Allegheny Episodes

IX The Gorilla

If Sir Rider Haggard was a Pennsylvanian he would doubtless lay the scenes of his wonderful mystery stories in Snyder County. It is in that ruggedly picturesque mountainous county where romance has taken its last stand, where the old touches the new, and hosts, goblins and witches and memories of panthers, wolves and Indians linger in cycle after cycle of imaginative reminiscences. Every now and then, even in this dull, unsympathetic age, when the world, as Artist Shearer puts it, “is aesthetically dead”, Snyder County is thrilled by some new ghost, witch, panther or mystery story. The latest of these in the last days of 1920 and the first of 1921–the giant gorilla–has thrilled the entire Commonwealth by its unique horror.

The papers have told us how a gigantic man-ape escaped from a carnival train near Williamsport, and seeking the South, fled over the mountains to Snyder County, where it attacked a small boy, breaking his arm, held up automobiles, rifled smoke houses and the like, and then appeared in Snyder Township, Blair County, still further South, his nocturnal ramblings in that region proving an effective curfew for the young folks of a half-dozen rural communities.

This story sounds thrillingly interesting, but as gorillas live on fruit, and do not eat flesh, the animal in question would have starved or frozen to death at 123the outset of his career in the Alleghenies, and there the “X”, unknown quantity of the real story begins. The newspapers have only printed the most popular versions of the gorilla mystery, only a fraction of the romance and folk-lore that sprang up mushroom-like around the presence of such an alien monster in our highlands. Already enough has been whispered about to fill a good sized volume, most of it absolutely untrue, yet some of the tales, if they have not hit the real facts, have come dangerously close to it.

Let the readers judge for themselves. Probably one of the most widely circulated versions among the Snyder County mountaineers, the hardy dwellers in the fastnesses of the Shade, Jack’s and White Mountains, is the one about to be related. It is too personal to warrant promiscuous newspapers publication, and even now all names have been changed and localities altered, but to a Snyder County Mountaineer “all things are plain”. This is the “authoritative”, confidential Snyder County version, unabridged:

To begin with, all the mountain people know Hornbostl Pfatteicher, whose log cabin is situated near the heading of Lost Creek, on the borders of Snyder and Juniata Counties. He has never been much of a worker, living mostly by hunting and fishing, prospering greatly during the days when the State raised the bounty on foxes and wild cats to an outrageously extravagant figure–but no one cares; let the hunter’s license fund be plundered and the taxpayers be jammed.

124He was also very noticeable during the Spring and Fall forest fires, which never failed to burn some art of his mountain bailiwick annually. He was opposed to Forester Bartschat, regarding him as too alert and intuitive, and made valiant efforts through his political bosses to have him transferred or removed. He was regular in his politics, could always have a hearing at Harrisburg, and though an ardent fisherman, saw no harm in the dynamiting or liming of streams, and upheld the right of “the interests” to pollute the waterways with vile filth from paper mills and tanneries. In other words he was, and probably is, typical of the professional mountaineer that the politicians, through the nefarious bounty laws, have maintained in the forestsforests, to the detriment of reforestation and wild life.

Hornbostl, about 1915, was in love with a comely mountain girl, Beulah Fuchspuhr, the belle of Lost Creek Valley, but he was away from home so much, and so indifferent, and so much in his cups when in the neighborhood that she found time to become enamored of a tie-jobber named Heinie Beery, and ran away with him to Pittsburg.

During the flu epidemic, about the time of the Armistice, she was seized with the dreaded malady, and passed away, aged twenty-eight years.

Hornbostl was in the last draft, but the Armistice was signed before he was called to the colors, much to the regret of the better element, for he was the sole pro-German in the mountains–a snake in a 125brood of eaglets–and all allowed he should have been given a chance to fight his beloved Kaiser. Though his name had a Teutonic flavor, he was only remotely of German ancestry, and should have known better than to root for a despotism–he, above all others, whose sole creed was personal liberty when it came to interfering with his “vested rights” of hunting and fishing out of season, and all other privileges of a lawless backwoodsman.

After attending the funeral of his wife in Pittsburg, he took the train to Philadelphia, and while there the news of the Armistice was received, consequently his grief was assuaged by this very satisfying information. He boarded on one of the back streets in the southern part of the Quaker City, in a rear room, which looked out on an alley where there were still a number of private stables or mews, occupied for the most part by the horses and carriages of the aristocracy.

Hornbostl liked to sit at the window after his day’s work at Hog Island, smoking his stogie and watching the handsome equipages coming and going, the liveried colored coachmen, the long-tailed horses, with their showy brass mounted harness, with jingling trappings, the animated groups of grooms, stable boys and hangers-on. Some of the darkies kept game roosters, and these occasionally strutted out into the alley and crowed when there was bright sunshine and the wind came from the “Summer Islands”.

One afternoon he saw a strange spectacle enacted 126at the stable opposite his window. A large collection of moth-eaten and dusty stuffed animals and birds were unloaded from a dray–stuffed elks, horns and all, several buffalo heads, four timber wolves, with a red bear like they used to have in Snyder County, a golden eagle, with tattered flopping wings and a great black beast that stood upright like a man were the most conspicuous objects. A crowd of mostly Negro children congregated as the half a hundred mangy specimens of this “silent zoo” became too much for Hornbostl, and putting his stogie between his teeth, sallied out the back door, hatless and in his shirt sleeves, a brawny rural giant who towered above the puny citified crowd.

He was greatly interested in that huge black beast which stood upright, and could not quite classify it, though its hair was like that of a black bear in its summer pelage. He sought out the tall Negro coachman who was in charge of the stable, and asked why a museum was being unloaded at that particular moment.

“Yer see its jest dis way”, said the darkey, confidentially, “old Major Ourry have died an’ ’is heirs dey didn’t want de stuff about, so dey sent ’em down to de stable fer me to put in de empty box stalls”.

As the conversation progressed the Negro intimated that the aforementioned heirs would be glad to sell any or all of the specimens at a reasonable figure.

127“I’ll give you ten dollars for that big animal that looks like a cross between a Snyder County black bear and a prize fighter”, said Hornbostl.

“The gorilla, you mean”, interposed the darkey.

“Yes, I mean the gorilla”, answered the backwoodsman.

“It’s yours”, said the Negro with a grin, for he was to get half of the proceeds of all sales. He wondered why the uncouth stranger wanted a stuffed gorilla, but of all the animals in the collection, he was most pleased to get rid of that hideous effigy, the man-ape that might come to life some dark cold night and raise ructions with the horses.

Hornbostl offered five dollars more if the Negro would box the monster, and they finally arranged to box it together, and keep it in the stable until he would be let out at Hog Island. Eventually they got it to the freight station, billed to Meiserville.

At the time of the purchase it is doubtful if Hornbostl had any definite idea of what he was going to do with his “find”, all that came later. Hornbostl was glad to return to his mountain home, and sank complacently back in his seat on the 11.30 A. M. train for Selim Grove Junction. It was an uneventful trip, for he was an unimaginative person, taking everything as a matter of course, though he did notice an unusually pretty high school girl with a wonderfully refined face and carriage, who got off the train at Dauphin, and followed her with his eyes as she walked along the street back of the station and across 128the bridge that spans Stony Creek, until the moving train shut her from view behind Fasig’s Tavern. He thought that he had never seen anything quite so lovely before; if his late sweetheart who had run away had been one quarter as beautiful and elegant she would be worth worrying about.

He reached Meiserville well after dark, for it was almost the shortest day of the year, and put up there for the night. In the morning he inquired at the freight office for his consignment, but hardly expected it that soon. He had to wait three days before it arrived, but when it did, he secured a team which hauled it to his mountain retreat, depositing the crate in front of his door. After the teamster with his pair of heavy horses, decked out with jingling bells, departed, Hornbostl unpacked his treasure, and the huge, grinning man-ape stood before him, seven feet tall. It was set up on a platform with castors, so he ran it into the house, leaving it beside the old-fashioned open fireplace, where he used to sit opposite his mother while they both smoked their pipes in the old days.

LAST RAFT IN THE WEST BRANCH OF SUSQUEHANNA

That night after supper, when the raftered room was dark, save for one small glass kerosene lamp, and the fitful light of the embers, the mountaineer sat and smoked, trying to conjure up the history of the hideous monster facing him across the inglenook. Instead of evolving anything interesting or definite, the evil genius of the man-ape, as the evening progressed, seemed to take complete possession of him. He became 129filled with vicious, revengeful thoughts; all the hate in his nature was drawn to the surface as the firelight flashed on the glass eyes and grinning teeth of the monstrous jungle king. All at once the maelstrom of nasty thoughts assumed coherent form, and he realized why he had brought the gorilla to Snyder County.

He had heard since going to Philadelphia that the hated Heinie Beery had taken a tie contract on the Blue Knob, the second highest mountain in Pennsylvania, somewhere on the line between Blair and Bedford Counties. He wanted to kill his rival, and now would be a chance to do it and escape detection. He would dress himself up in the hide, and proceed overland to Snyder Township, reconnoitre there, find his victim and choke him to death, which the Negro coachman had told him was the chief pastime of live gorillas in the African wilds.

Suiting the action to the word, he drew his long knife and began cutting the heavy threads which sewed the hide over the manikin. He soon had the hide lying on the deal floor, and a huge white statue of lath and plaster of Paris stood before him, like an archaic ghost. He did not like the looks of the manikin, so pounded it to a pulp with an axe to lime his kitchen garden. The hide was as stiff as a board, but between the heat of the fire and bear’s grease he had it fairly pliable by morning. By the next night it was in still better shape so he donned it and sewed himself in. Physically he was not unlike the man-ape, 130gross about the abdomen, sloping shouldered and long-armed, while his prognathous jaw and retreating forehead were perfect counterparts of the gorilla’s physiognomy.

Arming himself with a long ironwood staff, he started on his journey towards the Blue Knob country. He had to cross the Christunn Valley in order to get into Jack’s Mountain, which he would follow along the summits to Mount Union. It was a dark, starless night, and all went well until he suddenly came upon the scene of a nocturnal wood chopping operation. The wood-cutter, a railroader, had no other chance to lay in his winter’s fuel supply than after dark, and by the light of a lantern placed on a large stump had already stacked up a goodly lot of cordwood. His son, a boy of fourteen, was ranking the wood. At the moment of the gorilla-man’s appearance in the clearing the man had gone to the house for a cup of hot coffee, leaving the lad alone at his work. The boy heard the heavy footfalls on the chips, and thinking his father was returning, looked up and beheld the most hideous thing that his eyes had ever looked upon. He uttered a shriek of terror, but before he could open his lips a second time the “gorilla” was upon him, slapping his mouth until the blood flowed, with one brawny paw, while he wrenched his arm so severely with the other that he left it limp and broken, hanging by his side. Then the monster, looking back over his shoulder, loped off into the deep forest at the foot of Jack’s Mountain.

131The boy, more dead than alive from fright, was found a few minutes later by his father, to whom he described his terrible assailant.

After that the man-ape was more careful when he traveled, although he was seen by half a dozen persons until he got safely to the vicinity of “the Monarch of Mountains”.

Blue Knob is a weird and impressive eminence around which many legends cluster, some of them dating back to Indian days. Its altitude at the new steel forest fire tower is 3,165 feet above tide.“is a beautiful word picture of the disappearance of two little tots on the slopes of Blue Knob, from the gifted pen of Rev. James A. Sell, of Hollidaysburg.

Heinie Beery was living alone in a small shack on Poplar Run, a stream which has its heading on the slopes of Blue Knob, not far from the home of the mighty hunter, Peter Leighty. Since the loss of his wife he was gloomy and taciturn, and refused to live with his choppers and teamsters in their big camp further down in the hollow.

While searching for Beery, the man-gorilla was seen by several of the woodsmen, and the lonely camp was almost in a panic by this savage visitation. The man-ape was glad that his outlandish appearance struck terror to all who saw him, else he might have been captured long before. He watched his chance to get Beery where he wanted him, and in the course of several days was rewarded. Meanwhile he had to live somehowsomehow, and at dead of night broke into 132smoke-houses and cellars, eating raw eggs and butter when hunger pressed him hard. In some ways it was no fun playing gorilla on an empty stomach.

One Sunday afternoon Beery, after eating dinner with his crew at their camp near the mouth of the hollow, started on a solitary ramble up the ravine which led past the small shanty where in the local vernacular, he “bached it” towards the top of the vast and mysterious Blue Knob. Little did he know that the man-ape was waiting behind his cabin, and followed him to the summit, which he reached about dusk, and sat on a flat rock on the brink of a dizzy precipice watching the lights flashing up at Altoona and Johnstown, the long trains winding their way around Horse Shoe Curve. He heard the brush crack behind him, and looking around beheld the hideous monster that he had supposed his workmen had conjured up out of brains addled by too much home-brew.

Heinie Beery was a fighting Dutchman, but on this occasion his curly black hair stood straight on end, and his dark florid face became as ashen as death. He lost his self-control for an instant, and in this fatal moment the giant “gorilla” gripped him behind the shoulders and sent him careening over the precipice “to take a short cut to Altoona”.

With a shout of glee the monster turned on his heel, his mission accomplished, to return along the mountains and through the forests to his cabin near the sources of Lost Creek. He was seen by a number 133of children at Hollidaysburg and Frankstown, late at night, frightening them almost out of their wits; he terrified several parties of automobilists near Yellow Springs; he had all of Snyder Township in an uproar before he had passed through it, but he eventually got to Shade Mountain safe and sound.

Once on his home mountains, overlooking Lewistown Narrows, a strange remorse overcame him; he began to regret his folly, his odd caprice. He sat on a high rock near the top of the mountain, much in the attitude of Rodin’s famous “Penseur”, and began to sob and moan. It was a still night, and the trackwalkers down in the valley heard him and called to him through their megaphones. But the more they called the worse he groaned and shrieked, as if he liked to mystify the lonely railroad men. At length he got up and started along the mountain top, wailing and screaming like a “Token”, until out of hearing of the trackwalkers and the crews of waiting freight trains. He had played a silly game, made a monkey of himself and was probably now a murderer in the bargain. He could hardly wait until he got to his cabin to rip off the hideous, ill-smelling gorilla’s hide, and make a bonfire of it. He hoped that, if no evil consequence befell him as a result of his mad prank, he would be a better man in the future.

However, as he neared his cabin, all his good resolves began to ooze out of his finger tips. By the time he reached the miserable cabin he decided to stick to his disguise, and continue the adventure to 134the end, come what may. If he would be shot down like a vile beast, it would only be retribution for Heinie Beery hurled off the crag of Blue Knob, without a chance to defend himself. The night was long; he would travel until morning and hide among the rocks until night, picking up what food he could along the way.

In his northward journey he had many thrilling experiences, such as crossing the covered bridge at Northumberland at midnight, riding on the trucks of a freight train to Jersey Shore and frightening fishermen at Hagerman’s Run. When last seen he was near the flourishing town of Woolrich, frightening old and young, so much so that a young local sportsman offered a reward of “five hundred dollars dead, one thousand dollars alive”, putting the Snyder County gorilla in the same category with the Passenger Pigeon as a natural history curiosity.

And in this terrible disguise Hornbostl Pfatteicher is expiating his sins, black as the satanic form he has assumed, and when his penance is over to be shed for the newer and better life.

X The Indian’s Twilight

According to Daniel Mark, born in 1835, (died 1922), when the aged Seneca Indian, Isaac Steel, stood beside the moss-grown stump of the giant “Grandfather Pine” in Sugar Valley, in the early Autumn of 1892, he was silent for a long while, then placing his hands over his eyes, uttered these words: “This is the Indians’ Twilight; it explains many things; I had heard fromfrom Billy Dowdy, when he returned to the reservation in 1879, that the tree had been cut by Pardee, but as he had not seen the stump, and was apt to be credulous, I had hoped that the report was untrue; the worst has happened.”

Then the venerable Redman turned away, and that same day left the secluded valley, never to return.

The story of the Grandfather Pine, of Sugar Valley, deserves more than the merely passing mention already accorded it in forestry statistics and the like. Apart from being probably the largest white or cork pine recorded in the annals of Pennsylvania sylviculture–breast high it had to be deeply notched on both sides, so that a seven foot cross-cut saw could be used on it–it was the sacred tree of the Seneca Indians, and doubtless of the earlier tribes inhabiting the country adjacent to the Allegheny Mountains and the West Branch Valley.

It was a familiar landmark for years, standing as 136it did near the mouth of Chadwick’s Gap, and could be seen towering above its fellows, from every point in Sugar Valley, from Schracktown, Loganton, Eastville and Carroll.

Professor Ziegler tells us that the maximum or heavy growth of white pine was always on the winter side of the inland valleys; the biggest pines of Sugar Valley, Brush Valley and Penn’s Valley were all along the southern ridges.

Luther Guiswhite, now a restauranteur in Harrisburg, moving like a voracious caterpillar easterly along the Winter side of Brush Valley, gradually destroyed grove after grove of superb original white pines, the Gramley pines, near the mouth of Gramley’s Gap, which Professor Henry Meyer helped to “cruise”, being the last to fall before his relentless juggernaut.

Ario Pardee’s principal pineries were mostly across the southern ridge of Nittany Mountain, of Sugar Valley, on White Deer Creek, but the tract on which the Grandfather Pine stood ran like a tongue out of Chadwick’s Gap into Sugar Valley, almost to the bank of Fishing Creek. It is a well known story that after the mammoth pine had been cut, Mike Courtney, the lumberman-philanthropist’s woods boss, offered $100 to anyone who could transport it to White Deer Creek, to be floated to the big mill at Watsontown, where Pardee sawed 111,000,000 feet of the finest kind of white pine between 1868 and 1878.

The logs of this great tree proved too huge to handle, even after being split asunder by blasting 137powder, crushing down a number of trucks, and were left to rot where they lay. Measured when prone, the stem was 270 feet in length, and considering that the stump was cut breast high, the tree was probably close to 276 feet from root to tip. The stump is still visible and well worthy of a visit.

In addition to boasting of the biggest pine in the Commonwealth, one of the biggest red hemlocks also grew in Sugar Valley, in the centre of Kleckner’s woods, until it was destroyed by bark peelers in 1898. It dwarfed the other original trees in the grove, mostly superb white hemlocks, and an idea of its size can be gained when it is stated that “breast high” it had a circumference of 30 feet.

When Billy Dowdy, an eccentric Seneca Indian, was in Sugar Valley he told ’Squire Mark the story of the Grandfather Pine, then recently felled, and while the Indian did not visit the “fallen monarch” on that occasion, he refrained from so doing because he said he could not bear the sight. The greatest disaster that had yet befallen the Indians had occurred, one that they might never recover from, and meant their final elimination as factors in American history.

Dowdy seemed unnerved when he heard the story of the demolition of the colossal pine, and it took several visits to the famous Achenbach distillery to steady his nerves so that he could relate its history to his old and tried friend the ’Squire. In the evening, by the fireside, showing emotion that rarely an Indian 138betrays, he dramatically recited the story of the fallen giant.

Long years ago, in the very earliest days of the world’s history, the great earth spirit loved the evening star, but it was such an unusual and unnatural attachment, and so impossible of consummation that the despairing spirit wished to end the cycle of existence and pass into oblivion so as to forget his hopeless love. Accordingly, with a blast of lightning he opened his side and let his anguish flow away. The great gaping wound is what we of today call Penn’s Cave, and the never ending stream of anguish is the wonderful shadowy Karoondinha, now renamed John Penn’s Creek.

As time went on fresh hopes entered the subterranean breast of the great earth spirit, and new aspirations towards the evening star kindled in his heart of hearts. His thoughts and yearnings were constantly onward and upward towards the evening star. He sought to bridge the gulf of space and distance that separated him from the clear pure light of his inspiration. He yearned to be near, even if he could not possess the calm and cold constellation so much beyond him. He cried for an answer, but none came, and thought that it was distance that caused the coldness, and certainly such had caused the great disappointment in the past.

His heart was set on reaching the evening star, to have propinquity with the heavens. Out of his strong hopes and deep desires came a tall and noble tree, growing 139in eastern Sugar Valley, a king among its kindred, off there facing the shining, beaming star. This tree would be the symbol of earth’s loftiest and highest aspirations, the bridge between the terrestrial and the celestial bodies. It was earth’s manliest, noblest and cleanest aspiration, standing there erect and immobile, the heavy plates of the bark like gilt-bronze armor, the sparse foliage dark and like a warrior’s crest.

The Indians, knowing full well the story of the hopeless romance of the earth spirit and the evening star, or Venus, as the white men called it, venerated the noble tree as the connecting link between two manifestations of sublimity. They only visited its proximity on sacred occasions because they knew that the grove over which it dominated was the abode of spirits, like all groves of trees of exceptional size and venerable age.

The cutting away of most of the bodies of original pines has circumscribed the abode of the spiritual agencies until they are now almost without a lodgement, and must go wailing about cold and homeless until the end of time, unless spiritual insight can touch our materialistic age and save the few remaining patches of virgin trees standing in the valley of the Karoondinha, the “Stream of the Never Ending Love”, now known by the prosaic cognomen of “Penn’s Valley”.

The Tom Motz tract is no more, the Wilkenblech, the Bowers and the Meyer groves are all but annihilated. Where will the spirits rest when the last original 140white pine has been ripped into boards at The Forks, now called Coburn? No wonder that Artist Shearer exclaimed, “The world is aesthetically deal!”deal!”

The Indians were greatly dismayed at the incursion of white men into their mountain fastnesses, so contrary to prophecy and solemn treaties, and no power seemed to stem them as they swept like a plague from valley to valley, mountain to mountain. The combined military strategy and bravery of Lenni-Lenape, Seneca, Cayuga, Tuscarora and Shawnee failed before their all-conquering advance. How to turn back this white peril occupied the mind and heart of every Indian brave and soothsayer.

One evening just as Venus in the east was shedding her tranquil glory over the black outline of the pine covered ranges of the Nittanies, a mighty council of warriors and wise men, grave and reverent, assembled under the Grandfather Pine. Hitherto victory, while it had rested with the white invaders, had not been conclusive; there was still hope, and the Indians meant to battle to the end.

It was during this epochal conclave that a message was breathed out of the dark shaggy pigeon-haunted tops of the mighty tree. Interpreted it meant that the Indian braves and wise men were reminded that this great pine reached from heaven to earth, and by its means their ancestors used to climb up and down between the two regions. In a time of doubt and anxiety like this, the multitudes, conferring beneath the tree, were invited to ascend to hold a council with 141the stars, to exchange views and receive advice as to how the insidious white invader could be kept in proper bounds, and to preserve the glory and historic dignity of the Indian races. The stars, which were the spirits of undefeated warriors and hunters and huntresses of exceptional prowess–their light was the shimmer of their silvery targets–had always been the allies of the red men.

In solemn procession the pick of the assemblage of Indian warriors and wise men ascended the mighty tree, up, up, up, until their forms became as tiny specks, and disappeared in the dark lace-like branches which merged with the swart hues of the evening heavens. They set no time for their return, for they were going from the finite to the infinite, but they would be back to their beloved hills and valleys in plenty of time, and with added courage and skill, to end the regime of the pale faced foes.

Every wife and mother and sweetheart of a warrior who took this journey was overjoyed at the privilege accorded her loved one, and none begrudged being left behind to face the enemy under impaired leadership, or the risk of massacre, as in due course of time the elite would return from above and rescue them from their cruel tormentors.

Evidently out of space, out of time, was almost the equivalent of “out of sight, out of mind” for all who had witnessed the chosen band of warriors and warlocks ascend the pine, even the tiny babes, reached maturity and passed away, and yet they had not returned 142or sent a message. The year that the stars fell, in 1833, brought hopes to the anxious ones, but never a falling star was found to bring tidings from that bourne above the clouds.

