenarian hunter Nelson and his devoted and

equally aged sister. How different all this from what it was in the

hey-day of prosperous Billy Cloyd! The hum of the mills, the busy teams

of horses and ox-spans bringing in the logs, the carpenters and boatmen,

the large family of the successful woodsman, their guests, and the

hunters and surveyors who often made the house their headquarters.

It was at the time that the line of the Sunbury and Erie Railroad was

being surveyed from Rattlesnake, now Whetham, to Erie, and one surveying

crew was quartered at Castlecloyd. A few weeks earlier Dr. J. T.

Rothrock had stopped there, but was now further west, camping with Mike

Long, the wolf hunter, in the midst of a great deer and pigeon country

in Elk County.

Those were days of reckless waste of our natural resources, according to

the good Doctor. One of the surveyors, so as not to have to curve his

line, ordered that three giant original white pines be cut. All the

stumps were measured by Dr. Rothrock and averaged considerably over six

feet in diameter. They were, of course, left to rot in the woods,

thousands of feet of lumber of priceless value today!

Philip L. Webster, who died a few years ago in Littletown, now Bradford,

was also a member of one of these surveying parties on Elk Creek, a

branch of the Clarion River; on one occasion he saw four elks together,

in a swale.

As “Buffalo Bill” had been the professional hunter for the Northern

Pacific engineering crews, Jim Jacobs, “The Seneca Bear Hunter,” was

attached to Mr. Webster’s organization in the same capacity. Instead of

bison roasts, Jacobs was to furnish fresh elk steaks, and he kept the

surveyors, axmen and chain-carriers supplied with plenty of it all

summer long.

The members of the party billeted at Castlecloyd were composed of young

Philadelphia gentlemen, sons of prospective stockholders in the new

railroad, finely educated, traveled youths, whose love of adventure had

been fired by the deeds of their colleagues, the Brothers Kane. One of

them stood out more brilliantly than the rest for his scholarly

attainments and poetic nature. He was young Wayne Stewardson, scion of a

distinguished Quaker house of that name, and probably connected with the

family who owned the lands on Kettle Creek, once occupied by Ole Bull.

The young man had been educated at the university in his native city,

and in Europe. His early upbringing had been in great cities, and his

sentimental tastes came out in a peculiar admiration of spires,

chimneys, towers, stacks, vanes, arched roofs, corbels and crockets. He

would wander for hours just at evening watching the skyline in the

changing light, peopling the growing shadows with all manner of

grotesque shapes and chimeras. His love of shadowland was so great that

he fell naturally to cutting charming silhouettes of his friends, his

likeness of the lovelorn and ill-fated Dr. E. K. Kane being highly

prized.

His visit to the Sinnemahoning Country was his first induction into the

heart of nature, and his admiration of man’s handicraft as exemplified

in minarets and high gables softened to a deep reverence for the spiral,

columnar forms of the giant pines as they serrated the skyline of the

Allegheny summits.

There was a bench between two red maple trees, on the bank of the

Sinnemahoning, just in front of Castlecloyd, where he would sit after

supper, watching the crimson sunset reflected in the stream, with the

dusky shapes of the ancient trees athwart, and the sky gradually

becoming less of rose and more of mother-of-pearl, behind the sentinel

pines on the comb of the mountains beyond Birch Island. It was more

beautiful than anything he had ever seen in cities, in its sheer

ferocious wildness.

One evening, on hearing a woman’s voice humming an old tune, he looked

around, beholding Cloyd’s pretty daughter sitting, watching the

afterglow from the portal of the classic doorway. Her knees were

crossed, revealing pretty, plump little legs, encased in blue cotton

stockings. His first thought at seeing her was to recall Poe’s youthful

lines, “Helen Thy Beauty is to Me.” Previously he had not noticed her

much, except that she seemed more than ordinarily good-looking and

refined, for the drudge’s life she was living. Now that, like himself,

she was a person who took notice of her surroundings, she must be

different, he thought, and have a soul more in keeping with her lovely

appearance.

When she saw that he had observed her, instead of jumping up and running

into the house and slamming the door, like some crude backwoods girl

might have done, she came forward and stood leaning against one of the

red maples, and chatted pleasantly about the wonderful scenery.