Generation after generation came and went, and the ablest leaders still were absent counseling with the stars. Evidently there was much to learn, much to overcome, before they were fully fledged to return and battle successfully.

The succeeding generations of Indian braves fought the white foes as best they could, yet were ever being pushed back, and they were long since banished from Sugar Valley where grew the Grandfather Pine. Occasionally those gifted with historic lore and prophecy journeyed to the remote valley to view the pine, but there were no signs of a return of the absent Chieftains.

It was a long and weary wait. Were they really forsaken, or were there affairs of great emergency in the realm of the evening star that made them tarry so long? They might be surprised on their return to find their hunting territories the farms of the white men, their descendants banished to arid reservations on La Belle Riviere and beyond. They had left in the twilight; they would find the Indians’ Twilight everywhere over the face of the earth. It was a sad prospect, but they never gave up their secret hope that the visitors to strange lands would return, and lead a forlorn hope to victory.

Then came upon the scene the great lumberman, 143Ario Pardee. The bed of White Deer Creek was “brushed out” from Schreader Spring to Hightown, to float the millions of logs that would pile up wealth and fame for this modern Croesus. What was one tree, more or less–none were sacred, and instead of being the abode of spirits, each held the almighty dollar in its heart.

Pardee himself was a man of dreams and an idealist, vide Lafayette College, and the portrait of his refined and spiritual face by Eastman Johnson, in the rotunda of “Old Pardee”. Yet it was too early a day to care for trees, or to select those to be cut, those to be spared; the biggest tree, or the tree where the buffaloes rubbed themselves, were alike before the axe and cross-cut; all must fall, and the piratical-looking Blackbeard Courtney was the agent to do it.

Perhaps trees take their revenge, like in the case of the Vicar’s Oak in Surrey, as related by the diarest Evelyn–shortly after it was felled one of the choppers lost an eye and the other broke a leg. Mike Courtney, it is reported, ended his days, not in opulent ease lolling in a barouche in Fairmount Park with Hon. Levi Mackey, as had been his wont, but by driving an ox-team in the wilds of West Virginia!

The Grandfather Pine was brought to earth after two days of chopping by an experienced crew of woodsmen; when it fell they say the window lights rattled clear across the valley in Logansville (now Loganton). It lay there prone, abject, yet “terrible still in death”, majestic as it sprawled in the bed that 144had been prepared for it, with an open swath of forest about that it had maimed and pulled down in its fall.

Crowds flocked from all over the adjacent valleys to see the fallen monarch, like Arabs viewing the lifeless carcass of a mighty lion whose roar had filled them with terror but a little while before.

Then came the misfortune that the tree was found to be commercially unprofitable to handle, and it was left for the mould and the moss and the shelf-fungi to devour, for little hemlocks to sprout upon.

Billy Dowdy was in the West Branch Valley trying to rediscover the Bald Eagle Silver Mine–old Uriah Fisher, of the Seventh Cavalry, can tell you all about it–when the story was told at “Uncle Dave” Cochran’s hotel at Pine Station that Mike Courtney had conquered the Grandfather Pine. It is said that a glass of the best Reish whiskey fell from his nerveless fingers when he heard the news. He suddenly lost all interest in the silver mine on the Bald Eagle Mountain, which caused him to be roundly berated by his employers, and dropping everything, he made for Sugar Valley to verify the terrible story. ’Squire Mark assured him that it was only too true; he had strolled over to Chadwick’s Gap the previous Sunday and saw the prostrate Titan with his own eyes.

The Indians’ twilight had come, for now the picked band of warriors and warlocks must forever linger in the star-belt, unless the earth spirit, out of his great love, again heaved such a tree from his inmost creative consciousness.

A FENCE OF WHITE PINE STUMPS, ALLEGHENIES

145SometimesSometimes the Indians notice an untoward bright twinkling of the stars, the evening star in particular, and they fancy it to be reassuring messages from their marooned leaders not to give up the faith, that sometimes they can return rich in wisdom, fortified in courage, ready to drive the white men into the sea, and over it to the far Summer Islands. When the stars fell on the thirteenth of November, 1833, it was thought that the starry hosts were coming down en masse to fight their battles, but not a single steller ally ever reported for duty.

Old John Engle, mighty Nimrod of Brungard’s Church (Sugar Valley), on the nights of the Northern Lights, or as the Indians called them, “The Dancing Ghosts”, used to hear a strange, weird, unaccountable ringing echo, like exultant shouting, over in the region of the horizon, beyond the northernmost Allegheny ridges. He would climb the “summer” mountain all alone, and sit on the highest summits, thinking that the wolves had come back, for he wanted to hear them plainer. In the Winter of 1859 the distant acclamation continued for four successive nights, and the Aurora covered the entire vault of heaven with a preternatural brilliance. Great bars of intensely bright light shot out from the northern horizon and broke in mid-sky, and filled the southern skies with their incandescence. The sky was so intensely red that it flared as one great sheet of fire, and engulfed the night with an awful and dismal red light. Reflected 146on the snow, it gave the earth the appearance of being clothed in scarlet.

The superstitious Indians, huddled, cold and half-clad, and half-starved in the desert reservations, when they saw the fearful glow over beyond Lake Erie, and heard the distant cadences, declared that they were the signal fires and the cries for vengeance of the Indian braves imprisoned up there in star-land, calling defiance to the white hosts, and inspiration to their own depleted legions, the echo of the day of reckoning, when the red men would come to their own again, and finding their lost people, lead them to a new light, out of the Indians’ twilight.

XI Hugh Gibson’s Captivity

After the brutal massacre, by the Indians, of the Woolcomber family, came fresh rumors of fresh atrocities in contemplation, consequently it was considered advisable to gather the women and children of the surrounding country within the stockade of Fort Robinson, under a strong guard, while the bulk of the able-bodied men went out in companies to reap the harvest. Some of the harvesters were on guard part of the time, consequently all the men of the frontier community performed a share of the guard duty.

Among the most energetic of the guardsmen was young Hugh Gibson, son of the Widow Gibson, a name that has later figured prominently in the public eye in the person of the Secretary of the American Legion at Brussels, who endured a trying experience during the period of the over-running of the Belgian Paris by the hordes of blood-thirsty Huns, as rapacious and merciless as the red men of Colonial Pennsylvania.

Hugh Gibson, of Colonial Pennsylvania, was under twenty, slim and dark, and very anxious to make a good record as guardian of so many precious lives. As days wore on, and no Indian attacks were made, and no fresh atrocities committed by the 148blood-loving monster, Cooties, the terror of the lower Juniata Valley, even the punctilious Gibson relaxed a trifle in the rigidity of his guardianship.

It was near the end of the harvest when the majority of the men announced that they would remain away over night at a large clearing on Buffalo Creek, as it would be difficult to reach the fort by nightfall and be back at work by daybreak the next morning. Hugh Gibson was made captain of the guard and placed in charge of the safety of the stockade full of refugees.

All went well with Gibson and his fellow pickets until about midnight, when the Indians launched a gas attack. The wind being propitious, they built a fire, into which they stirred a large number of oak balls, and the fumes suddenly engulfing the garrison, all became very drowsy, with the result that the nimble redskins rushed in on the defenders, who were gaping about, thinking that there must be a forest fire somewhere, but too dazed and semi-conscious to think very succinctly about anything.

When the guards saw that it was red men, and not red fire, they roused themselves as best they could, and fought bravely to save the fort and its inmates. By throwing firebrands into the stockade, the women and children, and cattle, were stampeded, and by a common impulse burst open the gates, and dashed past the defenders, headed for the creek, to escape the threatened conflagrations. Then the Indians closed in, and in the darkness, amid the crackling 149of the fire–for a forest fire was now in progress, and part of the stockade wall was blazing, amid war whoops and shrieks of hatred and agony, the barking of dogs, the bellowing of cattle running amuck, rifle shots, the crack of tomahawks on defenseless skulls, the midnight air resounded with uncouth and horrible medley.

The fight continued all night long, until the approach of dawn, and the danger of the forest fire cutting them off made the Indians decamp. They did not stop until in the big beaver meadow at Wildcat Valley, they paused long enough to take stock of prisoners, and to count wounded and missing. They had captured an even dozen prisoners, and as the light grew stronger they noticed that they had one male captive, his face almost unrecognizable with soot, and mostly stripped of clothing, who proved to be none other than the zealous Hugh Gibson himself.

It was a strange company that moved in single file towards the Alleghenies, eleven women and one man, all tied together with leather thongs, like a party of Alpinists, one after another, not descending a monarch of mountains, but descending into captivity, into the valley of the shadow.shadow. The Indians were jubilant over the personnel of their captives. In addition to Hugh Gibson, late captain of the guard, they had taken Elsbeth Henry, daughter of the most influential of the settlers, a girl of rare beauty and charm, who had enjoyed some educational advantages 150among the Moravians at Nazareth, the pioneers of women’s education in America.

Gibson had for a year past, ever since he first appeared in the vicinity of Fort Robinson, admired the uncommonly attractive girl, and being ambitions in many ways, aspired to her hand. She had never treated him with much consideration, except to be polite to him, but she was that to everyone, and could not be otherwise, being a happy blend of Huguenot and Bohemian ancestry.

The minute that Gibson saw that Elsbeth was his fellow prisoner he forgot the chagrin at being the sole male captive, and congratulated himself in secret on the good fortune that would make him, for a year or more, the daily companion of the object of his admiration. He would redeem the humiliation of this capture by staging a sensational double escape, and then, after freeing the maiden, she could not fail to love him and agree to become his wife. He was, therefore, the most cheerful of prisoners, and whistled and sang Irish songs as he marched along at the tail end of the long line of captives.

It seemed as if they were being taken on a long journey, and he surmised that the destination was Fort Duquesne, to be delivered over to the French, where rewards would be paid for each as hostages. He could see by the deference paid to Elsbeth Henry that the redmen recognized that they had a prisoner of quality, and as she walked along, away ahead of him, 151whenever there was a turn in the path, he would note her youthful beauty and charm.

She was not very tall, but was gracefully and firmly built. Her most noticeable features were the intense blackness of her soft wavy hair, and the whiteness of her skin, with minute blue veins showing, gave her complexion a blue whiteness, the color of mother of pearl almost, and Gibson, being a somewhat poetical Ulster Scot, compared her to an evening sky, with her red lips, like a streak of flame, across the mother of pearl firmament, her downcast eyes, like twin stars just appearing!

The further on the party marched the harder it was going to be to successfully bring her back in safety to the Juniata country, through a hostile Indian territory, for he had not the slightest doubt that he would outwit the clumsy-witted redmen and escape with her. It might be best to strike north or northwest, out of the seat of hostilities, and make a home for his bride-to-be in the wilderness along Lake Erie, and never take her back to her parents. But then there was his mother; how could he desert her? He must go back with Elsbeth, run all risks, once he had escaped and freed her from her inconsiderate captors.

After a few days he learned that the permanent camp was to be on the Pucketa, in what is now Westmoreland County. Cooties was located there, and since his unparalleled success in massacring whole families of whites, he was apparently again in favor with the Indian tribal Chieftains. He was to take 152charge of the prisoners, and when ready, would lead them to Fort Duquesne, or possibly to some point further up La Belle Riviere, to turn them over to the French, who would hold them as hostages.

It was in the late afternoon when the party filed into Cooties’ encampment, at the Blue Spring, near the headwaters of the beautiful Pucketa. Cooties had been apprised of their coming, and had painted his face for the occasion, but meanwhile had consumed a lot of rum, and was beastly drunk, so much so that in his efforts to drive the punkis off his face, which seemed to have a predilection for the grease paint, he smeared the moons and stars into an unrecognizable smudge all over his saturnine countenance.

As he sat there on a huge dark buffalo robe, a rifle lying before him, a skull filled with smoking tobacco on one side, and a leather jug of rum on the other, smoking a long pipe, his head bobbing unsteadily on its short neck, he made a picture never to be forgotten. The slayer of the Sheridan family was at best an ugly specimen of the Indian race. He was short, squat–Gibson described him as “sawed off”; his complexion was very dark, his lips small and thin, his nose was broad and flat, his eyes full and blood-shot, and his shaven head was covered with a red cap, almost like a Turk’s fez.

He was too intoxicated to indicate his pleasure, if he felt any, at the arrival of the prisoners. In front of where he sat were the embers of a campfire, as the weather–it was early in March–was still very cold. 153He had the prisoners lined up in front of him beyond the coals, while he squatted on his rug, eyeing them as carefully as his bleared, inebriated vision would permit. Calling to several of his henchmen, he had them fetch fresh wood and pile it beside the embers, as if a big bonfire was to be started later.later.

Just as they were in the midst of bringing the wood, a group of six stalwart Indians rushed on the scene, literally dragging a rather good-looking, dark-haired white woman of about thirty years, whose face showed every signsign of intense terror. From words that he could understand, and the gesturesgestures, Gibson made out that this woman had belonged to another batch of prisoners, but before she could be delivered at Shannopin’s Town had somehow made her escape.

To deliver a body of prisoners short one of the quota had brought some criticism on Cooties, and he was in an ugly frame of mind when she was brought before him. There was an ash pole near the wood pile, to which prisoners were tied while being interrogated, and Cooties ordered that the unfortunate woman should be strapped to it. The Indian warriors, needless to say, made a thorough job and bound her to it securely, hand and foot.

Though she saw twelve or more white persons, the bound woman never said a word, and the captives from Fort Robinson and other places were too terror-stricken to address a word to her. They stared at her with that look of dumb helplessness that a flock of sheep assume when peering through the bars of their 154fold at a farmer in the act of butchering one of their number. Sympathy they may have felt, but to express it in words would have availed nothing.

Once tied to the tree, Cooties ordered that the wood be piled about her feet. It was ranked until it came almost to her waist. Then the cruel warrior turned to his victim, saying to her in German, “It’s going to be a cold night; I think you can warm me up very nicely.”

Then he grinned and looked at each of his other prisoners menacingly. Silas Wright in his excellent “History of Perry County” thus quotes Hugh Gibson in describing the scene then enacted: “All the prisoners in the neighborhood were collected to be spectators of the death by torture of a poor, unhappy woman, a fellow-prisoner who had escaped, and been recaptured. They stripped her naked, tied her to a post and pierced her with red hot irons, the flesh sticking to the irons at every touch. She screamed in the most pitiful manner, and cried for mercy, but the ruthless barbarians were deaf to her agonizing shrieks and prayers, and continued their horrid cruelty until death came to her relief.”

After this fiendish episode, the Fort Robinson prisoners were sick at heart and in body for days, and most of them would have dropped in their tracks if they had been compelled to resume the long, tedious western journey.

It appeared that in the foray on Fort Robinson one young Indian had been slain; rumor among the 155Indians had it that he had been shot by mistake by a member of his own party. At any rate his parents, who lived near Cooties’ camp-ground, took his end very hard, and the squaw, who was Cooties’ sister, demanded the adoption of Hugh Gibson to take the place of her lost warrior son. This was a good point for Gibson, although the warrior’s father, Busqueetam, acted very coldly towards him, and he feared he might some day, in a fit of revenge and hate, take his life. However, the young white man, by making every effort to help his Indian foster parents, who were very feeble and unable to work, won their confidence, and also that of Cooties, who requisitioned him to do all sorts of errands and work about the encampment.

One day Busqueetam was in a terrible state of excitement. His spotted pony, the only equine in the camp, and the one that he expected to give to Cooties to ride with chiefly dignity through the portals of the Fort had strayed off in the night.

Most of the Fort Robinson and other prisoners who had been brought in from various directions since their arrival, to make a great caravan of captives to impress the commanders at Shannopin’s Town, like a Roman triumph, were allowed their liberty during the daytime. At night they were all tied together as they lay about the campfire, not far from the charred stump of the ash pole where the poor white woman had been burned to death, and where the small Indian dogs were constantly sniffing. There were about twenty-five prisoners, all told, and with these were 156tied about half a dozen guards, and all lay down in a circle about the fire, guards and prisoners sleeping at the same time. It was a different system from that of the whites, for if a prisoner got uneasy or tried to get up, he or she would naturally pull on the leather thongs, and rouse the guardians and other prisoners. The thongs were around both wrists, so a prisoner was tied to the person on either side.

Hugh Gibson managed to have a few words with Elsbeth, when he heard of the horse’s disappearance. Much as he would like to have talked to her, few words passed between them during the captivity. Elsbeth was naturally reserved, and had never known Hugh well before, and he was playing for big stakes, and saw how the Indians resented any hobnobbing among their prisoners. He managed to whisper to her that he would volunteer to hunt for Busqueetam’s missing pony, but would return at night and wait for her in the Panther Glade, a dense Rhododendron thicket through which they had passed on their way to the campground; that she should gnaw herself free with her teeth, and that done, with her natural agility and moccasined feet, could nimbly spring away into the darkness and escape to him. He thought he knew where the pony was hiding, and she could ride on the animal to civilization. And now let Gibson tell the adventure in his own words:

“At last a favorable opportunity to gain my liberty. Busqueetam lost a horse and sent me to hunt him. After hunting some time, I came home and told 157him I had discovered his tracks at some considerable distance, and that I thought I would find him; that I would take my gun and provisions and would hunt him for three or four days, and if I could kill a deer or a bear, I would pack home the meat on the horse.”

Hugh Gibson, the privileged captive, strolled out of camp with a business-like expression on his lean face, and carrying Cooties’ favorite rifle. He took a long circle about through the deep forest, and at dark was ensconced in the Panther Glade, to wait the fateful moment when Elsbeth, his beloved, would come to him, and as his promised wife, he would lead her to liberty.

It was a cold night, and his teeth chattered as he squatted among the rhododendrons waiting and listening. The wolves were howling, and he wondered if the girl would feel afraid!

At the usual time the various prisoners and their guards were lashed together, and lay down for their rest around the embers of the campfire. Most of them were short of coverings, so they huddled close together. Not so Elsbeth, for Cooties looked after her and provided her with four buffalo robes, which she would have loved dearly to share with her less favored fellow prisoners, but they would not allow it. The Indians made the captives work hard during the day cutting wood, dressing furs and pounding corn. They did not feed them any too well, as game was scarce and ammunition scarcer, so all were tired when they lay down by the campfire’s soothing glow.

158One by one they fell asleep, all but Elsbeth, who, covering her head with the buffalo robes, began to gnaw on the leather thongs as if they were that much caramel, first this side, then the other. She felt like a rodent before she was half through, and her pretty pearl-colored teeth grew shorter and blunter before she was done. It was a gigantic task, but she stuck to it bravely, and some time during the “wee, sma’” hours had the delicious sensation of knowing she was free, even though she felt horridly toothless and sore-gummed in her moment of victory.

Like a wild cat she slipped out from under the buffalo robes, wiggled along among the wet leaves and moss, then crawled to her feet and was off like a deer towards the Panther Glade, regardless of the howling of the wolves. Hugh Gibson’s quick sense of hearing told him she was coming, and he walked out so that he stood on the path before her, and clasped her white shapely arms in heartfelt congratulations.

“Now that we are free,” he said, “I will take you to the pony in three hours’ travel. I want to arrange the one final detail to make this reunion always memorable for us both. We have shared common hardships and perils; we have plotted and planned for freedom together. Let us guarantee that our lives shall always be together, for I love you, and want you to be my wife.”

Elsbeth drew herself back out of his grasp, and a shudder went through her supple little frame. “Why I have never heard the like of what you say, much 159as I have appreciated all you have done; ours was only a common misfortune. I could not care for you that way, even though recognizing your bravery, your foresight and your kindliness.”

For a moment Hugh Gibson was so angry that he felt like leading her back to Cooties, where she would probably have been received with open arms, and be burned at the stake, but he finally “possessed his soul” and accepted the inevitable.

They found the pony by morning, but it took some maneuvering to capture the wily beast, and packed him across the Kittanning Path, where, at Burgoon’s Run, they came upon a party of traders headed by George McCord, who had lately come from the Juniata.

McCord told them the details of the conflict at Fort Robinson, of the shocking killing of Widow Gibson, Robert Miller’s daughter, James Wilson’s wife, John Summerson, and others, on that bloody night of gas, forest fires, smoke and surprises.

It was the turning point in Hugh Gibson’s life; his mother gone, and not a sign of weakening in Elsbeth Henry’s mother-of-pearl countenance; in fact, the indistinct line of her mouth was more like a streak of crimson flame than ever. A new light had dawned for him out of these shocking misfortunes; his purpose would be to redeem his inactivity at Fort Robinson, his overconfidence, his over self-esteem, by going at once to Carlisle to secure a commission in 160the Royal American Regiment of Riflemen. He left Elsbeth in charge of the McCord party who would see her back to her distracted parents, while he tramped over the mountains towards Reastown and Fort Littleton, by the shortest route to the Cumberland Valley.

BILL BREWER, “HICK” PREACHER

XII Girty’s Notch

The career of Simon Girty, otherwise spelled Girtee and Gerdes, has become of sufficient interest to cause the only authoritative biography to sell at a prohibitive figure, and outlaw or renegade as he is called, there are postofficespostoffices, hotels, streams, caves and rocks which perpetuate his name throughout Pennsylvania.

Simon Gerdes was born in the Cumberland Valley on Yellow Breeches Creek, the son of a Swiss-German father and an Irish mother. This origin guaranteed him no high social position, for in the old days, in the Cumberland Valley, in particular, persons of those racial beginnings were never accepted at par by the proud descendants of Quakers, Virginia Cavaliers, and above all, by the Ulster Scots. After the world war similar beginnings have correspondingly lowered in the markets of prestige, and a century or more of gradual family aggrandizement has gone for nil, the social stratification of pre-Revolutionary days having completely re-established itself.

UnfortunatelyUnfortunately for Simon Gerdes, or Girty, as he was generally called, he was possessed of lofty ambitions, he aimed to be a military hero and a man of quality, like the dignified and exclusive gentry who rode about the valley on their long-tailed white horses and 162carried swords, and were accompanied by retainers with long rifles. There must have been decent blood in him somewhere to have brought forth such aspirations, but personally he was never fitted to attain them. He had no chance for an education off there in the rude foothills of the Kittochtinnies; he was undersized, swarthy and bushy headed; his hands were hairy, and his face almost impossible to keep free of black beard. Analyzed his features were not unpleasant; he had deepset, piercing black eyes, a prominent aquiline nose, a firm mouth and jaw, and his manner was quick, alert and decisive.

Such was Simon Girty when his martial dreams caused him to leave home and proceed to Virginia to enlist in the Rifle Regiment. A half century of Quaker rule in Pennsylvania had failed to disturb the tranquility of the relations between whites and Indians, but in the Old Dominion, there was a constant bickering with the redskins along the western frontier.

As Girty was a sure shot, he was eagerly accepted, and in a short time was raised to the grade of Corporal. Accompanied by a young Captain-lieutenant named Claypoole, he was sent to the Greenbrier River country to convey a supply train, but owing to the indifference of the officer, the train became strung out, and the vanguard was cut off by Indians, and captured, and the rearguard completely routed.

As Girty happened to be the vidette, the Captain-lieutenant, who was in the rear and should have come 163up and seen that his train traveled more compactly, had a splendid opportunity to shift the blame. An investigation was held at Spottsylvania, presided over by a board of officers recently arrived from England, who knew nothing of border warfare, and were sticklers for caste above everything else.

Someone had to be disciplined, and if a fellow could be punished and a gentleman exculpated, why then of course, punish the fellow. This was speedily done, and Girty was taken out before the regiment, stripped of his chevrons, denounced by the Colonel, forced to run the gauntlet, Indian style, and drummed out of camp.

Girty, though humiliated and shamed, felt glad that he was not shot; he would have been had he been actually guilty of neglect; he was punished as badly as an innocent man dare be punished to shield a guilty superior. After receiving his dishonorable discharge, Girty sorrowfully wended his way back to the parental home on the Yellow Breeches, his visions of glory shattered. He did not tell his parents what had happened, but they knew that something had gone wrong, and pitied him, as only poor, lowly people can pity another.

Henry Fielding, a gentleman born and bred, has said: “Why is it that the only really kindly people are the poor,” and again, “Why is it that persons in high places are always so hard?”

About this time Simon Girty found work breaking colts on the estate of an eccentric character named 164Gaspar, known in the Cumberland Valley as “French Louis,” who resided near the mouth of Dublin Gap, on the same side of the trail, but nearer the valley than the present Sulphur Springs Hotel. All that remains of his ambitious chateau is the chimney, which was recently photographed by Professor J. S. Illick, head of the research bureau of the State Department of Forestry.

“French Louis” Gaspar was a Huguenot, a Gascon, and prided himself on a resemblance to Henry of Navarre, and wore the same kind of fan-shaped, carefully brushed beard. His wife was also of French origin, a member of the well-known Le Tort family, and a woman of some education and character. They had several daughters, all of whom married well, and at the time of Girty’s taking employment, but one was at home–the youngest–Eulalie.

She was a slim, dark girl, with hair and eyes as black as Girty’s, a perfect mate in type and disposition. It is a curious thing while unravelling these stories of old time Pennsylvania, that in seeking descriptions of the personal appearance (which is always the most interesting part) of the persons figuring in them at an early day, scarcely any blondes are recorded; the black, swarthy Indian-like visages so noticeable to strangers traveling through Pennsylvania today, were also prevalent, commonly met with types of our Colonial period.

Eulalie Gaspar could see that there was something on Girty’s mind, and tried to be kind to him 165and encourage him, but she asked no questions, and he volunteered no information. If he had not received such a complete social setback at Spottsylvania, the youth might have aspired to the girl’s hand, but he now was keenly aware of the planes of caste, realizing that he stood very low on the ladder of quality.

He seemed to be improving in spirits under the warm sun of encouragement at Chateau Gaspar, as “French Louis” liked to call his huge house of logs and stone, for the Huguenot adventurer was much of a Don Quixote, and lived largely in a world of his own creation. Eulalie, hot-blooded and impulsive, often praised his prowess as a horseman, and otherwise smiled on him.

There was a great sale of Virginia bred horses being held in the market place at Carlisle, and, of course, “French Louis” mounted on a superbly caparisonedcaparisoned, ambling horse, and wearing a hat with a plume, and attended by Simon Girty, were among those present.

The animals ranged from packers and palfreys to fancy saddlers of the high school type, and although Gaspar had every stall full at home, and some wandering, hobbled about the old fields, he bought six more at fancy prices, and it would be an extensive task to return them safely to the stables at the “Chateau”.

It was near the close of the sale when a young Virginian named Conrad Gist or Geist, one of the sellers of horses, who had been a sergeant in Girty’s 166regiment, and witnessed his degradation at Spottsylvania, came up, and in the presence of the crowd, taunted young Simon on being court-martialed and kicked out of camp.

Girty, though the humiliating words were said among divers of his friends, bit his lips and said nothing at the time. Later in the tap room, when “French Louis” was having a final jorum before starting homeward, the Virginian repeated his taunts, and Girty, though half his size, slapped his face. Gist quickly drew a horse pistol from one of the deep pockets of his long riding coat, and tried to shoot the affronted youth. Girty was too quick for him, and in wresting the pistol from his hand, it went off, and shot the Virginian through the stomach. He fell to the sanded floor, and was soon dead.

Other Virginians present raised an outcry, in which they were upheld by those of similar social status in the fraternity of “gentlemen horse dealers” residing at Carlisle. Threats were made to hang Girty to a tree and fill him full of bullets. He felt that he was lucky to escape in the melee, and make for the mountains. Public opinion was against him, and a reward placed on his head. Armed posses searched for him for weeks, eventually learning that he was being harbored by a band of escaped redemptioners, slaves, and gaol breakers, who had a cabin or shack in the wilds along Shireman’s Creek. It was vacated when the pursuers reached it, but they burnt it to the ground, as well as 167every other roof in the wilds that it could be proved he had ever slept under.

By 1750 he became known as the most notorious outlaw in the Juniata country, and pursuit becoming too “hot”, he decided to migrate west, which he did, allying himself with the Wyandot Indians. He lived with them a foe to the whites, more cruel and relentless, the Colonial Records state, than his adopted people.

Some of his marauding expeditions took him back to the Susquehanna country, and he made several daring visits to his parents, on one of which he learned to his horror and disgust, that Eulalie Gaspar, while staying with one of her married sisters at Carlisle, had met and married the now Captain Claypoole, the author of his degradation, who had come there in connection with the mustering of Colonial troops.

During these visits Girty occupied at times a cave facing the Susquehanna River, in the Half Fall Hills, directly opposite to Fort Halifax, which he could watch from the top of the mountain. The narrow, deep channel of the river, at the end of the Half Fall Hills, so long the terror of the “up river” raftsmen, became known as Girty’s Notch. The sinister reputation of the locality was borne out in later years in a resort for rivermen called Girty’s Notch Hotel, now a pleasant, homelike retreat for tired and thirsty autoists who draw birch beer through straws, and gaze at the impressive scenery of river 168and mountain from the cool, breezeswept verandas.

But the most imposing of all is the stone face on the mountain side, looking down on the state road and the river, which shows clearly the rugged outlines of the features of the notorious borderer. An excellent photograph of “Girty’s Face” can be seen in the collection of stereoscoptic views possessed by the genial “Charley Mitchell” proprietor of the Owens House, formerly the old Susquehanna House, at Liverpool.

It was after General Braddock’s defeat in 1755 that Captain, now Major Claypoole, decided to settle on one of his parental estates on the Redstone River, (now Fayette County) in Western Pennsylvania. Being newly wedded and immensely wealthy for his day, he caused to be erected a manor house of the showy native red stone, elaborately stuccoed, on a bluff overlooking this picturesque winding river. He cleared much land, being aided by Negro slaves, and a horde of German redemptioners.

When General Forbes’ campaign against Fort Duquesne was announced in 1757, he decided to again try for actual military laurels, though his promotion in rank had been rapid for one of his desultory service; so he journeyed to Carlisle, and was reassigned to the Virginia Riflemen, with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel of Staff.

He was undecided what to do with his young wife in his absences, but as she had become interested in improving “Red Clay Hall,” as the new estate was 169called, he decided to leave her there, well guarded by his armed Virginia overseers. The Indians had been cleared out of the valley for several years, and were even looked upon as curiosities when they passed through the country, consequently all seemed safe on that score.

However, while Lieutenant-Colonel Claypoole was at Carlisle, before the Forbes-Bouquet Army had started westward, an Indian with face blackened and painted, in the full regalia of a chief, appeared at the door of “Red Clay Hall” and asked to see the lady of the manor, with whom he said he was acquainted–that she would know him by the name of Suckaweek.

This was considered peculiar, and he was told to wait outside, until “her ladyship” could be informed of his presence. Eulalie Gaspar Claypoole, clad in a gown of rose brocade, was in her living room on the second story of the mansion, an apartment with high ceilings and large windows, which commanded a view of the Red Stone Valley, clear to its point of confluence with the lordly Monongahela. She was seated at an inlaid rosewood desk, writing a letter to her husband, when the German chief steward entered to inform her of the strange visitor waiting on the lawn, whom she would know by the name of Suckaweek.

Taking the quill pen from her lips, for she had been trying to think of something to write, the dark beauty directed the steward to admit the visitor at 170once, and show him into the library. Hurrying to a pier glass, she adjusted her elaborate apparel, and taking a rose from a vase, placed it carefully in her sable hair, before she descended the winding stairway.

“Suckaweek” (Black Fish), which was a pet name she used to call Girty in the old days, was waiting in the great hall, and the greeting between the ill-assorted pair seemed dignified, yet cordial. They spent the balance of the afternoon between the library and strolling over the grounds, admiring the extensive views, dined together in the state dining room, and the last the stewards and servants saw of them, when informed their presence would be no longer required, was the pair sitting in easy chairs on either side of the great fireplace, both smoking long pipes of fragrant Virginia tobacco.

In the morning the Indian and Madame Claypoole were missing, and an express was sent at once to Carlisle to acquaint the Colonel with this daring abduction of a lady of quality. The news came as a great shock to the young officer, who obtained a leave of absence and a platoon of riflemen to engage in the search for his vanished spouse.

The marriage had seemed a happy one, but in discussing the case with his father-in-law, “French Louis,” indiscreetly admitted that his daughter had once seemed a little sweet on Simon Girty, the outlaw. All was clear now, the motive revealed.

It was the truth, the lovely “Lady” Claypoole, as she was styled by the mountain folks, had gone off 171with the seemingly uncouth renegade, Simon Girty.

Why she had done so, she could never tell, but doubtless it was a spark of love lain dormant since the old days at Chateau Gaspar, when she had seen the young outlaw breaking her father’s unmanageable colts, that furnished the motive for the elopement.

In the glade, where at an early hour in the morning, Girty and his fair companion joined his entourage of Indians and white outlaws, Simon, in the presence of all, unsheathed his formidable hunting knife, a relic of his first campaign against the Indians when he belonged to the Virginia “Long Knives,” and cut a notch on the stock of his trusty rifle, which was handed to him by his favorite bodyguard, a half Jew, half Indian, named Mamolen, a native of Heidelberg in Berks County.

Although during the past eight years he had personally killed and scalped over a hundred Indians and whites, Girty had never, as the other frontiersmen always did, “nicked” his rifle stock.

Turning to Lady Claypoole with a smile, he said: “Some day I will tell you why I have cut this notch; it is a long and curious story.”

In order to have her safe from capture or molestation, Girty took the woman on a lengthy and perilous journey to Kentucky, “the dark and bloody ground.” To the country of the mysterious Green River, in what is now Edmonson County, land of caves, and sinks, and knobs, and subterranean lakes 172and streams, amid hardwood groves and limestone, he built a substantial log house, where he left her, protected only by the faithful Mamolen, while he returned to fight with the French and Indians along the banks of the Ohe-yu, “The Beautiful River.”

The defeat of the allied forces by the British, and the abandonment of Fort Duquesne, were sore blows to Simon Girty’s plans and hopes, but his position and prestige among the Indians remained undimmed.

Claypoole, though promoted to full Colonel, did not take part in any of the battles, being intermittently off on leave, hunting for his recreant wife, and spluttering vengeance against “that snake, that dog, Girty,” as he alternately called him. It seemed as if the earth had swallowed up the lovely object of the outlaw’s wiles, for though Girty himself was heard of everywhere, being linked with the most hideous atrocities and ambushes, no Indian prisoner, even under the most dreadful torture, could reveal the Lady Claypoole’s whereabouts. The reason for that was only two persons in the service knew, one was Mamolen, the other Girty, and Mamolen remained behind with the fair runaway.

It was not until after the final collapse of the French power in 1764, and the western country was becoming opened for settlement, that Colonel Claypoole received an inkling of Eulalie’s whereabouts. It did not excite his curiosity to see her again, or bring her back, but merely fired his determination the 173more to even his score with Girty. When he was sober and in the sedate atmosphere of his correctly appointed library on Grant’s Hill, in the new town of Pittsburg, he realized how foolish it would be toto journey to the wilds to kill “a scum of the earth,” he a gentleman of many generations of refined ancestry, all for a “skirt” as he contemptuously alluded to his wife.

But when in his cups, and that was often, he vowed vengeance against the despoiler of his home, and the things he planned to do when once he had him in his clutches would have won the grand prize at a Spanish Inquisition.

If it was Girty’s destiny to notch his rifle once, Nemesis provided that Colonel Claypoole should also have that rare privilege. At a military muster on the Kentucky side of Big Sandy, during the Revolutionary War, Simon Girty boldly ventured to the outskirts of the encampment, to spy on the strength and armament of the patriot forces, as he had done a hundred times before. Colonel Claypoole, riding on the field on his showy, jet black charger, noticed a low-brewed face, whiskered like a Bolshevik, peering out through a clump of bushes. Recognizing him after a lapse of over a quarter of a century, he rode at him rashly, parrying with the flat blade of his sabre, the well directed bullet which Girty sent at him. Springing from his mount, which he turned loose, and which ran snorting over the field, with pistol in one hand, sabre in the other, he rushed into 174the thicket, and engaged his foe in deadly combat. He was soon on top of the surprised Girty, and stamping on him, like most persons do with a venomous snake, at the same time shooting and stabbing him.

When his frightened orderly, leading the recaptured charger, rode up, followed by a number of excited officers and men, and drew near to the thicket, they were just in time to see Colonel Claypoole emerging from it, red-faced but calm, carrying a long rifle.

“I see you have put a notch in it already,” said one of his companions, as he eagerly wrung his hand.

“So I perceive,” replied the Colonel, “but it was hardly necessary, for I have only killed a snake.”

There are some who say that Colonel Claypoole’s victim was not Simon Girty at all, but merely a drunken settler who was coming out of the bushes after a mid-day nap, and a coincidence that the fellow was armed with a rifle on which there was a single nick. Yet for all intents and purposes Colonel Claypoole had killed a good enough Simon Girty, and had his rifle to prove it.

Other reports have it that Simon Girty survived the Revolution, where he played such a reprehensive part, to marry Catharine Malott, a former captive among the Indians, in 1784, and was killed in the Battle of the Thames, in the War of 1812.

C. W. Butterworth in his biography of the Girty family, says that Simon, in later life, became totally blind, dying near Amlerstburg, Canada, February 18, 1818, was buried on his farm, and a troop of British soldiers from Fort Malden fired a volley at his grave.

XIII Poplar George

“I have been reading your legends of the old days in the ‘North American,’”American,’” said the delegate to the Grange Convention, stroking his long silky mustache, “and they remind me of many stories that my mother used to tell me when I was a little shaver, while we were living on the Pucketa, in Westmoreland County. There was one story that I used to like best of all. It was not the one about old Pucketa the Indian warrior for whom the run was named, but about a less notable Indian, but more esteemed locally, known as ‘Poplar George.’

“It isn’t nearly as interesting an Indian story as the one that Emerson Collins tells, of the time when his mother, as a little girl on the Quinneshockeny, went to the spring for a jug of water, finding a lone Indian sitting there all by himself, looking as if he was in deep thought. As he made no move to molest her, she filled her jug, and then scampered back to the house as fast as she could tote the jug there.

“She was a little shy about telling of her strange experience, but finally, when she mentioned the subject, her mother said, ‘maybe the poor fellow was hungry.’ Quickly spreading a ‘piece,’ she hurried back to the spring, but no Indian was to be found, only a few prints of his mocassined feet in the soft earth by the water course. If it hadn’t been for those 176footprints she would have always felt that she had not seen a real live Indian, but a ghost.

“It was the last Indian ever heard of on the Quinneshockeny, and he had probably come back to revive old memories of his happy childhood. No, Poplar George was hardly like Emerson Collins’ ‘last Indian,’ as he, my mother averred, was part Indian, part ghost. He was also the last Indian that ever visited the Pucketa, which had been a famous stream in its day for redmen, from the time when old Pucketa, himself, came there to spend his last days, after having been driven out from his former hunting grounds at the head of Lost Creek, which runs into the ‘Blue Juniata’ above Mifflintown.

“The principal part of this story revolves around two large trees that used to stand near the Pucketa, one a big tulip or ‘whitewood’ tree, hollow at the butt, so much so that a half grown person could hide in it, and a huge water poplar tree, or ‘cottonwood,’ a rare tree in Pennsylvania, you know, that stood on lower ground directly in line with it, but on the far side of the creek, which ran parallel with the road. It wasn’t much of a road in those days, I’m told, isn’t much of one yet, little better than a cow path, with grass and dandelions growing between the wagon tracks, and worn foot-path on the creek side of it. Many’s the time I’ve gone along that path to and from school, or to fetch the cows.

AGED FLAX-SPINNER AT WORK, SUGAR VALLEY

“In my boyhood there were two big stumps which always arrested my attention, the stumps of the ‘cottonwood’ 177and the tulip which I have already mentioned. The native poplar stump, which was chopped breast high for some reason, had been cut before my day, but the tulip tree had stood a dead stab for many years, and was not finally cut until my babyhood. I was too young to recall it, and its stump had been sawed off almost level with the ground.

“When my mother was old enough to notice things, say along six, or seven or eight years of age, both trees was standing, and despite their venerable age, were thrifty and green; the hollow trunk of the tulip did not seem to lessen its vitality. Trees in those days, of all kinds, were pretty common, and regarded as nuisances; the farmers were still having ‘burning bees’ in the spring and fall when all hands would join in and drag with ox-spans the logs of the trees that had been cut when they were clearing new ground, and making huge bonfires, burn them like a modern section foreman does a pile of old railroad ties, and by the way, the time is going to come soon when tie burners will be as severely condemned as the instigators of the ‘burning bees’ in the olden days.

“Trees were too plentiful to attract much attention or create affection or veneration, but these two trees had a very special human interest.

“Long after the Indians passed out of our country they came back as ghosts or ‘familiars,’ just as the wolves, panthers and wild pigeons do, so that the stories of folks seeing them after they became extinct, while not literally true, are in a sense correctcorrect. Closely 178associated with the life of the big cottonwood was an old Indian, mother said; he wasn’t a real live Indian, yet not a ghost, was probably a half ghost, half Indian, if there could be any such thing.

“The tulip tree was inhabited by a very attractive spirit, an Indian girl, an odd looking one too, for her smooth skin was only a pumpkin color and her eyes a light blue. They all called her ‘Pale Eyes,’ and she was described as slight, winsome and wonderfully pretty. The Indian man, because he spent so much time under the cottonwood or water poplar, became generally known as ‘Poplar George.’ He would appear in the neighborhood early in the spring, in time to gather poke, milkweed, dandelion and bracken for the farmer’s wives, and to teach the young folks to fish, to use the bow and arrow, and snare wild pigeons and doves.

“It was a sure sign of spring when the young people would see him squatting before a very small fire of twigs under the still leafless branches of the ancient poplar tree. He would remain about all summer long, helping with the harvest, so he must have been real flesh and blood, in a sense, and in the fall he gathered nuts, and later cut some cordwood for those who favored him–but in truth he never liked hard, downright work overly much.

“He was a creature of the forests and streams. When he went away in the fall, after the wild pigeons had left, he always said that he wintered south, on the Casselman River, where the weather was not so 179severe, in that wonderful realm of the Pawpaw, the Persimmon and the Red Bud.

“Often when he took the young folks of the neighborhood on fishing trips, and his skill with the angle and fly were unerring, the pretty Indian maiden, ‘Pale Eyes,’ would turn up, and be with the party all day. When asked who she was, he would sometimes say that she was his daughter, other times his nieceniece, or grand-daughter, but when anyone asked of ‘Pale Eyes,’ she would shake her pretty head, indicating that she only spoke the Indian language. Poplar George could speak Dutch and a little English.

“No one knew where Poplar George slept, if it wasn’t in the open, under the cottonwood tree. If he slept in barns, or under haystacks, no one had ever seen him coming or going, but a detail like that, mattered nothing as long as he was kindly and harmless, and took good care of the children.

“He was a master of woodcraft, much like that old Narragansett Indian ‘Nessmuk,’ who furnished the late George W. Sears with his inspiration as well as ‘nom de plume.’ Poplar George could call the wild birds off the trees, so that they would feed on the ground before him, the squirrels and even the shy chipmunks climbed all over him, and extracted nuts from his pockets.

"The old Indian was an odd person to look at, so my mother said; of medium height, meagre, wrinkled and weazened, tobacco colored, with little black shoe-button eyes, and a sparse mustache and beard. He 180dressed in rags, and was often bare-footed, yet he never complained of the cold. He was always jolly and cheerful, had always been the same; he had been coming to the Pucketa Valley for several generations before my mother’s day; in fact, no one could remember when he hadn’t been there, but that wasn’t saying much, as it was a new country, dating only from the time when Pucketa and his tribesmen had enjoyed it as a hunting ground for big game.

"Once when some hunters killed a bear, they were going to nail the paws on the end of a log barn, but Poplar George begged for them, and invited the children to a feast of ‘bear paw cutlets’ under the cottonwood tree. My mother sat beside ‘Pale Eyes,’ and took a great fancy to her; she was able to talk with her in sign language, and Poplar George, seeing how well they got on together, occasionally interpreted for them.

"Mother managed to learn that ‘Pale Eyes’’ abode was in a huge hollow tulip tree, but that she, too, wintered in the south, but beyond the Maryland line. Those were all gloriously care-free, happy days, and my mother, in later life, never tired talking about them.

"Once in the fall when the buckwheat harvest was in progress, millions of wild pigeons came in, and mother could never forget the sight of old Poplar George sitting on a ‘stake and rider’ fence, with a handsome cock pigeon resplendent with its ruddy breast, pearchedpearched on one of his wrists, while it pecked 181at some buckwheat seeds in his other hand. Beside him sat the demure ‘Pale Eyes,’ a speckled squab of the year in her lap, stroking it, while other pigeons, usually so wild, were feeding in the stubble about them, or perched on the stakes of the fence.

"Some of the boys of sixteen years or thereabouts, grown lads they seemed to my mother, wanted to be attentive to ‘Pale Eyes,’ but she was so shy that she never let them get close to her. As it was a respectable backwoods community, and all minded their own business, no further efforts were made to have her mingle in society.

"There was a rich boy, Herbert Hiltzheimer from Philadelphia, whose father was a great land owner, and who sometimes came with his parents to stay with their Agent while inspecting their possessions, who, at first sight of ‘Pale Eyes,’ fell violently in love with her. On rainy days he was not allowed out of doors, and sent word to Poplar George that ‘Pale Eyes’ should go to the Agent’s house, and play with him. Old Poplar George replied that he was willing if his niece would consent, but she always ran away into the depths of the forest, and was never once induced to play with him indoors. She did not dislike the city boy, only was very timid, and was afraid to go inside of a house.

"My mother was made a confidante of by Herbert,who,who offered her five dollars, a collosalcollosal sum in those days, if she would induce ‘Pale Eyes’ to at least come into the Agent’s yard, and play with him alone. 182He had her name cut on everything, even on the window frames, and wrote verses about her which he carried in his pocket, and sometimes tried to read to her.

"In the fall he was taken back to Philadelphia to school, but said that, the evening before, when he walked up the lane, weeping over his misfortune, he opportunately met the fair Indian maid alone at the tulip tree, and actually kissed her. She broke away and ran into the hollow trunk, and while he quickly followed her into the aperture, she had disappeared.

"The lands on which the cottonwood and the tulip tree stood were a part of a farm belonging to ’Squire George Garnice, an agreeable, but easy going old gentleman, who never learned to say ‘no’ to any one, though not much to his detriment for he was very generally respected.

"One fall some of the Fiedler boys suggested to him, that he let them go on his property and cut up a lot of old half-dead good-for-nothing trees for cordwood and of course he assented. The first tree they attacked was Poplar George’s favorite, the mighty cottonwood. They were skilled axemen, and cut a level stump but too high for these days of conservation.conservation. Soon the big poplar was down, and the boys were trimming off the sweeping branches. Before cutting into stove lengths, they hopped across the creek and started on their next victim, the hollow tulip tree, the home of ‘Pale Eyes.’