It was a blissful experience for Stewardson, and as he had hardly spoken

to a girl for a month, was in a particularly susceptible mood. He

studied her appearance minutely. She was probably a trifle under the

middle height, very delicately made, with chestnut hair and eyes of

wondrous golden amber. Her skin was transparently white, and the

delicate peach-blow color in her cheeks was too hectic to betoken good

health. But the outstanding feature was the nose, the most beautiful

nose he had ever seen, the bridge slightly aquiline, yet a sudden

shortness at the tip that transcended the retrousse. She was modest and

simple, reticence being her chief trait, as she told about the deer

which often took harbor in the stream, in front of where they were, when

pursued by dogs.

She said that she had been christened Marie Asterie, but was generally

called by her second name, though the first was shorter and easier to

pronounce.

Just as they were becoming nicely acquainted, a young woodsman, whom she

introduced as Oscar Garis, put in an appearance, and the two walked away

together, leaving Stewardson still meditating on the bench. Evidently

they were lovers, thought the young surveyor, and when he looked out on

Sinnemahoning, the light was gone–the water ran dark and menacing.

Though he had noticed the girl’s unusual nose the first time he saw her,

he had been too busy to become well acquainted, but he recalled that she

occupied a small interior room, just off where he slept, in the

second-floor lobby. He had seen her go upstairs to retire every night,

but proximity had meant nothing to him, so deeply had he been imbued

with ideas of class. Tonight it would be different.

He walked around a while longer, watching the bats flit hither and

thither, and listening to the plaintive calling of the whippoorwills,

then he went indoors and joined his fellow surveyors in the lobby. He

kept watching the clock and watching the door for Asterie to return,

amusing himself trying to cut her marvellous profile, the like of which

King Henry VIII or King Arthur may have admired, for she was evidently a

“throw back” to some archaic type. It was always the rule for the men to

remain downstairs until the women had retired, and on this occasion they

were all yawning but Stewardson, waiting for Asterie, who was the last

to come in, close to ten o’clock.

Garis seemed indifferent to her, but it was the negligence of bad

manners rather than lack of interest. This gave Stewardson a chance to

light her fat lamp for her, and she closed the door and went upstairs.

When the young surveyor and his companion ascended the stairs, he noted

the rays of light from her room, streaming from the crack beneath her

door. The night after the lights were out, and his friends asleep, he

drew his mattress nearly to her door, repeating to himself the lines of

Horace’s Ode X, in Book III:

“O Lyce, didst thou like Tanais,

Wed to some savage, what a pity ’tis

For me to lie on such a night as this

Before your door,

My feet exposed where haunting north winds hiss,

And angry roar.”

The concluding lines of which were:

“O thou as hard as oak no storm can break,

As pitiless as Mauritanian snake,

Not thus forever can I lie and quake,

Nor thus remain

Before thy threshold, for thy love’s sweet sake,

Soaked by the rain.”

But it wasn’t a terrible night, only a fairly chilly one in early June,

with all the stars out, and Asterie’s worst offense was that she was

“keeping company” with another!

The young man could not sleep all night and wondered if the girl was

similarly afflicted, as the light continued to burn; or maybe she was

only like many mountain people, and slept with a night-light, for no

sound came from her tiny apartment. After that night his pleasures at

Castlecloyd were ended. He loved the fair and fragile girl, whom he

hated to see working so hard, so patient and so misunderstood. He

dreaded the thought of her inevitable marriage to Garis, a rough, common

fellow of no refinement. He could not think of courting her himself as

his family had never in ten generations been declasse. There was nothing

to do but to sigh in vain, and watch that light coming from beneath her

door. And on nights when the wind howled, and the rain beat about the

roof, or some particularly hard gust sent a few cold drops pattering

through a crack in the shingles, on his face, he found consolation by

reciting to himself the lament of Horace in his Ode X. But he did

present her with her silhouette, which she blushingly accepted, and on

several occasions when she sang at the organ, complimented her on her

sweet contralto voice.

In the autumn when the red maples had cast the last of their leaves, and

the pines and hemlocks looked the blacker in contrast, Stewardson’s

particular work was done, and he prepared to return to Philadelphia.

John Smoke, aged Seneca, professional hunter of the outfit, agreed to

take him and one of his chums to Rattlesnake in a birchbark canoe. Seth

Iredell Nelson, another hunter, would take two more of the young men in

another canoe. Asterie was on the leaf-strewn bank to see them depart,

dressed in her best pink denham frock, and cherry colored peach-basket

straw bonnet. It made him resentful to watch Garis put his arm on her

shoulder as the canoes shoved away, to the tune of old Smoke’s Seneca

chant.