"One of the boys, the youngest, Ed, had gotten 183a new cross-cut saw, and begged them to try it on the tulip. They notched, and then getting down on their knees, started to saw a low stump, for some reason or other. They had sawed in quite a distance on both edges of the hollow side when they heard a piteous shrieking and wailing down the road, toward the old ’Squire’s barn.

"Leaving saw, axes and wedges, they ran to where the cries came from, and to their horror, found ‘Pale Eyes’ lying on the grassy bank beside the road at the orchard, her ankles terribly lacerated, front and back, clear in to the bones, and bleeding profusely. On this occasion she was able to speak in an intelligible tongue.

“‘Run quick to the ’Squire’s, and get help,’ she said, in Pennsylvania German; ‘I am dying, but I want something to ease this dreadful pain.’

“The sympathetic boys, without waiting to inquire where she received her greviousgrevious hurts, scurried down the road and through the ’Squire’s gate. The old gentleman was in his library, drawing up a legal document, when the long, lanky youths, hatless and breathless, burst in on him.

“‘Oh, sir,’ they chorused, ‘the Indian girl, ‘Pale Eyes,’ you know, has cut herself, and is dying up the road, and wants help.’

"The ’Squire always kept an old-fashioned remedy chest in his desk, so seizing it, and adjusting his curly wig, so that it would not blow off, he ran out after the nimble mountaineers. As they left the gate 184they saw old Poplar George running across the orchard in the direction of the wounded girl. Evidently he, too, had heard her cries.

"When they reached the spot where marks on the greensward showed where ‘Pale Eyes’ had been lying, she was nowhere to be found, neither was Poplar George. There were no signs of blood, only a lot of sawdust like comes from the workings of a cross-cut saw.

"The old ’Squire was nonplussed, but consented to accompany the boys to the scene of their wood cutting operations. ‘Pale Eyes’ was not there either, nor Poplar George. The newly formed leaves of the cottonwood–it was in the month of May–although the tree had only been cut and sawed into but an hour before, were scorched and withered.

"The ’Squire showed by his face how heartbroken he was to see the two picturesque trees so roughly treated, but he was too kindly and forgiving to chide the boys for their sake. As he was standing there, looking at the ruin, a number of school children, among them my mother, came along, for it was during the noon recess, or dinner hour. They saw the butchered trees, and learned of the events of the morning; several of them, prosaic backwoods youngsters, though they were, shed bitter tears.

“‘Dry your eyes,’ the ‘’Squire urged them, ‘else your people will think that the teacher licked you.’ Then they all chorused that it was a shame to have ruined the retreats of Poplar George and ‘Pale Eyes.’

185“Evidently ’Squire Garnice was wise in the lore of mysticism, for he shook his head sadly, saying, ‘Never mind, you’ll never see Poplar George nor ‘Pale Eyes’ again.’

“It was a dejected company that parted with him at his gate. The old ’Squire was right, for never more was anything seen or heard of Poplar George and the mysterious ‘Pale Eyes.’ They must have been in some unknowable way connected with the lives of those two trees, the cottonwood and the tulip–their lives or spirits maybe, and when they were cut into, their spirits went out with them.

“I knew of a wealthy man who had a cedar tree in his yard, that when he fell ill, the tree became brown, but retained a little life. Finally it was cut down as an eyesore, and the gentleman died suddenly a few days afterward. That tree must have contained a vital part of his spirit.

“By fall the tulip tree looked as if it had been dead for years, and the bark was peeling off. As the wood of the poplar would not burn, and set up a fetid odor, the Fieldler boys never bothered to finish cutting down the hollow tulip tree, of which the shy wood sprite, ‘Pale Eyes,’ had been the essence.

"Much of the mystery and charm of that old grass-grown way along the gently flowing Pucketa had vanished with its Indian frequenters. But the memory of Poplar George and ‘Pale Eyes’ will never be forgotten as long as any of those children who were lucky enough to know them, remain in this world."

XIV Black Alice Dunbar

Down in the wilds of the Fourth Gap, latterly used as an artery of travel between Sugar Valley and White Deer Hole Valley, commonly known as “White Deer Valley,” a forest ranger’s cabin stands on the site of an ancient Indian encampment, the only clearing in the now dreary drive from the “Dutch End” to the famous Stone Church. Until a dozen years ago much of the primeval forest remained, clumps of huge, original white pines stood here and there, in the hollows were hemlock and rhododendron jungles, while in the fall the flickers chased one another among the gorgeous red foliage of the gum trees.

Now much is changed; between “Tom” Harter and “Charley” Steele, and other lumbermen, including some gum tree contractors, little remains but brush and slash; forest fires have sacrificed the remaining timber, and only among the rocks, near the mouth of the gap, can be seen a few original yellow pines, shaggy topped in isolated grandeur. Some day the tragic Indian history of White Deer Hole Valley will come to its own, and present one of the most tragic pages in the narrative of the passing of the red man.

It was into this isolated valley, that terminates 187in Black Hole Valley, and the Susquehanna River, near Montgomery, that numbers of the Monsey Tribe of the Lenni-Lenape, called by some the Delaware Indians, retreated after events subsequent to the Walking Purchase, made them outcasts on the face of the earth. It was not long afterwards that warlike parties of their cruel Nemesis, the Senecas, appeared on the scene, informing the Monseys that they had sold the country to the whites, and if they stayed, it was at their peril.

Even at that early day white men were not wholly absent; they came in great numbers after the Senecas had sold the lands of the Lenni-Lenape to the “Wunnux,” but even coincident with the arrival of the Delawares, a few white traders and adventurers inhabited the most inaccessible valleys.

Alexander Dunbar, a Scotchman, married to a Monsey woman, arrived in White Deer Hole Valley with the first contingent of his wife’s tribes-people, settling near the confluence of White Deer Hole Creek and South Creek. Whether he was any relation to the Dunbar family, who have long been so prominent in this valley is unknown, as his family moved further west, and the last heard of them was when his widow died and was buried in the vicinity of Dark Shade Creek, Somerset County.

Dunbar was a dark, swarthy complexioned man, more like an Indian than a Celt, and dressed in the tribal garb, could easily have passed off as one of the aboriginies. At one time he evidently intended to remain 188in the Fourth Gap, as in the centre of the greenswardgreensward which contained the Indian encampment, he erected a log fortress, with four bastions, the most permanent looking structure west of Fort Augusta. In it he aimed to live like a Scottish Laird, with his great hall, the earthen floor, covered with the skins of panthers, wolves and bears, elk and deer antlers hanging about, and a huge, open fireplace that burned logs of colossal size, and would have delighted an outlaw like Rob Roy MacGregor.

When the Seneca Indians penetrated into the valley they were at a loss at first to ascertain Alexander Dunbar’s true status. If he was related to the prominent Scotch families identified with the Penn Government, he would be let alone, but if a mere friendless adventurer, he would be driven out the same as any one of the “Original People.”

Dunbar was a silent man, and by his taciturnity won toleration for a time, as he never revealed his true position. When the Senecas became reasonably convinced that, no matter who he had been in the Highlands of Scotland, he was a person of no importance in the mountains of Pennsylvania, they began a series of prosecutions that finally ended with his murder. This took its first form by capturing all members of the Lenni-Lenape tribe who ventured into the lower end of the valley, for those who had settled further down, and on the banks of the Susquehanna and Monsey Creek had moved westward when they learned that they had been “sold out.” 189However, the residents of Dunbar’s encampment occasionally ventured down South Creek on hunting and fishing expeditions. When the heads of half a dozen families, and several squaws, young girls and children had been captured, over a dozen in all, and put into a stockade near the present village of Spring Garden, and rumor had it that they were being ill-treated, Alexander Dunbar, carrying a flag of truce, set off to treat with the Seneca Council, at what is now Allenwood, with a view to having them paroled.

The unfortunate man never reached the Senecas’ headquarters, being shot from ambush, and left to die like a dog on the trail, not far from the Panther Spring, above the present John E. Person residence.

While the surviving, able bodied Monseys could have risen and started a warfare, they deemed it prudence to remain where they were, and to make Sugar Valley, and the valleys adjacent to White Deer Creek, their principal hunting grounds.

While Dunbar had lived, squaw man, though he was, he was the leader of the Indians among whom he resided, else they would never have permitted his erecting a pretentious fortress in the midst of their humble tepees of hides and poorly constructed log cabins. At his death the leadership devolved on his eighteen-year-old daughter, “Black Agnes,” his widow being a poor, inoffensive creature, a typical Indian drudge.

“Black Agnes” was even darker complexioned than her father, but was better looking, having fine, 190clear cut features, expressive dark eyes which flashed fire, although she was much below medium height, in fact, no bigger than a twelve-year-old child. She wore her hair in such a tangled way that her eyes, lean cheeks and white throat were half hidden by the masses of her sable tresses. She usually attired herself in a blue coat and cape, a short tan skirt trimmed with grey squirrel tails, and long Indian stockings. She was in miniature a counterpart of Miriam Donsdebes, the beautiful heroine of one of the chapters in this writer’s book “South Mountain Sketches.”

While it may have given the Senecas added cause to repeat their jibe of “old women” at the Lenni-Lenapes, for not avenging Dunbar’s death, it was a case of living on sufferance anyway, and foolish to have attacked superior numbers. The Senecas always had white allies to call on for arms and ammunition, while from the first, the Delawares were a proscribed people, slated to be run off the earth and exterminated.

During this lull, following the Scotchman’s murder, which the Senecas would have doubtless have disavowed, an embassy appeared at the Dunbar stronghold to ask “Black Agnes’” hand in marriage with a young Seneca warrior named Shingaegundin, whom the intrepid young girl had never seen. While it would have been extremely politic for “Black Agnes” to have accepted, and allied herself with the powerful tribe that had wronged her people, she sent back word firmly declining.

After the emissaries departed through the gate of 191the stockade, she turned to her warriors, saying, in the metaphorical language of her race: “The sky is overcast with dark, blustering clouds,” which means that troublesome times were coming, that they would have war.

The embassy returned crestfallen to Shingaegundin, who was angry enough to have slain them all. Instead, he rallied his braves, and told them that if he could not have “Black Agnes” willingly, he would taketake her by force, and if she would not be a happy and complaisant bride, he would tie her to a tree and starve her until she ceased to be recalcitrant.

The bulk of the Monseys having departed from the valleys on both sides of the Susquehanna, to join others of their tribe at the headwaters of the Ohe-yu, left the Dunbar clan in the midst of an enemy’s country, so that it would look like an easy victory for Shingaegundin’s punitive expedition.

“Black Agnes” had that splendid military quality of knowing ahead of time what her adversaries planned to do–whether “second sight” from her Scotch blood, or merely a highly developed sense of strategy, matters not. At any rate, she was ready to deal a blow at her unkind enemies. Therefore she posted her best marksmen along the rocky face of the South Mountains, on either side of Fourth Gap. Behind these grey-yellow, pulpit-shaped rocks, the tribesmen crouched, ready for the oncoming Senecas. “Black Agnes” herself was in personal command inside the stockade, where she was surrounded by a courageous bodyguard twice her size. 192The women, old men and children, were sent to the top of the mountain, to about where Zimmerman’s Run heads at the now famous Zimmerman Mountain-top Hospice. At a signal, consisting of a shot fired in the air by “Black Agnes” herself, the fusillade from the riflemen concealed among the rocks was to begin, to make the Fourth Gap a prototype of Killiecrankie.

In turn the entrance of the Senecas into the defile was to be announced by arrow shot into the air by a Monsey scout who was concealed behind the Raven’s Rock, the most extensive point of vantage overlooking the “Gap.”

When “Black Agnes” saw the graceful arrow speed up into space, she again spoke metaphorically, “The path is already shut up!” which meant that hostilities had commenced, the war begun.

The little war sprite timed her plot to a nicety. When the Senecas were well up in the pass, and surrounded on all sides by the Monseys, whom they imagined all crowded into the stockade, “Black Agnes” fired her shot, and the slaughter began. The Senecas began falling on all sides, thanks to the unerring aim of the Monsey riflemen, but they were too inured to warfare to break and run, especially when caught in a trap.

Shingaegundin, enraged beyond all expression at again being flouted by a woman, and a member of the tribe of “old women,” determined to die gamely, and within the stockade which harbored “Black Agnes.” He seemed to bear a charmed life, for while his cohorts fell about him, he plunged on unhurt. The 193gate of the stockade was open, and “Black Agnes” stood just within it, directing her warriors, a quaint but captivating little figure, more like a sprite or fairy than one of flesh and blood.

OLD CONESTOGA WAGON, BRUSH VALLEY

Shingaegundin espied her, and knew at a glance that this must be the woman who the wise men of his tribe had selected to be his bride, and the cause of this senseless battle. His was a case of love at first sight, the very drollness of her tiny form adding to his passion, and he ran forward, determined to be killed holding her in his arms and pressing kisses on her dusky cheeks.

Such thoughts enhanced his ambition and courage, and he shouted again and again to his braves to pick themselves up and come on as he was doing. Dazed with love, he imagined in a blissful moment that he would yet have the victory and carry “Black Agnes” home under his arm like a naughty child.

Just outside the palisade he was met by three of Agnes’ bodyguard, armed with stone hatchets. None of his warriors were near him; shot and bleeding, they were writhing on the grass, while some were already in the hands of the Monsey braves, who had come down from their eyries, and were dexterously plying the scalping knives. Few of the mutilated Senecas uttered cries, although as the scalps were jerked off, it was hard to suppress involuntary sobs of pain.

“Black Agnes” saw nothing in the long, lank form of Shingaegundin to awaken any love; she detested him as belonging to the race that had sold her birthright and foully murdered her father, and she called 194to her warriors: “Suffer no grass to grow on the war-path,” signifying to carry on the fight with vigor.

Shingaegundin was soon down, his skull battered and cracked in a dozen places. Even when down, his ugly spirit failed to capitulate. Biting and scratching and clawing with his nails like a beast, he had to have his skull beaten like a copperhead before he stretched out a lifeless, misshapen corpse. As he gave his last convulsive kick the Monsey warriors began streaming through the gates, some holding aloft scalps dripping with blood, while others waved about by the scalp locks, the severed heads of their defeated foemen.

Never had such a rout been inflicted on the Senecas; perhaps “Black Agnes” would be a second Jeanne d’Arc, and lead the Lenni-Lenape back to their former glories and possessions!

The victorious Monseys became very hilarious, hoisting the scalps on poles, they shimmied around “Black Agnes,” yelling and singing their ancient war songs, the proudest moment of their bellicose lives.

“Black Agnes” was calm in triumph, for she knew how transitory is life or fame. Biting her thin lips, she drew her scalping knife and bent down over the lifeless form of Shingaegundin, to remove his scalp in as business-like a manner as if she was skinning a rabbit. Addressing the grinning corpse, she said: “Bury it deep in the earth,” meaning that the Seneca’s injury would be consigned to oblivion. Then, with rare dexteritydexterity, she removed the scalp, a difficult task when the skull has been broken in, in so many places.

195Holding aloft the ugly hirsute trophy, she almost allowed herself to smile in her supreme moment of success. Her career was now made; she would rally the widely scattered remnants of the Delawares, and fight her way to some part of Pennsylvania where prestige would insure peace and uninterrupted happiness. But in these elevated moments comes the bolt from the blue.

One of the panic-stricken Senecas, bolting from the ignominious ambush of his fellows, had scrambled up the boulder-strewn side of the mountain, taking refuge behind the Raven’s Rock, lately occupied by the chief lookout of the Monseys–he who had shot the warning arrow into the air. Crouching abject and trembling at first, he began to peer about him as the fusillade ceased and smoke of battle cleared. He saw his slain and scalped clansmen lying about the greensward, and in the creek, and the awful ignominy meted out to his lion-heartedlion-hearted sachem, Shingaegundin. At his feet lay the bow and quiver full of arrows abandoned by the scout when he rushed down pell mell to join in the bloody scalping bee.

The sight of “Black Agnes” holding aloft his chieftain’s scalp, the horribly mutilated condition of Shingaegundin’s corpse, the shimmying, singing Monseys, waving scalps and severed heads of his brothers and friends, all drew back to his heart what red blood ran in his veins.

“Black Agnes” stood there so erect and self-confident, like a little robin red-breast, ready for a potpie, he would lay her low and end her pretensions. Taking 196careful aim, for he was a noted archer, the Seneca let go the arrow, which sped with the swiftness of a passenger pigeon, finding a place in the heart of the brave girl. The tip came out near her backbone, her slender form was pierced through and through. The slight flush on her dark cheeks gave way to a deadly pallor, and, facing her unseen slayer, “Black Agnes” Dunbar tumbled to the earth dead.

The dancing, singing Monseys suddenly became a lodge of sorrow, weeping and wailing as if their hearts would break. The Seneca archer could have killed more of them, they were so bewildered, but he decided to run no further risks, and made off towards his encampment to tell his news, good and bad, to his astounded tribesmen.

When it was seen that “Black Agnes” was no more, and could not be revived, the sorrowful Monseys dug a grave within the stockade. It was a double death for them, as they knew that they would be hunted to the end like the Wolf Tribe that they were, and they had lost an intrepid and beloved leader.

According to the custom, before the interment, “Black Agnes’” clothing was removed, the braves deciding to take it as a present to the dead girl’s mother, to show how bravely she died. They walled up the grave and covered the corpse with rocks so that wolves could not dig it up, graded a nice mound of sod over the top, and, like the white soldiers at Fort Augusta, fired a volley over her grave.

That night there was a sorrowing scene enacted at 197the campground near the big spring at Zimmerman’s Run. The grief-stricken mother wanted to run away into the forest, to let the wild beasts devour her, and was restrained with great difficulty by her tribesmen, who had also lost all in life that was worth caring for, peace and security.

With heavy hearts they started on a long journey for the west, carrying the heart-broken mother Karendonah in a hammock, to the asylum offered to them by the Wyandots on the Muskingum. The bereaved woman carried the blood-stained, heart-pierced raiment of her heroic daughter as a priceless relic, and it was in her arms when she died suddenly on the way, in Somerset County, and was buried beside the trail, on the old Forbes Road. The Monseys, however, took the costume with them as a fetich, and for years missionaries and others interested in the tragic story of “Black Agnes” Dunbar were shown her blue jacket with the hole in the breast where the arrow entered.

That arrow pierced the hearts of all the Monseys, for they became a dejected and beaten people in their Ohio sanctuary.

While it is true that most of the very old people who lived in the vicinity of the Fourth Gap have passed away, it may yet be possible to learn the exact location of the cairn containing the remains of “Black Agnes” and place a suitable marker over it. One thing seems certain, if the tradition of the Lenni-Lenape that persons dying bravely in battle reach a higher spiritual 198plane once their souls are released, her ghost will not have to hunt the hideous, burnt-over slashings that were once the wildly romantic Fourth Gap; it has gone to a realm beyond the destructive commercialism of this dollar-mad age, where beauty finds a perpetual reward and recognition.

XV Abram Antoine, Bad Indian

Abram Antoine, a Cacique of the Stockbridge Tribe of Oneida Indians, had never before while in Pennsylvania been off the watershed of the Ohe-yu, or “The Beautiful River,” called by the white men “Allegheny,” until he accepted the position of interpreter to a group of chiefs from the New York and Pennsylvania Indians, to visit “The Great White Father,” General Washington, at Mount Vernon.

While the General had not been President for several years, and was living in retirement at his Virginia home, the red Chieftains felt that his influence would be such that he could secure redress for their wrongs. Cornplanter had been on many such missions, and come home elated by promises, few of which were ever fulfilled in any shape, and none in their entirety, consequently he declined to accompany the mission on what he termed a “fool’s errand.”

Abram Antoine, through life in New England, New York and Canada, had become much of a linguist, speaking English and French with tolerable fluencyfluency, besides being well versed in the Seneca and other Indian tongues. He was a tall, handsome type of redman, powerfully muscled, his career on “The Beautiful River,” where he rafted and boated between the Reservations 200and Pittsburg, and his service as a ranger for the Holland Land Company, had developed his naturally powerful form to that of a Hercules. Previously he had served in the American Navy, during the Revolutionary War, which had instilled in him a lifetime respect for the name of Washington. He was eager therefore to act as interpreter on an occasion which would bring him into personal contact with the Father of his Country.

The Indians took the usual overland route, coming down the Boone Road, to the West Branch of the Susquehanna at the mouth of Drury’s Run; from there they intended hiking across the mountains to Beech Creek, there to get on the main trail leading down the Bald Eagle Valley to Standing Stone (now Huntingdon), and from thence along the Juniata to Louisbourg, then just beginning to be called Harrisburg. It had been an “open winter” thus far.

At the West Branch they met an ark loaded with coal, bound for Baltimore, in charge of some Germans who had mined it in the vicinity of Mosquito Creek, Clearfield County, near the site of the later town of Karthaus. A friendly conversation was started between the party of Indians on shore and the boatmen, with the result that the pilot of the ark, Christian Arndt, invited the redmen to climb aboardaboard.

The invitation being accepted with alacrity, the ark was steered close to the bank, and the Indians, running out on an uprooted snag which hung over the water, all leaped on the deck in safety. It made a jolly party 201from that moment on. The time passed happily, and many were the adventures and experiences en route. No stops of any consequence were made except at the mouth of Mianquank (Young Woman’s Creek), and Utchowig (now Lock Haven), until the Isle of Que was reached, where other arks and flats and batteaux were moored, and there were so many persons of similar pursuits that a visit on dry land was in order.

There was much conviviality at the public houses of Selin’s Grove, and the Germans amused themselves trying to carry on conversations with the native Pennsylvania Dutchmen, dusky, dark-featured individuals, who saw little affinity between themselves and the fair, podgy “High Germans.” In wrestling and boxing matches, throwing the long ball, running races, and lifting heavy weights, the Germans were outclassed by the native mountaineers, but they took their defeats philosophically. A shooting match was held, at which all the Indians except Abram Antoine held aloof, but his marksmanship was so extraordinary that he managed to tie the score for the up-river team. This was a consolation for the Germans, and they left the Isle of Que well satisfied with their treatment.

Other arks left their moorings at the same time, mostly loaded with grain or manufactured lumber from the Christunn and the Karoondinha, and the fleet was augmented by a batteau loaded with buffalo hides, at the mouth of the West Mahantango. This was the last consignment of Pennsylvania bison hides ever taken to Harrisburg, the animals having been killed at their 202crossing over the Firestone or Shade Mountains, the spring previous.

It was a picturesque sight to see the fleet of arks and other boats coming down the noble river, the flood bank high, driving up flocks of water birds ahead of them, while aloft like aeroplanes guarding a convoy of transports, sailed several majestic American Eagles, ever circling, ever drifting, and then soaring heavenward.

Out from the Juniata came several more arks, consequently the idlers in front of the rivermen’s resorts at “The Ferry,” as some of the old-timers still called Harrisburg, declared that they had never seen a flood bring in a larger flotilla at one time. All, however, were anxious to get in before the river closed up for the winter.

When the up-river ark with its load of Teutons and redmen made its moorings for the night near the John Harris tree, they noticed that all the flags were at half-mast–there were many displayed in those days–and there was a Sunday calm among the crowds lolling along the banks in the wintry sunshine.

“Who’s dead?” inquired Abram Antoine, as he stepped on the dock; his naval training had made him alert to the language of the flag.

“General Washington,” was the awed reply.

The big Stockbridge Indian’s jaw dropped, his lifetime ambition of conversing with the “first in the hearts of his countrymen,” and the purpose of the mission had been thwarted by a Higher Will.

203Turning to the gaudy appareled chief behind him, he conveyed the unhappy message. The Indians shook their heads so hard that their silver earrings rattled, and were more genuinely sorry that Washington was no more than the failure of their quest. All ashore, they held a conclave under the old Mulberry tree, deciding that there was no use to go any further, but would spend a day or two in the thriving new town, Louisbourg or Harrisburg, whichever it was proper to call it, and then return home. There was no use going to Philadelphia again, and a new prophet sat in the chair of the Father of his Country at the Nation’s Capitol.

The party then separated for the present, most of them hurrying to the nearest tavern stands to refresh thirsts made deeper by the sharp, fine air on the river. Abram Antoine stood undecided, one hand resting on the trunk of the historic Mulberry, a crowd of small boys watching him open-mouthed and wide-eyed, at a respectful distance.

Pretty soon he was accosted by a very old, white-bearded Dutchman, with a strip of soiled gray silk on the lapel of his coat, which indicated that he was a veteran of the Royal American Regiment of Riflemen that had figured at Fort Duquesne in 1758. Abram Antoine had seen many such veterans in and about Pittsburg, and held out his hand to the aged military man. The old soldier signalled with his cane that the Indian come and sit with him on a nearby bench, which he did, and they passed an hour pleasantly together.

204The conversation turned principally to soldiering, and then to firearms, and all the ancient makes of rifles were discussed, and their merits and demerits compared. The veteran allowed that the best rifle he had ever owned was of Spanish make, the kind carried by the Highlanders in the campaigns of 1758 and 1763; it was of slim barrel, light and easily handled, and unerring if used by a person of tolerable accuracy.

There was one gunsmith in the alley over yonder, a veteran of the Revolution, named Adam Dunwicke, who made a rifle close to the early Spanish pattern. It was the best firearm being turned out in the State of Pennsylvania. The gunsmith, anyhow, was a man worth knowing, as his shop was filled with arms of many makes and periods, and he liked to talk with any one who was an enthusiast on guns.

Abram Antoine was fired by what the veteran told him, and as it was still early in the afternoon, asked if he would escort him thither. It would be fine if he could get an extra good rifle as a souvenir of his ill-starred trip to Mount Vernon. The old man had too much time on his hands as it was, and was only too glad to pilot the redman to the workshop. They made a unique looking pair together, the old soldier, bent and hobbling along on his staff, the Indian, tall, erect, and in the prime of life. Their high, aquiline noses, with piercing, deep-set eyes, were their sole points of physical similarity.

When they reached the gunshop, in the dark, narrow alley that ran out from Front Street, the veteran 205banged the grimy knocker, and it was almost instantly opened by Dunwicke himself, a sturdy man of medium height, who wore great mustaches, had on a leather apron and his sleeves were rolled up, revealing the brawny biceps of a smith.

Standing by the gunmaker, in the shadowy, narrow entry, was a very pretty girl in a dark blue dress. She was as tall as the smith, but very trim and slight, and her chestnut brown hair was worn low over her ears, throwing into relief her pallid face, and the rather haunted, tired look in her fine grey eyes, the marvelous smooth lines of her chin and throat.

A third figure now emerged from the gloom, a small Negro boy, to whom the girl was handing a letter, with her trembling white hands. As the Indian, the veteran and the gunsmith withdrew into the workroom, Abram could hear her saying to the lad, as she closed the door by way of added emphasis: “Tell him to be sure and come.”

He could hear the footsteps of the girl as she went upstairs, and henceforth he lost most of his interest in the question of obtaining a rifle of the Spanish design. All his designs were elsewhere, and he was glad when the smith suggested they visit another room on the opposite side of the entry, to look at several sets of extra large horns of the grey moose or elk, which had recently come down on an ark from somewhere up Tiadaghton.

As they crossed the hallway, Abram Antoine looked up the flight of stairs–there were three that he could 206make out–wondering on which floor the fair apparition retired to; he presumed pretty near the roof, as he had not heard her on the loose laid floor above the workshop.

When they returned to the gun shop, the Indian, knowing the smith well enough by then, inquired who the lady was whom they had seen in the entry.

“Oh, I don’t quite know what she is,” he replied. “She stays upstairs, under the roof; you know that the upper floors of this building are let for lodgers.”

Instantly a life’s story, tragic or unusual, grouped itself about his image of the girl, and his heart was filled with yearning. He was hoping against hope that she would come down again. He had no excuse to go up, but several times while the smith was chatting with the veteran of the Royal Americans, he managed to wander across the hall, looking up the well towards the grimy skylight, and then took another perfunctory glance at the huge antlers standing against the wall. He prolonged his stay as long as he could, saying that he liked to watch gunmakers at work, and having ordered and paid for a costly rifle, he felt that his presence was justified.

It was well into the gloaming when “knock, knock, knock” on the front door resounded through the hollow old building. Abram Antoine’s blood ran cold; he could have shot the visitor if he was the slender girl’s recalcitrant lover, but fervently hoped that, whoever it was, would have the effect of bringing her downstairs.

True enough, before he could get to the door at the 207smith’s heel, he heard the light, familiar footsteps, and the girl, trying to look unconcerned, was the first to turn the lock.

It was only Simon Harper, a big, lean hunter from Linglestown, over by the Blue Mountain, who had come to take delivery of a rifle made to order.

“Oh, I am so disappointed,” said the girl, as she turned to run upstairs.

The smith was escorting his swarthy customer into the shop. Abram Antoine’s opportunity had come, if ever.

“Do you have the letting of the rooms upstairs?” he said, politely, hat in hand.

The girl looked at him; it was probably the first time during the afternoon that she had noticed his presence, so pre-occupied she had been.

“No,” she said, softly; “the lady lives on the next landing, but I saw her going out.”

Abraham was well aware how closely she had been watching that doorway! “Are there any vacancies?”

The girl dropped her head as if in doubt about carrying on the conversation further, then replied: “I think there are.” “said the Indian.

Whether it was loneliness or desperation at the non-arrival of the person to whom she had sent the letter, or the tall redman’s superlative good looks and genteel demeanor–for a handsome man can attempt what a plain one dare never aspire–at any rate without another 208word, she turned and led the way up the long, steep stairs.

It was with no sense of surprise that she brought him to the top of the house, into her own garret, with its two small dormer windows which gave a view in the direction of the Narrows at Fort Hunter, and the broad, majestic river. There was a narrow bed with a soiled coverlet, a portmanteau, a brass candlestick, and two rush-bottomed chairs, and nothing else in it. In those days lodgers washed at the well in the back yard.

Both sat down as if they had known each other all their lives; the frigid barrier of reserve of a few minutes earlier had broken down. They were scarcely seated when the ominous “Clank, clank, clank,” that the girl had been listening for so intently all afternoon, resounded up the dismal vault of the stairway.

Casting a frightened look at the big Indian, as much as to say, “What will he say if he finds you here?” she bounded out of the room, descending the steps two or three at a time.

Abram Antoine did not take the hint to retire, if such was meant, and sat stolidly in the high-backed, rush-bottomed chair, in the unlighted room. It was only a few minutes until she returned, her face red, all out of breath, carrying the same letter which he had seen her hand to the colored boy earlier in the afternoon.

OLD SCHELLSBURG CHURCH, LINCOLN HIGHWAY

“Not in town, don’t know when he will return,” she was chanting to herself, as she came through the open door. She started back, as if surprised to find her new 209champion still there. Without speaking, she dropped down on the bed, facing him, fanning her flushed cheeks with the envelope, although the little room was quite cold.

“I am sorry that your letter was undelivered,” said Abram Antoine, after a considerable silence. There was another pause, and then the girl, still clutching the fated letter, revealed her story of embarrassment.

“It isn’t a long story,” she began. "My name is Ernestine de Kneuse. My father is the well-known miller and land-owner at New Berlinville, in Berks County–Solomon de Kneuse. About a year ago a young stranger, Carl Nitschman, I think a High German, came to the town, stopping at the ‘Three Friends’ Inn, which it was rumored he was to purchase. While negotiating, he naturally met many of the leading people. He was handsome and engaging, and all the girls went wild over him. It gave me a fiendish pleasure to think that he favored me above the rest, and one afternoon I cut my classes at the Select Academy, where I was in my third year, and went walking with him.

"My father, who belonged to the old school, had a hatred for any one who might even consider going into the liquor business, saw us together and told mother. On reaching home, although I was eighteen and had not had even a spanking for several years, and thought I had outgrown it, my mother took me to my room and administered a good, sound ‘scotching’ with the rod.

"Previously they had forbidden the young man the 210house, and when I informed him how I was treated, he told me if I was disciplined again, to run away.

"Not long afterwards I was kept in at school, and mother accused me of meeting my lover. I told her to go to the school and find out for herself, which she did, but nevertheless that evening my mother visited me in my room with the strap, and walloped me until I was black and blue from shoulders to ankles.

"Meanwhile Carl’s negotiations for the purchase of the tavern had fallen through, and he was preparing to leave for Reading. Through one of my girl friends who was not so strictly raised, I communicated to him the story of this latest indignity, begging him to take me with him. He replied that he would be traveling about for some time before settling down there, but as soon as he was located, he would send me his address, and to come.

"I recall the morning of his departure, how I crawled out of bed before dawn, and pressed my tear-stained face against the window lights as he climbed on the coach at the inn, which was across the street from where we lived, and settling down among his goodly store of bags and boxes, was driven away.

"Weeks passed, and I eventually got a letter through one of my girl friends whose parents were less strict, that he had gone to Harrisburg, and I should join him there. By exercising a great amount of ingenuity, I got out of the house, and on the night stage for Reading, during one of the terrible Equinoctial rains, making close connections with another stage for Harrisburg, 211and I came to my present abode a month before, but have never once seen Nitschman in the interval.

“I’ve now learned that my parents are on my track, and will reach town tonight; I have spent my last cent, and my letters to Nitschman receive no satisfactory answers. I am now penniless, and cannot pay my lodging, have eaten nothing all day, and have no place to go. I would not return for all the world and subject myself to an irate mother.”

The Indian was much interested by the recital, and told her that he had loved her the minute he laid eyes on her, and would marry her if she would return with him to his home, which adjoined the Cornplanter Reservation, in Warren County. “I will marry you right away if you will accept.”

Pressed and harassed on all sides, and hungry as well, Ernestine, looking up into the handsome face of the redman, capitulated. Closing up her scanty belongings in the shabby portmanteau, she went down to the landlady and settled her bill in full out of a “Double Eagle” which Abram gave her, and then the pair quickly left the building. The gunshop was locked, and dark, the veteran of the Royal Americans and the smith had forgotten all about their Indian friend and gone their ways regardless.

They soon found the leading hotel stand, where they enjoyed a good supper and learned of a preacher who would marry them.

Just as they were about to leave the tavern the stage 212from Reading and Stitestown pulled in, horses and running gear all spattered with mud and slush. Among the first to clamber out was old Solomon de Kneuse and his wife, but they gave them the slip in the darkness and confusion.

At the manse, after the ceremony, the clergyman mentioned that his brother was to be a juryman the next day at the trial of Nitschman, the highwayman, who had held up and robbed the aristocratic McAfee family on the road to York Springs. “May he pay dearly for interfering with quality,” he added, seriously.

Ernestine hung her head; she understood now why it was she had been unable to see her lover since she came to the town; he had been in jail, and perhaps she was stung with some tiny feelings of remorse to have renounced him so quickly. However, necessity knows no law, but she thought she knew her man.

Before daybreak the newly married couple were ensconced in the stage bound for Northumberland and Williamsport, and in due course of time reached their future home, just across the river from Corydon.

None of the other Indians returned for several weeks. When they did, they were miserable looking objects from drink, and Abram half blamed himself for not looking after them, but love had blinded him to everything else. He provided a comfortable home for his bride, and as an agent for the Holland Land Company, mingled with respectable people, who were considerate to his wife. Among these were the family of 213Philip Tome, that indomitable Indian-looking Nimrod, author of “Thirty Years a Hunter,” whose prowess in the forests of Northern Pennsylvania will never be forgotten while memory of the big game days lasts.

Ernestine was really happy, and did not aspire to any different lot. Though she was fearless, she hated to be left alone when her husband was absent on inspection trips, and he generally managed to have an Indian boy or girl–one of the O’Bails or Logans–remain with her when he was away.

In due time his handsome Spanish-type rifle, with its stock inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, like the gun of some Moorish Sheik, reached him, and of it he was justly proud, partly because it was the instrument of his meeting Ernestine.

On the first anniversary of their wedding he killed a fine stag with it on the Kinzua, while hunting with Philip Tome. It was in the fall of the second year of their marriage that Abram Antoine was called awayaway during a heavy flood in the Ohe-yu, which flowed in front of their house. Old Shem, the one-eyed, half-breed ferryman, had difficulty in getting him across in the batteau, so swift was the angry current. He was to be gone, as usual, several days.

On the night when she was expecting him home, Ernestine heard a loud knocking at the kitchen door. Opening it she beheld Old Shem standing outside, the rain dripping from his hat and clothing.

“Missus Antoine,” he wheezed, “Abram is over to 214the public house at Corydon, a very sick man, and wants you to come to him at once.”

Ernestine was horrified, but, jerking down her cloak from the nail on which it hung, ran out into the storm, and followed the aged ferryman down the steep bank to the landing. The wind was bellowing terribly among the almost bear hickories and butternuts along the shore, the current was deep, dark and eddying.

When one-third the way over, Old Shem looked up, saying: “Missus, it hain’t Abram that’s sick; it’s your other man, Mister Nitschman, what wants you.” “shouted Ernestine. “I never had any other man. Take me back home at once, you treacherous old snake in the grass.”

Just then a pile of buffalo robes in one end of the deep batteau stirred, and the form of a man arose–Carl Nitschman, back from jail.

“Talk sensibly, Ernestine,” he said. “I have come for you, and will forgive everything. You know you belong to me; your going off with that Indian was all a hasty mistake.”

Ernestine glared at him and again ordered the ferryman to take her home. Instead he seemed to be trying to reach the Corydon shore the faster. Just then Nitschman stepped forward, with arms outstretched, as if to seize her.

The slight and supple Ernestine sprang up on the gunwale, the boat tipped; she either fell or jumped into the dark, swirling current. She was gone before an effort could be made to save her, and the two frightened 215men, white as ghosts, pulled for the light which gleamed through the storm, in the tavern window at Corydon, with redoubled energy. With a thud the prow hit the muddy bank and slid on shore.

To their surprise Abram Antoine was standing on the bank. The one-eyed ferryman began to cry, a strange thing for any one of Indian blood. “I was fetching your wife across to meet you and she fell in the river.”

Just then Nitschman, who had climbed out of the boat, was passing by Antoine, who seized him by the collar. “Who is this son of –--?” demanded the six-foot Indian.

It was then that the ferryman broke down completely and confessed all.

Antoine shook his captive like a rat, and slapped his face many times, eventually tumbling him into the mud and kicking him like a sack of flour. Then, picking up an oar, he beat the ferryman over the head until he yelled for mercy. The noise roused the habitues of the hotel, and as the victims were shouting “murder,” the local Constable, who ran the hotel, placed Abram Antoine under arrest, beginning his fatal brand as “Bad Indian.”

Nitschman did not appear to press the charge next day, and the ferryman apologized for his part in the affair, so Abram was free, minus his beautiful wife and his reputation.

It was beginning with that terrible tragedy that he began to find solace at the tap room of the public house 216at Corydon. Philip Tome and even old Cornplanter himself tried his best to save him, but he became an Indian sot, losing his position with the land company, his home and his self-respect. All that he held on to, and that because being an Indian he was sentimental, was his Spanish rifle with the inlaid stock. He spent more and more of his time in the forests, shunning white people and fraternizing only with his own kind. He made a protege out of young Jim Jacobs, a Seneca hunter of unusual ability, and they spent many weeks at a time in the forests.

To him he confided that before he died he would literally have Nitschman’s scalp, have the blood atonement against the destroyer of his happiness.

A score of years had to pass before he met the ex-highwayman face to face. He had heard of the early exploits of this modern Claude Du Val, who was supposed to have reformed, and his blood boiled that such a villainous wretch could wander about scot free.

It was in the fall of the year, about 1822 or thereabouts, when the great county fair was in progress at Morris Hills, one of the leading towns above the New York State line, adjacent to the Indian reservations. All manner of persons were attracted by the horse races, displays of cattle, Indian foot races and lacrosse games, as well as the more questionable side shows and gambling performances.

Abram Antoine’s Indian friends had been sobering him up for weeks, and he presented a pretty good appearance for a man of over sixty, when he appeared 217to challenge all comers in tests of marksmanship with the rifle. Never had “The Chief,” as everybody called him, done better than the afternoon of the first day of the fair. The wild pigeons were flying high overhead in the clear, blue atmosphere of that fine crisp autumn day, but whenever he turned his rifle upwards he brought one down for the edification and applause of the crowd.

Just as he had shot a pigeon, his keen eye noticed a medium-sized, fair-haired man, loudly dressed, edging hurriedly through the throng, as if trying to get away. Antoine had never seen Nitschman except that night when he had trampled him into the mud, but this fellow’s size and general demeanor Corresponded with his mental conception of the one that he had ever afterwards regretted that he had not slain.

Moving with rapid strides through the crowd, pigmies beside his giant stature, he blocked his little enemy’s further progress. “Nitschman, I believe you are,” he said.

“No, no; that hain’t my name,” spluttered the short man, coloring to the roots of his faded yellow hair.

“Yes, it is, Chief,” yelled a young Indian who was standing close by.

That confirmation was all that Abram Antoine, bad Indian, wanted. Swinging his rifle above the crowd, he brought it down with terrific force on the head of his foe, crashing right through his high, flat brimmed beaver hat and shattering the lock.

To use the language of Jim Jacobs, Nitschman fell to 218the turf like a “white steer,” and laid there, weltering in blood, for he was dead.

All the latent hate and jealousy in the crowd against Indians immediately found vent, and an angry mob literally drove Abram Antoine, bad Indian, out of the fair grounds to the town lockup. It was some time during 1823 that he expiated his crime on the gallows.

XVI Do You Believe in Ghosts?

A. D. Karstetter, painstaking local historian, tells us that there was no more noteworthy spot in the annals of mountainous Pennsylvania than the old Washington Inn at Logansville. Built after the fashion of an ancient English hostelry, with its inn-yard surrounded by sheds and horse stables, it presented a most picturesque appearance to discerning travelers. The passage of time had obliteratedobliterated it, long before the great fire on June 24, 1918, swept the town, removing even the landmarks which would have showed where the old-time inn was situated.

Many are the tales, grave or gay, clustered about its memory, far more, says Mr. Karstetter, than were connected with the Logan Hotel, run by the Coles, which was erected at a much later day, just when the old coaching days were passing out, and the new era coming in. All of the history that grew up about the Washington Inn ante-dated the Civil War, while that of the Logan Hotel was of the period of that war and later. This gives one a good mental picture of the type of legend interwoven with the annals of the ancient Washington Inn.

A winter rain had set in, just at dusk, as the great lumbering five-horse coach (three wheelers and two leaders) from Hightown entered the straggling outkirts 220of Logansville. The post boy on the boot blew his long horn vociferously, waking the echoes up Summer Creek, then back again, clear to the “Grandfather Pine” at Chadwick’s Gap.

A whimsical old German, who worked at Jacob Eilert’s pottery, picked up his old tin horn that he used to blow as a boy when wolves or Indians were about, and answered the clarion in cracked, uncertain notes. Lights glimmered in cabin windows, and many a tallow dip, fat lamp or rushlight was held aloft to get a good view of the coach as it swirled along through the mud, and its crowded company. Everybody was standing up, buttoning their coats and gathering together their luggage, as the big, clumsy vehicle checked up under the swinging sign, on which was painted the well-loved features of the Father of His Country.

The old landlord, his wife and the hostlers and stable boys and household help were outside to assist the travelers to alight and show them into the comfortable glow of the lobby.

“When do you start out in the morning?” all were asking of the rosy-cheeked driver, although the hour for continuing the journey west from Logansville was printed in big letters on the rate card at the posting office at Hightown, as “Sharp, 6.00 A. M.”

In the candle-lit lobby, by a blazing fire of maple logs, the travelers surveyed one another, the landlord and their surroundings. They were an even dozen in number, nine men and three women. Some of the men were hunters and had their Lancaster rifles with them; 221the others commercial travelers. The women were also engaged in business pursuits.

The stage was the sole means of penetrating into the back country, and the canals and the Pennsylvania Central Railroad (now known as the Main Line) the only methods of crossing the Keystone State in those early days.

A good supper was served–hickory smoked ham and eggs, hot cakes and native grown maple syrup, and plentiful libations of original Murray “Sugar Valley” whiskey, which put the huntsmen and the drummers in capital humor. After the meal they brought out their pipes and sat in groups about the fire in the great, low-ceilinged room. The three women, who were middle-aged and of stolid appearance, sat together, talking in undertones.

All at once, when the fire suddenly spluttered up, one of the drummers, a big, black-bearded fellow, said loudly enough so that all could hear–he was evidently trying to make the conversation general–"In the mountains they say that it’s a sign of a storm when the fire jumps up like that."

“And I guess we’re having it,” said another of the travelers, a little man with gray side whiskers, dryly.

Then, as wide shadows fell across the floor, another of the men, a hunter, ventured the remark: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

There was a pause, as if no one wanted to take up such a very personal topic before strangers. It was in the days when the Fox sisters were electrifying all 222of Pennsylvania, including the celebrated Dr. Elisha Kane, with their mediumship, so that it was as popular a topic then as now, in the days of Sir Oliver Lodge and Mrs. Herbine.

At length one of the men, also a hunter, from Berks County, broke the silence by asking if any one present had heard the story of the Levan ghost of Oley Township, in Berks; if not, he would tell it. None had ever heard it, so he told of the young Levan girl who had lost her father, to whom she was particularly attached.

One evening, while milking, she was seized with a very strong feeling that her father was near, which feeling kept up for a week, growing stronger daily. At last one evening she went into her room–the house was built all on one floor–and she saw her father, as natural as life, seated on an old chest that had come from France, for the Levans were Huguenot refugees.

The girl did not seem to be afraid to see her father, about whom a light seemed to radiate, and they conversed some time together, mostly on religious topics. Her mother and sisters, who were in another room, heard her talking, and the voice which sounded like that of the departed, and came to the door, which was ajar.

“Who are you talking to?” the mother inquired.

“To father–he is here; come in and see him,” replied the girl, calmly.

The family was afraid to enter, remaining outside until the conversation had finished and the ghost vanished. When the girl rejoined them, the side of her 223face that had been turned to her father was slightly scorched or reddened, as if she had been close to a fire. And that tenderness of skin remained as long as she lived.

While other versions of the story have appeared, this is the way it was told that stormy night in the Washington Inn in the long ago.

The ice having been broken, one of the women spoke up, saying that the part of the story which told of the girl’s face being burned by the aura from the ghost interested her most, that over in the Nittany Valley there was a case in the old Carroll family of a woman who had an only child which she loved to distraction, but which unfortunately died. The mother took on terribly, and during the night when she was sitting up with the little corpse, besought it to prove to her that the dead lived, if only for just one minute.

In the midst of her weeping and wailing, and romping about the cold, dimly-lit room, the dead child rose up in its little pine box and motioned its sorrowing mother to come to it. The woman ran to the coffin and the little one touched her forehead with its finger, which burned her like a red-hot poker. Then it sank back with a gasp and a groan, and was dead again. Ever afterwards there was a sore, tender spot on the woman’s forehead where the corpse had touched it.

Then another of the women told how she had been selling Bibles in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and one of the wheels of her carriage became dished from the bad roads. She had tried to put up 224with a mountaineer who would not take her in, and gave her the choice of sleeping in the barn with the team and the driver, or to occupy a room in a deserted Negro “quarters” across the road.