Billy Cloyd himself was not present; he excused himself as not feeling

well, and Went upstairs shortly after breakfast. On the journey old

Smoke confided to his passengers the cause of the landlord’s backward

conduct. A black calf had been born the night before; whenever one

appeared in the family it brought bad luck; that had been a belief with

Cloyd’s people even in the remote days when they lived in the “old

country.”

Then the aged Indian told the legend of how the redmen came to the

American continent. They had been driven eastward by famines until they

came to a great sea, across which they found a narrow strip of land,

which they crossed. They came to a country teeming with game, and made

themselves at home, wandering great distances to enjoy the chase and

visit the natural wonders.

Later they decided to revisit their old home, but the sea had washed

over the strip of land, and their canoes were not stout enough to breast

the angry waves.

Stewardson listened to this and other old tales in a half-abstracted

way; his thoughts were back with Asterie Cloyd; she with that wonderful,

impossible-to-silhouette nose, her sweet voice, and quiet, restful

manner. He did not marry any of the stately Junoesque beauties whom he

knew, upon returning to Philadelphia, but became critical of the fair

sex, and shunned their company whenever possible. About two years later

the Civil War broke out, and being intimately acquainted with the Kane

family, he hurried to Harrisburg, and the genial “Colonel Tom” gave him

a commission in his 1st Rifle Regiment, soon to win deathless fame under

the name of “Bucktails.”

One evening in camp Colonel Kane and Captain Stewardson were sitting

before their tents, stroking their long fair beards, for it was the aim

of every young soldier to be the most shaggily hirsute. The Colonel was

telling of his memorable trip on rafts from McKean County to Harrisburg

with his recruits and how he spent a night with a man named Garis, who

had acted like a copperhead, and though an expert rifleman, declined to

enlist. “Yet he had ample cause to be out of sorts” continued the

Colonel. “He had lately buried his wife, who, from all accounts, was an

exceptionally pretty girl, one of Billy Cloyd’s daughters.”

If he had watched Stewardson’s face carefully, he would have seen it

growing paler, even in the camp fire’s ruddy glow, beneath that mighty

beard.

“Cloyd, who before the girl’s marriage, had lost his wife,” continued

Colonel Kane, "went up Bennett’s Branch, to take out spars, and started

to clear a farm on the mountain top, and build an even more ambitious

mansion. Garis told me that the old man had recently sold the whole

property, including the timber, to William E. Dodge of New York, who

intends naming it after the President, the ‘Lincoln Farm’, and using it

for a private summer resort."

Captain Stewardson did not care to hear more; as soon as he could

consistently excuse himself from his commanding officer, he did so, and

wandered off among the pines, inwardly moaning.

In the early part of 1864, as the result of wounds, he was given an

indefinite sick leave, but instead of going home, he resolved to visit

Asterie’s grave.

The railroad was completed to Renovo, and the ties were down, ready for

the rails, almost to Erie. A mail carrier on horseback travelled from

Renovo to the backwoods settlements of Sinnemahoning and Driftwood, and

hiring an extra horse, the now Major Stewardson arranged to accompany

him. They had not ridden far through the snowy road when the mail man,

Wallis Gakle, began telling about the Haunted House, Billy Cloyd’s old

place that they would pass. “Nobody’s lived there,” he said, “since

Oscar Garis moved out in the summer of ’61, after burying that pretty

wife of his. They say he worked her to death, making her do all the

cooking for all the lumber and mill crews, and was always after her to

do more; he literally hounded the poor little child to death.”

Then he went on to tell how towards nightfall people were afraid to go

past the deserted house for the awful screaming and yelling, like a

woman in torment, that came from the upper rooms. Travellers never went

on that side of the creek, unless in parties of four or five together,

preferring to follow the right-of-way of the railroad across the creek,

but even there they could hear the shrieks and moaning. Some were even

hinting that Garis, who had gone to live with his late father-in-law on

the Clarion, had in a fit of temper murdered his wife. At the time it

was said that she had died of lung trouble.

All this was interesting to the young soldier, and he next inquired

where the poor girl was buried.

“She’s lying on the hillside, overlooking the meeting of the First Fork

and the Driftwood Branch, a beautiful spot, but it’s cold and bleak

under the pines when the country is covered with snow.”

Just beyond the present town of Westport, Gakle and Stewardson fell in

with two hunters tramping along on snowshoes with their dogs, headed for

the panther country. They were the veteran Nimrod Jake Hamersley and a

young hunter named Art Vallon.

“Glad to meet you, gentlemen,” said old Jake, half joking; “we wanted a

little bolstering up before passing the haunted house.” “said Gakle, “I

am never afraid, but my horse rears like one of the deil’s own buckies

when he hears those dreadful screams. I always try to get by before

dark, for they say the racket is a lot worse after sundown.”

As the party wended its way along the narrow trail by the river’s edge,

all manner of hunting and ghost stories were recounted. All were in an

eerie frame of mind, as with the rays of the setting sun shining in

their faces, they neared the deserted Castlecloyd. The deep woods

screened the clearings and gardens, but long before they came in view a

melancholy wailing, like a woman tortured by fiends, echoed through the

aisles of the primeval forest.

“I guess we’ll have to face it,” said the mail carrier, "but four man

sized men, and a like number of varmint hounds ought to be able to

‘rassle’ any spook."

As they neared the house, the setting sun tinted to the brilliancy of

the stained glass of some mediaeval cathedral the vari-coloured lights

above the classic portal. They noticed that the door stood open. From an

upper room came the doleful groans and lamentations.

“What’s those tracks?” said the keen-eyed young Vallon, who had run on

ahead with the dogs.

Coming up the bank from the ice-bound Sinnemahoning, crossing the trail,

and entering the mansion by the front door, were huge round footmarks

like those of some mammoth cat. “Painter, painter” they all cried, as

they looked at them, while the dogs, knowing well the ferocity of the

Pennsylvania Lion, slunk about their master’s feet.

All wanted to go indoors, and no one cared to mind the horses. They tied

the jaded beasts to the red maple trees, on either side of Major

Stewardson’s one-time favorite resting place. Gakle had an old-time,

flint-lock horse pistol that had been carried by David Lewis, the

Robber, when he was wounded on the First Fork; Stewardson had his army

pistol, while the two hunters had their flint-lock Lancaster rifles.

They followed the tracks into the lobby, and by the snow and mud left on

the floor, to the staircase, which they ascended. Stewardson’s eyes fell

on the green-painted door of the little room once occupied by his

beloved, which was ajar. He rushed forward, pistol in hand, and pushed

it wide open.

On the bed, a small affair of the four poster type which he had never

viewed before, the scene of the fair Asterie’s vigils, stood a great

lithe, lean pantheress, clawing the counterpane and mattress with all

four feet, and beating her fluffy tail with a regular rhythm against the

headboard. In her mouth was a huge rat, bleeding, which she had lately

captured.

Before he could recover from his amazement and shoot, the greycoated

monster sprang over the foot-board, and through the window, carrying the

sash with her. The other men appeared just in time to see the brute’s

long tail disappearing through the casement.

Quickly turning, they seized the dogs by their collars and pushed them

down the narrow winding stairs. Outside, in the fading light, the spoor

could be seen at the side of the house where the lioness bounded over

the lawn, and down the bank, and crossed the stream on the ice.

The dogs took up the scent, and were away, the hunters following gamely.

The baying of the hounds echoed and re-echoed through the narrow valley;

by their volume the quarry was not far ahead. The snow was deep and very

soft in the woods, and it was getting very dark. Perhaps the chase would

have to be abandoned, and the panther or spook, whichever it was, got

away after all.

Soon the barking of the dogs indicated that the beast had been run to

cover. It was just at dark when the hunters saw the pantheress crouched

in a rock oak at the forks, on the steep, stony face of the Keating

Mountain, with the dogs leaping up frantically, the monster feline

hissing and growling savagely.

Jake Hamersley was selected to give the death shot, “taking” the brute

between the eyes. She fell with a thud, and with a few convulsive kicks,

expired on the snow. Major Stewardson built a military campfire while

Hamersley and Vallon carefully skinned the carcass, and fed the flesh to

the dogs. The Nimrods offered the hide to the young Major as a trophy,

but he declined with thanks. He could not bear to have such a

remembrance of a creature that had disported itself so recently on his

loved one’s little four poster bed. Perhaps it had partaken of her

spirit, from absorbing the environment where she had pined away to

death.

He only wanted to visit her grave, above the meeting of the waters, to

drop there a few tears, a part of the boundless water of life. His heart

would always be a Haunted House.

It was verging on the “witching hour,” and an ugly winter drizzle had

begun to fall, as the triumphant hunters ascended the soggy bank, and

stood before the portals of Castlecloyd, undecided as to whether they

should bivouac there until morning. Major Stewardson was muttering to

himself the concluding lines of that Ode of Horace,

“Not thus forever can I lie and quake,

Nor thus remain,

Before thy threshold for thy love’s sweet sake,

Soaked by the rain.”

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

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