All night long she had been annoyed by her candles being blown out and the door blowing open, though she locked it time and again.

It was a commonplace sort of a ghost story, and one of the hunters yawned at its conclusion. The evening’s reminiscences might have ended then and there if the third woman traveler, the youngest and sturdiest of the lot, who thus far had been the quietest, turned to the landlord, who sat smoking in the settle, with a couple of his guests, asking him if he remembered the Big Calf.

“What do you know about the Big Calf?” he said, quizzically, looking at the woman in order to see if he could recognize her.

“I know as much as you do, I reckon,” she said. “I lived in this town for a year learning millinery with Emilie Knecht.” “said the landlord.

“I surely am,” responded the woman, “and I knew you well, Jakey Kleckner, in those days.” “said the boniface, sitting up very straight.

INTERIOR OF SCHELLSBURG CHURCH

“Long years ago,” began the business woman, "when this public house was first opened, the landlord’s cow gave birth to an unusual calf. At six weeks it was as 225big as most heifers of six months, and it was handsome and intelligent, a brown-gray color–‘Brown Swiss’ they called the breed. All the drovers and cattle buyers in the mountains wanted that calf for a show, and her fame spread all over the ‘five counties.’

"There were two buyers from out about Greensburg that came in all the ways to get her, but the price was too steep. They hung around all day, drinking with the landlord in the tap room, and though he took too much in this drunken bout, kept enough of his wits with him to refuse to lower the price one shilling. The next morning he had to go away on important business, and in the afternoon the drovers returned, telling the landlord’s wife that they had met her husband on the road, and he had consented to accept a lower figure.

"The woman replied that while she was sorry her ‘man’ had shown such weakness to change his mind so quickly, when on leaving he had told her that he had been sickened by the importunities of the two strangers the day before, yet she claimed, the calf as hers and it would not leave the premises for any price, and except over her dead body. She prized it especially since she had also raised the mother, which had recently been killed by a wandering panther.

"The men departed in an ugly mood. When the boniface returned in the evening he was indignant at what his wife told him; he had not met the drovers on the road, and if he had, the calf was not for sale.

"Shortly after his arrival a German Gypsy, one of the Einsicks, appeared in the inn-yard with a big she-bear, 226a brown one, which he took about the mountains to dance and amuse the crowds at public houses, fairs and political meetings. The stables were full, but after some arguing the landlord consented to let the bear occupy the box stall where he kept the Big Calf, which he removed to the smoke house.

"During the night, which was very dark, the covetous drovers returned, and, not knowing of the Big Calf’s changed quarters, one of them went into steal it. In the darkness the bear seized him and hugged him almost to death. His companion, vexed at his slowness in fetching out the Big Calf, called to him, and he made known his predicament.

"There was no way to free the captive but to begin clubbing the bear, which set up such a loud growling that it aroused the owner and the landlord, who ran out with pistols, just in time to see the two would-be cattle thieves decamping from the inn-yard. They both fired after them, but the scoundrels got off scot free. They never returned.

"The Big Calf grew into a very handsome cow, and was the pride of the mountain community. It was always brought in from pasture at night and milked, lest it share its mother’s fate and be pulled down by a Pennsylvania lion.

"One evening, while the landlord’s only daughter, a very pretty, graceful girl, was driving the cow home, she was joined by a handsome, dark-complexioned young man, mounted on a superb black horse. He accompanied her to the stables, where he watched her 227milk, and then put up for the night at the inn. Next day he became very sick, and several doctors were called in, who bled him, but could not diagnose his ailment.

"Meanwhile he proposed marriage to the landlord’s daughter, who nursed him, pretending that he was a young man of quality from Pittsburg, which flattered the innkeeper and his daughter mightily.

"All this while he was trying to learn if the landlord kept any large sum of money in the house. It was not long until the girl confided to him that her father had gone into debt buying a farm in Nippenose Bottom, as he wanted to retire from the tavern business. It was there where he was when the two dishonest drovers from Greensburg had returned and tried to euchre his wife out of the Big Calf.

"Satisfied that there was no booty in the house, the fellow rose one morning before daybreak, dressed quietly, although the girl was in the room, wrote a note to her which he left on the clothes press, and made his escape. The wording of the letter ran about as follows:

“‘Dearest Love:–I am sorry to have left without saying goodbye, but my intentions were not sincere, for while I admired your beauty and good sense, which none can deny, I was only here to find out where your father kept his money. But since he has none, and has gone into debt, I need remain no longer. I thank you for all the information you gave me, and for your kind attentions. Gratefully yours, David Lewis.’

“The poor girl had been one of the dupes of the 228celebrated ‘Lewis the Robber,’ or some one impersonating him, as he had many alter egos, some more daring than himself, and understudies. If half the stories told of his exploits were true, he would have had to be a hundred years old to do them, and get to so many places.

"At any rate, the pretty girl was frightfully cut up by her misfortune, and took to the bed lately vacated by ‘Lewis.’ She had told all of her friends that she was to marry in a fortnight, and go to live in a big house on Grant’s Hill, Pittsburg, and it was all terrible and humiliating. Rather than let the real story get out, the girl’s parents connived with her to say that word had been brought that the young gentleman, while riding near Standing Stone Town, had been thrown from his horse and killed. Hence when the girl was able to reappear, she was dressed in black, as if in mourning for her dashing sweetheart.

"The first time she came out of doors she went for a walk alone just about dusk, so that not many people would be abroad, towards the lower part of the village. She was never seen or heard of again. There was no stream or pool big enough for her to drown herself in; a panther could hardly have dragged her off and not left signs of a struggle; she might have fallen in a cave or sink, it is true. At all events, it seemed as if the earth had swallowed her up. Perhaps Lewis, or whoever he was, came back after her.

"When I came to Logansville to learn millinery with Emilie Knecht, I lived in her house over the store, just 229across the way from this hotel; the building was burned down afterwards. How such a gifted milliner came to settle off here in the mountains I could never tell, but I suppose mountain ladies must have nice hats just like those in the valleys.

"We became good friends, and very confidential, though at that time she was over thirty years of age and I was at least a dozen years younger. She would never tell where she came from, except that it was down country, and there seemed to be something on her mind which weighed on her terribly. Though I think she was the loveliest looking woman I have ever seen, she cared absolutely nothing for the men. As she believed in ghosts, and so did I, we compared experiences.

"I told her of a ghostly episode which left a deep impression on my childish nature, which happened when I was six years old. My father worked in the mines, and was on ‘night shift.’ Mother locked the doors and we all went to bed. Mother’s room adjoined mine and my sister’s. After we were in bed for some time, but not yet asleep, a man–he seemed to be black–came to the door which led from mother’s room to ours, and smiled at us. He drew back, re-appeared and smiled again, or rather grinned, showing his white teeth; it was a peculiar smile.

"I wanted to call mother, but sister, who was eight, said I must not speak, I must keep very still.

"Next morning we asked father what time he came home, and he said ‘not until morning.’ We told our 230experience, but father and mother seemed to think we had only imagined it.

"But two persons do not imagine the same thing at the same time. Besides, we were not afraid. I have often wondered what it was. My sister died shortly after that. Could it have been a ‘warning,’ I wonder?

"The pretty milliner’s story was even more startling and unusual. She declared that her grandmother’s ghost had come to her bedside every night since she was a small child. She said that she never feared it, but took it as a matter of course. I think that these nightly visitations took a whole lot out of her. I can see her yet running down the steep, narrow stairs in the mornings to the shop where I was working–I was always an early riser–her face looking as if it had been whitewashed, more so perhaps because her hair and eyes were so dark.

"She was often nervous and irritable, and I laid it all to the vital force which the ghost must be drawing out of her to materialize, but she said it was only her liver which made her so dauncy. I begged her to let me sleep with her, that I did not think that the ghost would come if I was present, and if it did it could draw on some of my vitality, as I was a big, strong, hearty girl. She would not let me sleep with her, saying that she had gotten used to the ghost.

"One evening Miss Knecht and I were invited to a chicken and waffle supper at the home of old Mrs. Eilert, wife of the potter, whose house was the last one in town. In those days there was quite a distance 231not built up between the potter’s home and the rest of the village. The holidays were approaching, and we were getting ready for the Christmas trade, consequently stayed later in the shop than we had expected.

"As I said before, Mrs. Eilert lived at the extreme end of town. When we were a few squares from home we noticed a woman dressed in mourning who seemed to be following us, or at least going in our direction. She was an entire stranger to us, and we wondered where she could be going; so each house we came to I would look back to see whether she entered. When we were half a square from where we were going, we passed a house which stood back pretty far from the road. There was considerable ground to the place, and a high board fence all around. After we passed the gate I turned, as before, to see whether this woman would enter. She did not. I watched her until she was past the gate quite a ways. I turned and told my companion she had not entered, and immediately turned to look at her again, and she was gone!

"Where could she have gone in those few seconds in which I was not looking at her? Everywhere there was open space–nowhere for her to hide. Had she jumped the fence she could not have gotten out of sight in those few seconds. I have often wondered since what it was.

"When we reached the Eilert home I noticed that Miss Knecht was in a highly unstrung condition, more so than I had ever seen her before. We told the story, and the old potter smiled grimly, saying: ‘You surely have seen the ghost of the landlord’s daughter who 232disappeared, all dressed in black, after being jilted by the robber.’

"Emilie shook her pretty dark curls, muttering that she feared it was something worse. She was afraid to go home that night, and we spent the night with our friends; yet she would not remain unless given a room by herself. In the morning she was in a most despondent mood; she had not seen her grandmother–what could it mean?

"The woman in black must have been her ‘familiar’ leaving her, warning her to that effect, and not the ghost of the landlord’s daughter after all, she maintained. I tried to reassure her that she would see her grandmother once she was in her own room, but next morning brought the tidings that the faithful spirit was again absent. This continued for a week, my friend becoming more nervous and despondent.

"One morning she did not come downstairs, so at eight o’clock I went up after her, to see if she were ill. The bed was empty, and had not been slept in. I searched the house and found her lying dead on a miserable cot in the cellar–beautiful in death–which an elderly Dutchman sometimes occupied, when cutting wood and taking care of the garden for us. She had drunk a potion of arsenic that she had bought some months before to poison rats which infested the cellar, but her lovely face was not marked.

“I left town shortly afterwards, and have never been back until tonight.”

233The burly commercial traveler who had started the general conversation stroked his long black beard.

"I guess it is time for all of us to retire. I don’t think we need to ask this lady again, ’Do you believe in ghosts?‘"

XVII A Stone’s Throw

When land warrants were allotted to Jacob Marshall and Jacob Mintges, of the Hebrew colony at Schaefferstown, there were elaborate preparations made by these two lifelong friends to migrate to the new country of the Christunn. That the warrants were laid side by side made the situation doubly pleasant, a compensation in a measure for any regrets at leaving the banks of the beautiful Milbach. The country was becoming too closely settled, opportunities were circumscribed, and the liberality of the Proprietary Government should be taken advantage of.

When the two groups of pioneers were ready to start for the new home, it was like some scene from the patriarchal days of the Old Testament. The long, lean, gaunt, black-bearded Jews, black-capped, cloaked to their heels, and carrying big staffs, led the way, followed by their families and possessions of live stock, farming and household utensils. Each head of a family had an Indian and Negro servant or two, which added to the picturesqueness of the caravans. Dogs, part wolf, herded the flocks of sheep, goats and young cattle, while the women rode on mares, the foals of which trotted along unsteadily at their sides.

Rachel, Jacob Marshall’s handsome daughter, was mounted on a piebald filly; on her back was slung her 235violin, a genuine Joseph Guarnerius, with which she discoursed sacred music around the campfire in the evenings, just as her ancestors may have done on some harp or cruit in remote days in Palestine or in the Arabian highlands.

These German Jews, who came to Pennsylvania in 1702 to re-convert the Indians, whom they believed to be the lost tribe of Israel, back to the ancient faith of Moses, while destined to fail as proselyters, became one of the potent root sources of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, “The Black Dutch” of the Christunn, Philadelphia, New York and the World.

The Pennsylvania Dutch are the most adaptable race in the world, altering the spelling of their names, their genealogies and traditions with every generation. They find success in all callings and in all walks of life like the true Nomads that they are. A Pennsylvania Dutchman’s lineage is kaleidoscopic any way–possibly German, Jewish, probably Indian, with sure admixtures of Dutch, Quaker, Swiss, Scotch-Irish, Greek, Bohemian, Spanish or Huguenot. And there were some propagandists shallow enough to try to line them up with Kaiserism in the days just anterior to the World War, and call them “Pennsylvania Germans.”

Their very swarthiness and leanness, the intenseness of their black eyes, gave the lie to any Teutonic affiliations, despite the jargon that they speak. And what a race of giants they have produced–Pershing, Hoover, Gorgas, Schwab, Replogle, Sproul, the Wanamakers, Newton Diehl Baker, Jane Addams–a group as potent 236as any other in the sublime effort of making the world “safe for democracy.”

When the pilgrims reached the Karoondinha, they were met by the local agents and surveyors of the Proprietors, who escorted them to their new estates, which were bounded on the south by the Christunn, now renamed “Middle Creek,” and on the north by the craggy heights of the culminating pinnacle of Jack’s Mountain, the famed “High Top,” climbed by the Pennsylvania Alpine Club, August 24, 1919.

A large gray fox, or Colishay, having led Mintges‘ dogs away from the camp, caused this “Father in Israel” to be absent during the critical moments when the line between his property and that of Marshall was being confirmed by the Proprietary surveyors. When he returned, exultingly swinging the fox’s pelt above his head and looking all the world like a lower Fifth Avenue fur jobber, the day was almost spent and the surveyors were gathering up their instruments.

Marshall, who was a kindly and just man, tried to explain to his friend, before the sun went down, just where the line was blazed. It seemed fair enough at the time to Mintges. Later on, when alone one day, he walked over the line, comparing it with the warrant, and it did not seem to satisfy him as much. He believed that the surveyors had deviated a rod or two all along, to his disadvantage. Doubtless if such was the case, it had been due to their haste to get through, for they had a daily grind of similar cases, but Marshall, 237he thought, should have compelled them to follow the parchment drafts, and not uncertain instruments.

Nevertheless, he decided to say nothing to his friend; they had always been good intimates, why should their relations be jeopardized for a paltry rod or two. Mintges confided the mistake to his wife, and later on to his children. It was unfortunate, but where therethere were so few neighbors it was hardly worth a fight.

As Mintges grew older the matter began to prey on his mind, to obsess him. It worried him until his head ached, and he could not drive it away. Marshall and his heirs were profiting at his expense; it should not be allowed to rest that way.

The surveyors had placed a great stone at the upper corner of the line, at the slope of the mountain, and there Jacob Mintges repaired one moonlight night, armed with a crowbar, and reset the stone two rods on the alleged domain of Jacob Marshall. Mintges was an old man at the time, rabbinical in appearance, and he chuckled and “washed his hands” as he stood and viewed the fruits of his labor. A wrong had been quietly righted; why hadn’t he done it twenty years ago?

It so happened that Jacob Marshall went out for chestnuts a week or so after Mintges’ performance, and saw the altered position of the stone. Instead of hastening to his friend’s house and asking him for a frank explanation, he, not being conscious of any wrong-doing, moved the stone back to its original position, to rebuke the presumptuous Mintges. Then he 238stood admiring his work, while hehe stroked his long black beard.

A few weeks later Mintges and his sons went to the mountain to brush out a road on which to haul logs with their oxteams in the winter-time. One of the boys, named Lazarus, called his father’s attention to the stone’s position. It made the old man “see red,” and he would not rest until, with the aid of his sons, it was again set where he felt it should rightfully be.

All this produced a coolness, almost a feud, between the two families, which kept up until Jacob Mintges died at the age of eighty years. Jacob Marshall, friend of his youth and companion of his “trek” to the wilderness, did not attend the obsequies.

It was not many nights afterwards when reports were made on all sides that Mintges’ spook was abroad, walking about the fields and lanes adjacent to Jacob Marshall’s home, his arms holding aloft a great block of stone. Marshall saw the apparition several times, but shunned it as he had the living Mintges the last years of his life.

What he wanted was very plain, for sometimes the night wind wafted the mournful words down Marshall’s bedroom chimney (for he always kept his windows nailed shut): “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?”

The ghost began his hauntings in the spring, kept it up all summer, fall, winter, then another spring and summer. He had affixed himself to the family, Marshall 239thought, as he racked his brain to lay the troublesome night prowler.

It was during the fall of the second year that a big party of moonlight ’coon hunters went up the lane which led between the Marshall and Mintges farms, headed for the rocky heights of Jack’s Mountain. In the party was Otto Gleim, the half-witted drunkard of Selin’s Grove, little, dumpy, long-armed High German, high-shouldered Otto Gleim, who was left at the foot of the mountain to hold one of the lanterns.

Gleim was half full on this occasion, as it was in the cider season, and he staggered about under the aged chestnut trees, while his wits revolved in his head with the speed of an electric fan. He felt lonesome, sick and uncomfortable. It was a relief to see a great, tall figure, with a long, black beard, approaching him, holding aloft a huge stone. It looked like “Uncle Jake” Marshall at first; no, it wasn’t–it was no one else but the late “Uncle Jake” Mintges, his neighbor.

As the gaunt figure drew nearer, it began groaning and wailing: “Where shall I put it; oh, where shall I put it?” in tones as melancholymelancholy as those of the Great Horned Owl on a New Year’s Eve.

“Put it where it belongs,” spluttered Otto Gleim, the drunkard, with a gleam of super-human prescience, and lo and behold, the ghost set the stone where it had been for twenty years after the surveyors had placed it there. Then the apparition vanished, and Gleim, in a matter-of-fact way, sat down on the cornerstone, where he waited until the ’coon hunters returned.

240Jake Mintges’ ghost ceased to wander and lament, but instead allied itself closely with Jake Marshall’s family as private stock banshee, warning, token or familiar. Whenever a disaster was due to any member he would show his grinning tusks, as much as to say: “Now, make the best of what is coming; life is short anyway.”

No doubt his visits of forewarning strengthened the nerves of the family to face trouble with a greater degree of equanimity; in all events the poor old fellow meant it that way. Old and young, rich and poor, in cities or in the wilds, wherever the blood of Jacob Marshall flowed, the ghost of Mintges was in evidence at the climacteric moments of their lives. They were all used to him, and never resented his visits or tried in any way to lay him.

The scene shifts to one of the last to encounter this strange old ghost. It is in a great city, in a high-ceilinged, yet gloomy room, furnished in the plush and mahogany of the middle eighties of the last century. A very dark girl, with full pouting lips and black eyes, half closed and sullen, yet beautiful in the first flush of youth withal, is seated on one of the upholstered easy chairs. Standing in the bay window facing her is a very tall man, equally dark, his drooping black mustache and long Prince Albert coat making him appear at least ten years older than the twenty-eight which was his correct age.

LOOKING TOWARDS SUMMER CREEK GAP FROM LOGANTON

On a centre table, with a top of brown onyx, on which were also several bisque ornaments, lay an 241ancient violin and bow, a veritable Joseph Guarnerius. It was made of a curious piece of spruce which, when growing in some remote forest of Northern Italy, had been punctured by a “Gran Pico” or large green woodpecker, and the wood stained, giving a unique and picturesque touch to this specimen of the skill of the old master of Cremona.

“I have determined to go home tonight,” said the dark girl, with decision, “and nothing can stop me. When any of our family see the face of Jacob Mintges, it means disaster to some one near to us; my mother and her old parents, whom I left so suddenly, may be grieving to death; I will go to them tonight.”

The tall man fumbled with his long fingers among the tassels on the back of a chair in front of him, as if trying to frame up a decisive answer. “This is what I call base ingratitude,” he faltered at length, in high, almost feminine tones. “Just when I have had your musical talent developed, turning you from a common fiddler to a finished artiste, and having you almost ready to make your stage debut as a popular juvenile, you leave me in the lurch, and all because you imagined you saw a ghost–imagined, I say, for there are no such things.”

The dark girl sat perfectly still, biting her full red lips, her immoble face as if made of ivory.

“What are you, anyway?” she finally responded; “nothing but what my father called a mountebank; he hated them, an actor, and I owe you nothing but contempt 242for having brought me here to be your plaything while my youth and good looks last.”

Then, as she got up and started towards a door, the tall man darted after her.

“I’ll not let you make a fool of yourself,” he hissed, theatrically. Catching her by the wrists, he attempted to detain her.

“Sit down; we must have this out.”

She was almost as tall as he, and very muscular, and the Jewish strain in her blood was hot. The pair struggled about the room, until the man in his anger seized the old violin and hit her a heavy blow over the head. She sank down on the floor in a limp mass, and the man, picking up his brown Fedora, ran out of the room and down the long flight of stairs and out into the street. The girl was not badly hurt, only stunned, and came to herself in about fifteen minutes. She saw that she was alone, and the Guarnerius was around her neck.

Gathering herself up, her first thought was for the violin, and tying the smallest chips in her handkerchief she went to the inner room and began to pack a large portmanteau. Then she put on her hat, veil and cloak and, locking the apartment door and slipping the key in her grip, she left the house and hurried down town towards the railroad depot.

It was dark when she reached there, and she quickly boarded a local, to wait in the suburbs until the night sleeping car train for Derrstown made its stop there. All went well, and by midnight she was boarding the 243sleeper and was soon afterwards undressed and under the sooty-smelling blankets in a lower berth.

She did not know how long she had been sleeping when the train suddenly stopped with a jerk and she was awake. Looking around, she saw a face peering through the curtains. It was not the porter, but the leering, open mouth, old Jacob Mintges himself, tusks and all.

Twice now in twenty-four hours he had come to her, for the night previous she had waked just in the gray half light before dawn, and had seen him standing grinning by her bedside.

An inexperienced person might have screamed, but not so Eugenie Carlevan, the great-great-granddaughter of Jacob Marshall. When their eyes met, Mintges quickly withdrew, and the girl, wide awake, began thinking over the past years of her life, as the train again started to roll on into the night. She had always been fond of music and theatres. The violin given to her on her sixth birthday by her grandfather Marshall had become the evil genius of her destiny. Her father had died and her mother was too much of a drudge to control her. She had attended every circus, burlesque, minstrel show or dramatic performance that had come to the town where she had lived, since she was thirteen years old.

When the young Thespian who called himself Derment Catesby had come to Swinefordstown, where she was visiting an aunt, with the “Lights O’London” Company, she had fallen violently in love with him, 244had made his acquaintance, and he, struck by her imperious beauty and musical predilections, had asked her to go away with him.

She had joined him a few days later in Sunbury, bringing her precious violin, and traveled with him to the great city. There the actor soon signed up to play in repertoire at a stock company. She liked him well enough, despite his vanity and selfishness, for he was very handsome. It was before the days when actors were clean-shaven like every servant, and looked much like other people. However much she had loved him, Jacob Mintges’ ghost had revealed a more pressing duty twice, and she was on her way home.

Soon she fell asleep again, and did not wake until the porter’s face appeared to notify her that the train was leaving Sunbury. Her mother lived with her aged parents out near Hartley Hall, among the high mountains; it would be a relief to see those lofty peaks and wide expanse of vision once more, after the cramped outlook of the city. How peculiarly sweet the air seemed, with the sun coming up behind the fringe of old yellow pines and oaks along the river! What refreshing zephyrs were wafted from those newly-ploughed fields. The bluebirds and robins were singing in the maple trees about the station. On a side-track stood the little wood-burner engine, with its bulbous stack, puffing black smoke, ready to pull its train of tiny cars out to the wonderful, wild mountain country, the land of Lick Run Gap, the Lost Valley, 245the High Head, Big Buffalo, Winklebleck and Shreiner!

How well she remembered the first time she had seen that wood-burner, as a little tot, going on a visit with her father and mother. It was in the golden hour, and deep purple shadows fell from the station roof athwart the golden light on the platform!

All these thoughts were crowding through her head until the bell on the little engine reminded her that the L. & T. train was soon to depart.

She reached home in time for dinner, was received with no enthusiasm, for her mother and grandparents were true mountaineers, and their swarthy faces masked their feelings, yet she was made to feel perfectly welcome.

Nobody had died, no one was sick, the house hadn’t burned down, evidently the trials foretold by Jake Mintges were yet to come.

That afternoon she showed the broken violin to her grandfather, who took it to his workbench in an out-house to repair it, undaunted by the seeming endlessness of the reconstruction.

Eugenie seemed perfectly contented to be at home, She had had enough of the bizarre, and reveled again in the humdrum. Five or six days after her return the weekly county paper appeared at the house, with its boiler plate front page and patent insides. Some instinct mademade her open the wrapper as it lay on the kitchen table. On the front page she saw the likeness 246of a familiar face, the well-known full eyes, oval cheeks, rounded chin and drooping mustache, Derment Catesby. Then the headlines caught her eyes, “Handsome Actor Shot to Death by Insanely Jealous Husband at Stage Door.” Then she glanced at the date and the hour. It was the night that she had taken the train–the very moment, perhaps, that Jacob Mintges’ grinning face had looked through the curtains of her berth. Yes, the murderer had waited a long time, as the victim had tarried in the green-room.

Eugenie sucked her full lips a moment, then looked hard at the picture and the whole article again. Then she turned to her mother and grandparents, who were seated about the stove.

“Say, folks,” she said, coldly,coldly, “there’s the fine gent I went away with from Swinesfordstown. I got out in time, the very night he was murdered.”

The mother and the old people half rose in their chairs to look at the wood cut.

“How did you know he was playing you false?” said the old grandfather.

“How did I know, gran’pap?” she replied. “Why, the night before, Jake Mintges came to me, and I knew something was due to go wrong, and home was the place for little me. You see I missed it all by a stone’s throw.”

"You’re right, ‘Genie’," said the old mountaineer. “Mintges never comes to us unless he means business.”

XVIII The Turning of the Belt

There are not many memories of Ole Bull in the vicinity of the ruins of his castle today. Fifteen years ago, before the timber was all gone, there were quite a few old people who were living in the Black Forest at the time of his colonization venture, who remembered him well, also a couple of his original colonists, Andriesen and Oleson, but these are no more. One has to go to Renovo or to Austin or Germania to find any reminiscences now, and those have suffered through passing from “hand to mouth” and are scattered and fragmentary. They used to say that the great violinist was, like his descendants, a believer in spiritualism, and on the first snowy night that he occupied his unfinished mansion, chancing to look out he saw what seemed to him a tall, white figure standing by the ramparts.

Fearing that it was some skeld come to warn him of impending disaster to his beloved colony, he rushed out hatless, only to find that it was an old hemlock stab, snow encrusted.

Disaster did come, but as far as local tradition goes Ole Bull had no warning of it. The hemlock stab which so disturbed him has been gone these many years, but a smaller one, when encased in snow, has frightened many a superstitious wayfarer along the Kettle Creek 248road, and gone on feeling that he had seen “the ghost of Ole Bull.”

But unaccountable and worthy of investigation are the weird strains of music heard on wild, stormy nights, which seem to emanate from the castle. Belated hunters coming down the deep gorge of Ole Bull Run, back of the castle, or travelers along the main highway from Oleona to Cross Forks, have heard it and refused to be convinced that there is not a musician hidden away somewhere among the crumbling ruins. The “oldest inhabitants,” sturdy race of trappers, who antedated Ole Bull’s colonists, declare that the ghostly musician was playing just the same in the great virtuoso’s time, and that it is the ghost of a French fifer, ambushed and killed by Indians when his battalion was marching along the “Boone Road” from Fort Le Boeuf to the memorable and ill-starred attack on Fort Augusta at Sunbury in 1757.

At the mention of “Boone Road” another question is opened, as there is no historic record of such a military highway between Lake Erie and the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. The afore-mentioned very old people used to say that the road was still visible to them in certain places; that there could be no doubt of its existence and former utilization.

Daniel Boone, if he be the pioneer of that name who first “blazed it out,” was a very young man during the “French and Indian War,” and his presence in that part of the country is a mooted question. Perhaps it 249was another “Boone,” and a Norseman, for many persons named “Bonde” or “Boon” were among the first Swedish settlers on the Lanape-Wihittuck, or Delaware River, unconsciously pioneering for their famous cousin-German, Ole Borneman Bull.

In all events, the French fifer was shot and grievously wounded, and his comrades, in the rout which ensued, were forced to leave him behind. After refreshing himself at the cold spring, which nearly a century later Ole Bull named “Lyso”–the water of light–he crawled up on the hill, on which the castle was afterwards partly erected, to reconnoitre the country, but dropping from exhaustion and loss of blood, soon died. The wolves carried away his physical remains, but his spirit rested on the high knoll, to startle Ole Bull and many others, with the strains of his weird, unearthly music.

It seems a pity that these old legends are passing with the lives of the aged people, but the coming of Ira Keeney, the grizzled Civil War veteran, as caretaker for the handsome Armstrong-Quigley hunting lodge, on the site of one of the former proposed fogderier Walhalla, has awakened anew the world of romance, of dashing exploits in the war under Sheridan and Rosecrans, of lumbering days, wolves, panthers and wild pigeons, all of which memories the venerable soldier loves to recount.

Yet can these be compared with the legend that Ole Bull, seeing a Bald Eagle rise from its nest on the top of a tall oak near the banks of Freeman’s Run, named 250the village he planned to locate there Odin, after the supreme deitydeity of the Scandinavian mythology, who took the form of an eagle on one period of his development. His other settlements or herods he called Walhalla, Oleona and New Bergen. Planned at first by the French to be a purely military route for ingress to the West Branch country, but owing to the repulse at Fort Augusta, very infrequently traversed by them, if at all, it became principally an overland “short cut” for trappers, traders, travelers and settlers, all of whom knew its location well.

Who could have laid out such an intricate road over high mountains and through deep valleys, unless a military force, is hard to imagine, even if for some strange reason it was never written into “history.”

After the Revolutionary War there was naturally an unsettled state of affairs, and many farmers and adventurers turned their thought to the country west of the Allegheny Mountains and River, as the land of opportunity, consequently there was much desultory travel over the Boone Road. Unemployment prevailed everywhere, and hordes of penniless ex-soldiers, turned adrift by their victorious new nation, traveled backwards and forwards along all the known highways and trails, picking up a day’s work as best they could, their precarious mode of living giving them the name of “cider tramps.” A few more reckless and blood thirsty than their fellows, claimed that the country which they had freed owed them a living; if there was no work and no pensions, and they could not get it by hook 251they would take it by crook. In other words, certain ex-service men, became strong-arm men, road agents, or highwaymen, whichever name seems most suitable.

The Boone Road, in a remote wilderness of gloomy, untrodden forests, made an ideal haunt for footpads, and when not robbing travelers, they took their toll from the wild game, elks, deer, bears, grouse and wild pigeons which infested the region. Law and order had not penetrated into such forgotten and forbidding realms, and obscure victims could report outrages and protest to a deaf and dumb government. How long it was before these robbers were curbed is hard to say.

One story which the backwoods people about Hamesley’s Fork used to tell dates back to five years after the close of the Revolution, about 1788. Jenkin Doane, possibly a member of the same family that produced the Doane outlaws in the Welsh Mountains, was one of the notorious characters along the Boone Road. Like others, he was an ex-soldier, a hero of Brandywine and Paoli, but his plight was worse, for just before peace was declared, when a premature rumor to that effect had reached his company, lying at Fort Washington, he had assaulted and beaten up an aristocratic and brutal officer who was the terror of the line. For this he had been sentenced to death, but later his sentence was commuted, and finally, because there were no satisfactory jails for military prisoners, he was quietly released, sans h. d. and the ability to make a livelihood.

He finally became a wagoner and hired out with a party of emigrants going to Lake Erie, who traveled 252over the Boone Road. He saw them safely to their destination, but on his return journey tarried in the mountains, hunting and fishing, until his supplies were gone, when he turned “road agent.” He evidently had a low grade of morals at that time, for he robbed old as well as young, women as readily as men. He was fairly successful, considering the comparative lightness of travel and the poor class of victims financially.

In an up-and-down country, where feed and shelter were scarce, he kept no horse, but traveled afoot. He had no opportunity to test his heels, as he never ran away, all his attacks being followed by speedy capitulation. If a trained force of bailiffs had been sent out to apprehend him, doubtless he could have been caught, as he had his favorite retreats, where he lingered, waiting for his prey.

There were not many such places in the depths of the seemingly endless forests of giant and gloomy hemlocks and pines, places where the sun could shine and the air radiated dryness and warmth. One of his best-liked haunts was known as the Indian Garden, situated in an open glade among the mountains which divide the country of Kettle Creek from that of Drury’s Run.

“Art.” Vallon, one of the oldest hunters on Kettle Creek, who died recently, once described the spot as follows: “More than sixty years ago my father on a hunting trip showed me a clearing of perhaps half an acre, which he told me was called ‘The Indian Garden.’ I visited it many times afterwards on my trapping excursions. 253It impressed me as very unusual, being entirely free from undergrowth, except the furze grass one sees on poor, worked-out land.

“It“It was a perfect square of about half an acre, and was surrounded by the deep, primeval forest. There was a fine spring not very far away.”

It was there that Jenkin Doane and two other reckless characters who had served with Simon Girty and acted as his henchmen lolled for hours in the sun, waiting for victims. It was there that he usually maintained his “camp fire” and at night slept on the ground in a sleeping bag of buffalo hides.

One night in the late winter, when there were still patches of snow on the ground, Doane dreamed very vividly of a girl whom he had never seen. He could hardly realize he had been dreaming when he awoke and sat up looking about him, to where his vision was cut off by the interminable “aisles of the forest.” He seemed to be married to her, at least they were together, and he had the pleasure of saving her life from drowning in a deep torrent where she had gone, probably to bathe.

He had never seen a person of such unusual beauty. Her hair was dark and inclined to curl, complexion hectic, her eyes hazel, but the chief charm lay in the line of her nose and upper lip. The nose was slightly turned up at the end, adding, with the curve of her upper lip, a piquancy to an expression of exceptional loveliness.

All the day he kept wishing that this charming young 254woman might materialize into his life; he could not bring himself to believe but that such a realistic vision must have a living counterpart.

It was during the morning of the second day, when he had about given up hope, that he saw coming towards him, down a steep pitch in the Boone Road–it is part of the Standard Oil Pipe Line now–a young woman on horseback, wearing a red velvet hat and a brown cloak. She was mounted on a flea-bitten white horse of uncertain age and gait. Close behind her rode two elderly Indians, also indifferently mounted, who seemed to be her bodyguard, and between them they were leading a heavily-laden pack-horse.

He quickly turned his belt, an Indian signal of great antiquity, which indicated to his companions that they would make an attack.

Just as the white horse touched fairly level ground he commenced to stumble and run sideways, having stepped on a rusty caltrop or “crow’s foot” which the outlaws had strewn across the trail at that point for that very purpose. Seeing the animal’s plight, the young equestrienne quickly stopped him and dismounted. She had been riding astride, and Doane noticed the brown woolen stockings which covered her shapely legs, her ankle-boots of good make, as she rolled off the horse’s back.

As she stood before her quivering steed, patting his shoulder, Doane and his companions drew near, covering the three with their army muskets. It was then to his infinite surprise he noticed that the girl in brown, 255with the red hat, was the heroine of his dream, though in the vision she had been attired in black, but the gown was half off her shoulders and back when he drew her out of the water.

It would have been hard to tell who was most surprised, Doane or the girl. Much as he admired her loveliness, there had been the turning of the belt, which meant there could be no change of purpose; his comrades were already eyeing the well-filled packsaddles.

The frightened Indians had dismounted, being watched by one of the outlaws, while Doane politely yet firmly demanded the whereabouts of her money. Lifting her cloak and turning her belt, she disclosed two long deerskin pouches, heavy with gold. Unbuckling them, she handed them to Doane, while tears began to stream down her cheeks.

“You may take it, sir,” she sobbed, "but you are ruining my chances in life. I am partly Indian, Brant’s daughter, grand-daughter of the old Brant, and my father had arranged a marriage for me with a young officer whom I met during the war, and I love him dearly. Though I told him of my love, he would not marry me without a dowry of $3,000, and it took my father five long years to gather it together. I would not care if I did not love him so much. I was on my way to his home at the forks of Susquehanna, and now you have destroyed all my hopes."

The brigand’s steely heart was for a moment touched. “Brant’s daughter,” he said, “you Indian people know the turning of the belt, which means that 256what is decided on at that moment must be carried out; before I saw who you were I resolved to rob you. It must be done, for I have two partners who will demand their shares.”

"You said ‘before you knew who I was,’" broke in the girl, her tearful, piquantpiquant face filled with curiosity. “You never saw me before.”

“Oh, yes, I did,” replied Doane, “in a dream a couple of nights ago.” “she said, as a final appeal.

“I am afraid not,” he answered, as his comrade started to open one of the pouches. Then he paused, saying: “I will not take all. I’d not take anything from you except that I have these partners. I will retain half for them, and let you go on your way with the rest. Your good looks–for you are truly the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on–will outweigh with your lover a paltry fifteen hundred dollars in gold.” “cried the girl weeping afresh. “He does not love me; he only wants the gold. I am the one that loves, and am lost and discarded without the dowry.”

Meanwhile one of the outlaws had drawn the caltrop from the horse’s frog, and having smeared it with bear’s grease, the animal was walking about in a fairly comfortable manner.

AN ALLEGHENY EPISODE

The girl stood looking at Doane. He was young, strong, and had a fairly decent face. How could he 257be so cruel? Then she looked at his partners, low-browed wretches, who were already muttering at the delay, and she realized there was no hope. Doane gave up his share, and tossed the other of the bags of gold to his “pals,” then ordered the girl and her escort to proceed. He said that he would accompany her to the river, to where the danger of meeting other highwaymen would be passed. The girl traveled on foot the entire distance, to ease her horse over the rough, uneven trail, walking side by side with the highwayman.

They parted with civility, and on Doane’s side with deep regret, for the dream had inflamed his soul, and the reality was so startlingly lovely that he was deeply smitten. Before he had reached the river he wished that he had shot his grasping companions, rather than endanger this beautiful creature’s future happiness.

“That was an unlucky turning of the belt,” he said to himself, as he retraced his steps towards the Indian Garden.

Brant’s daughter rode with a heavy heart the balance of the journey, for she knew her lover’s nature. The Indian bodyguards were equally downcast, for they had sworn to deliverdeliver her safe and sound at the forks of the Susquehanna.

When she reached the handsome colonial gray stone house, on a headland overlooking the “meeting of the waters,” her lover, a handsome upstanding youth, with a sports suit made of his old officer’s buff uniform, and surrounded by a pack of his hunting dogs, came out to greet her. His manner was not very cordial. With 258penetrating eyes he saw that she was disturbed over something, so he quickly asked if she suffered from fatigue after the long overland journey.

“No, Major,” she replied, “I am not at all tired in body, but I am in heart. I cannot postpone the evil moment. On the Boone Road we were stopped by three highwaymen, armed, who took from me half of my dowry.”

The Major’s handsome countenance darkened. “Why did you not tell them you needed it to get married?” he blurted out angrily. “A pretty wench like you could have honey-foogled them to keep it.” “replied the girl, confidently, “and for that reason the chief of the band, a very pretty man, let me keep the one-half, but he had to retain the rest for his companions.” “ “I think I came off well,” she said, hanging her pretty head, her cheeks all crimson flush. She was sitting on the horse, her feet dangling out of the stirrups, her skirts turned up revealing those shapely legs, and he had not asked her to dismount.

The Major drew nearer, with an angry gesture. “I have a mind to smack your face good and hard for your folly,” he stormed. “What do you think I have been waiting for, a paltry fifteen hundred dollars?”

Brant’s daughter turned her belt and handed him the pouch of gold, which he threw down testily. It was 259quickly picked up by one of his German redemptioner servants, who carried it into the house.

“Aren’t you going to ask me to come in?” pleaded the now humiliated love-sick girl. “You can slap me all you want. Punish me any way you will,” offering him her stiff riding crop, “only don’t cast me off.”off.”

“Come down if you wish; I don’t care,” he mumbled in reply. “I wouldn’t exert myself enough to whip you, but your hide ought to be tanned for your stupidity.”

Cut to the heart, yet still loving abjectly, she slid off the horse and meekly followed the imperious Major into the mansion. During the balance of the afternoon, and at supper, and until she begged to be allowed to retire, she was reviled and humbled in the presence of his redemptioners. He declared that no one man in a thousand, in his station of life, would consider marriage with a person of Indian blood; that it was worth twice three thousand dollars, the figure he had originally named. Nevertheless, he had carefully put the money bag in his strong box, even though saying nothing about setting a date for a marriage.

She was shown into an unfinished room. There was no bed, only a few chairs, and two big walnut chests. Tearful and nervously unstrung, she took off her shoes and, wrapping herself in her cloak, lay down on the cold wooden floor. She could have called for blankets, and doubtless gotten them, but her pride had rebelled and she resolved to make the best of conditions. She could not sleep, and her mind was tortured with her love for the Major, anger at his ungrateful conduct, 260and an ever-recurring vision of the highwayman on the Boone Road. She heard the great Irish clock in the hall below strike every hour until one.

Suddenly she got up, her face brightened with a new resolve. Tying her shoes together, she threw them them across her shoulder and tiptoed to the door, which she opened softly, and went downstairs. Her Indian bodyguards were sleeping on the stone floor in the vestibule, wrapped in their blankets.

“Exundos,” she whispered in the ear of the oldest, “get me out of this; I am going to go away.”

The trusty redskin, who always slept with one eye open, nudged his comrade, Firequill, and made their way to the door. It was locked and chained, and the key probably under the Major’s pillow.

Exundos was determined to redeem his record. He rushed upstairs to where a portly German was sleeping in the officer’s antechamber. He knocked the valet senseless with the butt of his horse pistol. Then he sprang like a panther over the prostrate body into the Major’s apartment. In a moment he had gagged him with the caltrop extracted from the horse’s foot, then bound him hand and foot.

The key was under the pillow. In five minutes the fugitives were on the front lawn, surrounded by the Major’s pack of yelping, snarling hounds. Getting by them as best they could, the trio made for the bluffs, found a dugout in which they crossed the river, and were soon in the shelter of the friendly mountains.

In the morning the Major’s other servants who slept 261in quarters near the stables, found the half-dazed bodyguard with a bloody head, and their gagged and helpless master. Once released, the Major decided not to send a posse after the runaways; he was heavily in debt, and needed that pouch of fifteen hundred dollars in gold.

Brant’s daughter, after her fortuitous escape, was not completely happy. She had longed for the Major for five years, and had almost gotten him as the result of severe privations. It was pretty hard to lose him now. She was going home defeated, to die unwed. Her feelings became desperate when she reached the Boone Road, with all its haunting memories.

As she clambered up the steep grades, and the Indian Garden came into view, she reached down and turned her belt, the symbol of resolution. No one was about as she passed the garden, which made her heart sink with loneliness for some strong man’s love.

When Kettle Creek was reached and crossed near the Cold Spring, she decided to rest awhile. After a meal, which she barely tasted, she told the Indians that she was going for a little walk in the woods.

“I am safe now,” she said, bitterly; “I have no gold.”

Past the Cold Spring she went, on and on up the wild, narrow gorge of what is now called Ole Bull Run, where a dark and dismal hemlock forest of colossal proportions bent over the torrent, keeping out the light of day.

While she was absent, who should appear at the Cold Spring but Doane, with his colleagues in crime.

262“So he took her after all, with only half the money,” he said, almost regretfully, to the Indians.

“I don’t know,” replied one of the bodyguard. “He was very ugly when he heard it, wanted to slap her, and she ran away in the night, leaving horses, saddle-bags and gold. Oh, she felt terribly, for she truly loved the monster.” “said Doane, in surprised tones.

The Indian pointed up the dark gorge of the run. That moment the outlaw thought of his dream, of his rescuing her from an angry torrent. Motioning to her guards to follow, he made haste along the edges of the stream, slipping often on the moss-grown rocks. Half way to the top of the gigantic mountain, he heard the roar of a cascade. There was a great, dark, seething pool beneath. Just as Doane came in sight of this he beheld, to his horror, Brant’s daughter, hatless and cloakless, plunging in. It was like a Dryad’s immolation!

With superhuman effort he reached the brink and sprang after her. He caught her, as she rose the first time, by her profuse brown hair, but as he lifted her ashore a snag or branch tore her shirtwaist, so that her shoulder and back were almost completely bare, just as in the dream. Aided by the faithful Indians, he laid her tenderly among the moss and ferns, and poured some rum from a buffalo horn flask down her throat. She revived and opened her pretty hazel eyes quizzically.

“Am I at the Indian Garden?” she said.

263“You are with the one who turned his belt there,” answered Doane; “only this time I don’t want anything for my comrades. I only want you for myself.” “said Brant’s daughter, having now fully recovered the power of speech. “When I came back to the Garden and you were not there, I turned my belt.” “said Doane, “for that last resolve has brought us together. I should have known from the beginning my destiny was revealed in that dream.” “said the girl.

“Of course I will, anywhere with you, and never follow the road again, or anything not strictly honorable. Wrongdoing, I see now, is caused by the preponderance of the events of life going against us. Where things come our way, and there is joy, one can never aspire to ill. Wrong is the continued disappointment. I could never molest a soul after I saw you, and have lived by hunting ever since. I made my partners return the purse of gold; it shall go to your father to buy a farm.”

Brant’s daughter now motioned to him that she felt like sitting up, and he propped her back against an old cork pine, kissing her pretty plump cheeks and shoulders many times as he did so. “And that scoundrel 264would have smacked you,” he thought, boiling inwardly. Then taking her cold hands in his, he said:

“Out of evil comes good. I do not regret this one robbery, for if I had not taken that gold for my comrades, some one would have robbed me of you!”

XIX Riding His Pony

When Rev. James Martin visited the celebrated Penn’s Cave, in the Spring of 1795, it was related that he found a small group of Indians encamped there. That evening, around the campfire, one of the redskins related a legend of one of the curiosities of the watery cave, the flambuoyant “Indian Riding Pony” mural-piece which decorates one of the walls.

Spirited as a Remington, it bursts upon the view, creates a lasting impression, then vanishes as the power skiff, the “Nita-nee,” draws nearer.

According to the old Indians, there lived not far from where the Karoondinha emerges from the cavern a body of aborigines of the Susquehannock tribe who made this delightful lowland their permanent abode. While most of their cabins were huddled near together on the upper reaches of the stream, there were straggling huts clear to the Beaver Dams. The finding of arrow points, beads and pottery along the creek amply attests to this.

Among the clan was a maiden named Quetajaku, not good to look upon, but in no way ugly or deformed. In her youth she was light-hearted and sociable, with a gentle disposition. Yet for some reason she was not favored by the young bucks. All her contemporaries found lovers and husbands, but poor Quetajaku was 266left severely alone. She knew that she was not beautiful, though she was of good size; she was equally certain that she was not a physical monster. She could not understand why she could find no lover, why she was singled out to be a “chauchschisis,” or old maid. It hurt her pride as a young girl, it broke her heart completely when she was older.

Gradually she withdrew from the society of her tribal friends, building herself a lodge-house on the hill, in what is now the cave orchard. There she led a very introspective life, grieving over the love that might have been. To console herself she imagined that some day a handsome warrior would appear, seek her out, load her with gifts, overwhelm her with love and carry her away to some distant region in triumph. He would be handsomer and braver than any youth in the whole country of the Karoondinha. She would be the most envied of women when he came.

This poor little fancy saved her from going stark mad; it remedied the horror of her lonely lot. Every time the night wind stirred the rude hempen curtain which hung before the door of her cabin, she would picture it was the chivalrous stranger knight come to claim her. When it was cold she drew the folds of her buffalo robe tighter about her as if it was his arms.

As time went on she grew happy in her secret lover, whom no other woman’s flame could equal, whom no one could steal away. She was ever imagining him saying to her that her looks exactly suited him, that she was his ideal.

267But like the seeker after Eldorado, years passed, and Quetajaku did not come nearer to her spirit lover. But her soul kept up the conceit; every night when she curled herself up to sleep he was the vastness of the night.

On one occasion an Indian artist named Naganit, an undersized old wanderer appeared at the lonely woman’s home. For a living he decorated pottery, shells and bones, sometimes even painted war pictures on rocks. Quetajaku was so kind to him that he built himself a lean-to on the slope of the hill, intending to spend the winter.

On the long winter evenings the old woman confided to the wanderer the story of her unhappy life, of her inward consolation. She said that she had longed to meet an artist who could carry out a certain part of her dream which had a right to come true.

When she died she had arranged to be buried in a fissure of rocks which ran horizontally into one of the walls of the “watery” cave. On the opposite wall she would like painted in the most brilliant colors a portrait of a handsome young warrior, with arms outstretched, coming towards her.

Naganit said that he understood what she meant exactly, but suggested that the youth be mounted on a pony, a beast which was coming into use as a mount for warriors, of which he had lately seen a number in his travels on the Virginia coast, near Chincoteague.

This idea was pleasing to Quetajaku, who authorized the stranger to begin work at once. She had saved 268up a little property of various kinds; she promised to bestow all of this on Naganit, except what would be necessary to bury her, if the picture proved satisfactory.

The artist rigged up a dog-raft with a scaffold on it, and this he poled into the place where the fissure was located, the woman accompanying him the first time, so there would be no mistake. All winter long by torchlight, he labored away. He used only one color, an intensive brick-red made from mixing sumac berries, the pollen of the Turk’s Cap Lily, a small root and the bark of a tree, as being more permanent than that made from ochers and other ores of stained earth.

Marvelous and vital was the result of this early impressionist; the painting had all the action of life. The superb youth in war dress, with arms outstretched, on the agile war pony, rushing towards the foreground, almost in the act of leaping from the rocky panel into life, across the waters of the cave to the arms of his beloved.

It would make old Quetajaku happy to see it, she who had never known love or beauty. The youth in the mural typified what Naganit would have been himself were he the chosen, and what the “bachelor maid” would have possessed had nature favored her. It was the ideal for two disappointed souls.

Breathlessly the old artist ferried Quetajaku to the scene of his endeavors. When they reached the proper spot he held aloft his quavering torch. Quetajaku, in order to see more clearly, held her two hands 269above her eyes. She gave a little cry of exclamation, then turned and looked at Naganit intently. Then she dropped her eyes, beginning to cry to herself, a rare thing for an Indian to do!

The artist looked at her fine face, down which the tears were streaming, and asked her the cause of her grief–was the picture such a terrible disappointment?

The woman drew herself together, replying that it was grander than she had anticipated, but the face of Naganit’sNaganit’s, and, strangely enough, the face she had dreamed of all her life.

“But I am not the heroic youth you pictured”, said the artist, sadly. “I am sixty years old, stoop-shouldered, and one leg is shorter than the other.” “ NaganitNaganit looked at the Indian woman. She was not hideous; there was even a dignity to her large, plain features, her great, gaunt form.

“I have never received such praise as yours. I always vowed I would love the woman who really understood me and my art. I am yours. Let us think no more of funeral decorations, but go to the east, to the land of war ponies, and ride to endless joy together.”

270Quetajaku, overcome by the majesty of his words, leaned against his massive shoulder. In that way he poled his dog-raft against the current to the entrance of the cave. There was a glory in the reflection from the setting sun over against the east; night would not close in for an hour or two. And towards the darkening east that night two happy travelers could be seen wending their way.

XX The Little Postmistress

It was long past dark when Mifflin Sargeant, of the Snow Shoe Land Company, came within sight of the welcoming lights of Stover’s. For fourteen miles, through the foothills on the Narrows, he had not seen a sign of human habitation, except one deserted hunter’s cabin at Yankee Gap. There was an air of cheerfulness and life about the building he had arrived at. Several doors opened simultaneously at the signal of his approach, given by a faithful watchdog, throwing the rich glow of the fat-lamps and tallow candles across the road.

The structure, which was very long and two stories high, housed under its accommodating roofs a tavern, a boarding house, a farmstead, a lumber camp, a general store, and a post office. It was the last outpost of civilization in the east end of Brush Valley; beyond were mountains and wilderness almost to Youngmanstown. Tom Tunis had not yet erected the substantial structure on the verge of the forest later known as “The Forest House.”

A dark-complexioned lad, who later proved to be Reuben Stover, the son of the landlord, took the horse by the bridle, assisting the young stranger to dismount. He also helped him to unstrap his saddle-bags, carrying them into the house. Sargeant noticed, as he passed 272across the porch, that the walls were closely hung with stags’ horns, which showed the prevalence of these noble animals in the neighborhood.

Old Daddy and Mammy Stover, who ran the quaint caravansery, quickly made the visitor feel at home. It was after the regular supper-time, but a fresh repast of bear’s meat and corn bread was cheerfully prepared in the huge stone chimney.

The young man explained to his hosts that he had ridden that day from New Berlin; he had come from Philadelphia to Harrisburg by train, to Liverpool by packet boat, at which last named place his horse had been sent on to meet him. He added that he was on his way into the Alleghenies, where he had recently purchased an interest in the Snow Shoe development.

After supper he strolled along the porch to the far end, to the post office, thinking he would send a letter home. A mail had been brought in from Rebersburg during the afternoon, consequently the post office, and not the tavern stand, was the attraction of the crowd this night.

The narrow room was poorly lighted by fat-lamps, which cast great, fitful shadows, making grotesques out of the oddly-costumed, bearded wolf hunters present, who were the principal inhabitants of the surrounding ridges. A few women, hooded and shawled, were noticeable in the throng. In a far corner, leaning against the water bench, was young Reuben, the hostler, tuning up his wheezy fiddle. As many persons as possible hung over the rude counter, across which the 273mail was being delivered, and where many letters were written in reply. Above this counter were suspended three fat-lamps, attached to grooved poles, which, by cleverly-devised pulleys, could be lifted to any height desired.

SETH NELSON, JR., AFTER A GOOD DAY’S SPORT

The young Philadelphian edged his way through the good-humored concourse to ask permission to use the ink; he had brought his favorite quill pen and the paper with him. This brought him face to face, across the counter, with the postmistress. He had not been able to see her before, as her trim little figure had been wholly obscured by the ponderous forms that lined the counter.

Instantly he was charmed by her appearance–it was unusual–by her look of neatness and alertness. Their eyes met–it was almost with a smile of mutual recognition. When he asked her if he could borrow the ink, which was kept in a large earthen pot of famous Sugar Valley make, she smiled on him again, and he absorbed the charm of her personality anew.

Though she was below the middle height, her figure was so lithe and erect that it fully compensated for the lack of inches. She wore a blue homespun dress, with a neat checked apron over it, the material for which constituted a luxury, and must have come all the way from Youngmanstown or Sunbury. Her profuse masses of soft, wavy, light brown hair, on which the hanging lamps above brought out a glint of gold, was worn low on her head. Her deepset eyes were a transparent blue, her features well developed, and when she 274turned her face in profile, the high arch of the nose showed at once mental stability and energy. Her complexion was pink and white. There seemed to be always that kindly smile playing about the eyes and lips.

When she pushed the heavy inkwell towards him he noticed that her hands were very white, the fingers tapering; they were the hands of innate refinement.

Almost imperceptibly the young man found himself in conversation with the little postmistress. Doubtless she was interested to meet an attractive stranger, one from such a distant city as Philadelphia. While they talked, the letter was gradually written, sealed, weighed and paid for–it was before the days of postage stamps, and the postmistress politely waited on her customers.

He had told her his name–Mifflin Sargeant–and she had given him hers–Caroline Hager–and that she was eighteen years of age. He had told her about his prospective trip into the wilds of Centre County, of the fierce beasts which he had heard still abounded there. The girl informed him that he would not have to go farther west to meet wild animals; that wolf hides by the dozen were brought to Stover’s each winter, where they were traded in; that old Stover, a justice of the peace, attested to the bounty warrants–in fact, the wolves howled from the hill across the road on cold nights when the dogs were particularly restless.

Her father was a wolf hunter, and would never allow her to go home alone; consequently, when he could not accompany her she remained over night in the dwelling which housed the post office. Panthers, too, were occasionally 275met with in the locality–in the original surveys this region was referred to as “Catland”–also huge red bears and the somewhat smaller black ones.

If he was going West, she continued in her pretty way, he must not fail to visit the great limestone cave near where the Brush Mountains ended. She had a sister married and living not far from it, from whom she had heard wonderful tales, though she had never been there herself. It was a cave so vast it had not as yet been fully explored; one could travel for miles in it in a boat; the Karoondinha, or John Penn’s Creek, had its source in it; Indians had formerly lived in the dry parts, and wild beasts. Then she lowered her voice to say that it was now haunted by the Indians’ spirits.

And so they talked until a very late hour, the crowd in the post office melting away, until Jared Hager, the girl’s father, in his wolfskin coat, appeared to escort her home, to the cabin beyond the waterfall near the trail to Dolly Hope’s Valley. She was to have a holiday until the next afternoon.

The wolf hunter was a courageous-looking man, much darker than his daughter, with a heavy black beard and bushy eyebrows; in fact, she was the only brown-haired, blue-eyed one in the entire family connection. He spoke pleasantly with the young stranger, and then they all said good night.

“Don’t forget to visit the great cavern,” Caroline called to the youth.

“I surely will,” he answered, “and stop here on my way east to tell you all about it.”

276“That’s good; we want to see you again,” said the girl, as she disappeared into the gloomy shadows which the shaggy white pines cast across the road.

Young Stover was playing “Green Grows the Rushes” on his fiddle in the tap-room, and Sargeant sat there listening to him, dreaming and musing all the while, his consciousness singularly alert, until the closing hour came.

That night, in the old stained four-poster, in his tiny, cold room, he slept not at all. “Yet he feared to dream.” Though his thoughts carried him all over the world, the little postmistress was uppermost in every fancy. Among the other things, he wished that he had asked her to ride with him to the cave. They could have visited the subterranean marvels together. He got out of bed and managed to light the fat lamp. By its sputtering gleams he wrote her a letter, which came to an abrupt end as the small supply of ink which he carried with him was exhausted. But as he repented of the intense sentences penned to a person who knew him so slightly, he arose again before morning and tore it to bits.

There was a white frost on the buildings and ground when he came downstairs. The autumn air was cold, the atmosphere was a hazy, melancholy gray. There seemed to be a cessation of all the living forces of nature, as if waiting for the summons of winter. From the chimney of the old inn came purple smoke, charged with the pungent odor of burning pine wood.

With a strange sadness he saddled his horse and resumed 277his ride towards the west. He thought constantly of Caroline–so much so that after he had traveled ten miles he wanted to turn back; he felt miserable without her. If only she were riding beside him, the two bound for Penn’s Valley Cave, he could be supremely happy. Without her, he did not care to visit the cavern, or anything else; so at Jacobsburg he crossed the Nittany Mountains, leaving the southerly valleys behind.

He rode up Nittany Valley to Bellefonte, where he met the agent of the Snow Shoe Company. With this gentleman he visited the vast tract being opened up to lumbering, mining and colonization. But his thoughts were elsewhere; they were across the mountains with the little postmistress of Stover’s.

Satisfied that his investment would prove remunerative, he left the development company’s cozy lodge-house, and, with a heart growing lighter with each mile, started for the east. It was wonderful how differently–how vastly more beautiful the country seemed on this return journey. He fully appreciated the wistful loveliness of the fast-fading autumn foliage, the crispness of the air, the beauty of each stray tuft of asters, the last survivors of the wild flowers along the trail. The world was full of joy, everything was in harmony.

Again it was after nightfall when he reined his horse in front of Stover’s long, rambling public house. This time two doors opened simultaneously, sending forth golden lights and shadows. One was from the tap-room, where the hostler emerged; the other from the 278post office, bringing little Caroline. There was no mail that night, consequently the office was practically deserted; she had time to come out and greet her much-admired friend. And let it be said that ever since she had seen him her heart was agog with the image of Mifflin Sargeant. She was canny enough to appreciate such a man; besides, he was a good-looking youth though perhaps of a less robust type than those most admired in the Red Hills.

After cordial greetings the young man ate supper, after which he repaired to the post office. By that time the last straggler was gone; he had a blissful evening with his fair Caroline. She anticipated his coming, being somewhat of a psychic, and had arranged to spend the night with the Stovers. There was no hurry to retire; when they went out on the porch, preparatory to locking up, the hunter’s moon was sinking behind the western knobs, which rose like the pyramids of Egypt against the sky line.

Sargeant lingered around the old house for three days; when he departed it was with extreme reluctance. Seeing Caroline again in the future appeared like something too good to be true, so down-hearted was he at the parting. But he had arranged to come back the following autumn, bringing an extra horse with him, and the two would ride to the wonderful cavern in Penn’s Valley and explore to the ends its stygian depths. Meanwhile they would make most of their separation through a regular correspondence.

Despite glances, pressure of hands, chance caresses, 279and evident happiness in one another’s society, not a word of love had passed between the pair. That was why the pain of parting was so intense. If Caroline could have remembered one loving phrase, then she would have felt that she had something tangible on which to hang her hopes. If the young Philadelphian had unburdened his heart by telling her that he loved her, and her alone, and heard her words of affirmation, the world out into which he was riding would have seemed less blank.

But underneath his love, burning like a hot branding iron, was his consciousness of class, his fear of the consequences if he took to the great city a bride from another sphere. As an only son, he could not picture himself deserting his widowed mother and sisters, and living at Snow Shoe; there he was sure that Caroline would be happy. Neither could he see permanent peace of mind if he married her and brought her into his exclusive circles in the Quaker City.

As he was an honorable young man, and his love was real, making her truly and always happy was the solitary consideration. These thoughts marred the parting; they blistered and ravaged his spirit on the whole dreary way back to Liverpool. There his colored servant, an antic darkey, was waiting at the old Susquehanna House to ride the horse to Philadelphia.

The young man boarded the packet, riding on it to Harrisburg, where he took the steam train for home. In one way he was happier than ever before in his life, for he had found love; in another he was the most dejected 280of men, for his beloved might never be his own.

He seemed gayer and stronger to his family; evidently the trip into the wilderness had done him good. He had begun his letter-writing to Caroline promptly. It was his great solace in his heart perplexity. She wrote a very good letter, very tender and sympathetic; the handwriting was clear, almost masculine, denoting the bravery of her spirit.

During the winter he was called upon through his sisters to mingle much with the society of the city. He met many beautiful and attractive young women, but for him the die of love had been cast. He was Caroline’s irretrievably. Absence made his love firmer, yet the solution of it all the more enigmatical.

The time passed on apace. Another autumn set in, but on account of important business matters it was not until December that Sargeant departed for the wilds of mountainous Pennsylvania. But he could spend Christmas with his love.

This time he sent two horses ahead to Liverpool. When he reached the queer old river town he dropped into an old saddlery shop, where the canal-boat drivers had their harness mended, and purchased a neat side saddle, all studded with brass-headed nails. This he tied on behind his servant’s saddle.

The two horsemen started up the beautiful West Mahantango, crossing the Shade Mountain to Swinefordstown, thence along the edge of Jack’s Mountain, by the gently flowing Karoondinha, to Hartley Hall 281and the Narrows, through the Fox Gap and Minnick’s Gap, a slightly shorter route to Stover’s.

On his previous trip he had ridden along the river to Selin’s Grove, across Chestnut Ridge to New Berlin, over Shamokin Ridge to Youngmanstown, and from there to the Narrows; he was in no hurry; no dearly loved girl was waiting for him in those days.

Caroline, looking prettier than ever–she was a trifle plumper and redder cheeked–was at the post office steps to greet him. Despite his avoidance of words of love, she was certain of his inmost feelings, and opined that somehow the ultimate result would be well.

Sargeant had arranged to arrive on a Saturday evening, so that they could begin their ride to the cave that night after the post office closed, and be there bright and early Sunday morning. For this reason he had traveled by very easy stages from Hartley Hall, that the horses might be fresh for their added journey.

Sargeant’s devoted Negro factotum was taken somewhat aback when he saw how attentive the young man was to the girl, and marveled at the mountain maid’s rare beauty. Upon instructions from his master, he set about to changing the saddles, placing the brand new lady’s saddle on the horse he had been riding.

It was not long until the tiny post office was closed for the night, and Caroline emerged, wearing a many-caped red riding coat, the hood of which she threw over her head to keep the wavy, chestnut hair in place. She climbed into the saddle gracefully–she seemed a natural horse-woman–and soon the loving pair were 282cantering up the road towards Wolfe’s Store, Rebersburg and the cave.

It was not quite daybreak when they passed the home of old Jacob Harshbarger, the tenant of the “cave farm;” a Creeley rooster was crowing lustily in the barnyard, the unmilked cattle of the ancient black breed shook their shaggy heads lazily; no one was up.

The young couple had planned to visit the cave, breakfast, and spend the day with Caroline’s sister, who lived not far away at Centre Hill, and ride leisurely back to Stover’s in the late afternoon. It had been a very cold all-night ride, but they had been so happy that it seemed brief and free from all disagreeable physical sensations.

In those days there was no boat in the cave, and no guides; consequently all intending visitors had to bring their own torches. This Caroline had seen to, and in her leisure moments for weeks before her lover’s coming, had been arranging a supply of rich pine lights that would see them safely through the gloomy labyrinths.

They fed their horses and then tied them to the fence of the orchard which surrounded the entrance to the “dry” cave, which had been recently set out. Several big original white pines grew along the road, and would give the horses shelter in case it turned out to be a windy day. The young couple strolled through the orchard, and down the steep path to the mouth of the “watery” cave, where they gazed for some minutes at the expanse of greenish water, the high span of the 283arched roof, the general impressiveness of the scene, so like the stage setting of some elfin drama.

They sat on the dead grass, near this entrance, eating a light breakfast with relish. Then they wended their way up the hill to the circular “hole in the ground” which formed the doorway to the “dry” cave. The torches were carefully lit, the supply of fresh ones was tied in a bundle about Sargeant’s waist. The burning pine gave forth an aromatic odor and a mellow light. They descended through the narrow opening, the young man going ahead and helping his sweetheart after him. Down the spiral passageway they went, until at length they came into a larger chamber. Here the torches cast unearthly shadows, bats flitted about; some small animal ran past them into an aperture at a far corner. Sargeant declared that he believed the elusive creature a fox, and he followed in the direction in which it had gone.

When he came to this opening he peered through it, finding that it led to an inner chamber of impressive proportions. He went back, taking Caroline by the hand, and led her to the narrow chamber, into which they both entered. Once in the interior room, they were amazed by its size, the height of its roof, the beauty of the stalactite formations. They sat down on a fallen stalagmite, holding aloft their torches, absorbed by the beauty of the scene.

In the midst of their musing, a sudden gust of wind blew out their lights. They were in utter darkness. The young lover bade his sweetheart be unafraid, while 284he reached his hand in his pocket for the matches. They were primitive affairs, the few he had, and he could not make them light. He had not counted on the use of the matches, as he thought one torch could be lit from another; consequently had brought so few with him. Finally he lit a match, but the dampness extinguished it before he could ignite his torch.

When the last match failed, it seemed as if the couple were in a serious predicament. They first shouted at the top of their voices but only empty echoes answered them. They fumbled about in the chamber, stumbling over rocks and stalagmites, their eyes refusing to become accustomed to the profound blackness. Try as they would, they could not locate the passage that led from the room they were in to the outer apartment.

Caroline, little heroine that she was, made no complaint. If she had any secret fears, her lover effectually quenched them by telling her that the presence of the two saddle horses tied to the orchard fence would acquaint the Harshbarger family of their presence in the cave.

“Surely,” he went on, “we will be rescued in a few hours. There’s bound to be some member of the household or some hunter see those horses.”

But the hours passed, and with them came no intimations of rescue. But the two “prisoners” loved one another, time was nothing to them. In the outer world, both thought, but neither made bold to say, that they might have to separate–in the cave they were one in purpose, one in love. How gloriously happy they were! 285But they did get a trifle hungry, but that was appeased at first by the remnants of the breakfast provisions, which they luckily still had in a little bundle.

When sufficient time had elapsed for night to set in, they fell asleep, and in each other’s arms. Caroline’s last conscious moment was to feel her lover’s kisses. When they awoke, many hours afterwards, they were hungrier than ever, and thirsty. Sargeant fumbled about, locating a small pool of water, where the two quenched their thirsts. But still they were happy, come what may.

They would be rescued, that was certain, unless the horses had broken loose and run away, but there was small chance of that. They had been securely tied. It was strange that no one had seen the steeds in so long a time, with the farmhouse less than a quarter of a mile away–but it was at the foot of the hill.

Hunger grew apace with every hour. After a while drinking water could not sate it. It throbbed and ached, it became a dull pain that only love could triumph over. Again enough hours elapsed to bring sleep, but it was harder to find repose, though Sargeant’s kisses were marvelous recompense. Caroline never whimpered from lack of food. To be with her lover was all she asked. She had prayed for over a year to be with him again. She would be glad to die at his side, even of starvation.

The young man was content; hunger was less a pain to him than had been the past fourteen months’ separation.

286Again came what they supposed to be morning. They knew that there must be some way out near at hand, as the air was so pure. They shouted, but the dull echoes were their only reward. Strangely enough, they had never felt another cold gust like the one which had blown out their torches. Could the shade of one of the old-time Indians who had fought for possession of the cave been perpetrator of the trick? suggested lovely little Caroline. If so, she thought to herself, he had helped her, not harmed her, for could there be in the world a sensation half so sweet as sinking to rest in her lover’s arms?

Meanwhile the world outside the cavern had been going its way. Shortly after the young equestrian passed the Harshbarger dwelling, all the family had come out, and, after attending to their farm duties, driven off to the Seven Mountains, where the sons of the family maintained a hunting camp on Cherry Run, on the other side of High Valley.

The boys had killed an elk, consequently the guests remained longer than expected, to partake of a grand Christmas feast. They tarried at the camp all of that day, all of the next; it was not until early on the morning of the third day that they started back to the Penn’s Creek farm.

They had arranged with a neighbor’s boy, Mosey Scull, who lived further along the creek below the farm house, to do the feeding in their absence; it was winter, there was no need to hurry home.

When they got home they found Mosey in the act of 287watering two very dejected and dirty looking horses with saddles on their backs.

“Where did they come from?” shouted the big freight-wagon load in unison.

“I found them tied to the fence up at the orchard. By the way they act I’d think they hadn’t been watered or fed for several days,” replied the boy.

“You dummy!” said old Harshbarger, in Dutch. “Somebody’s in that cave, and got lost, and can’t get out.”

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 reachedreached 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:

288“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.”

BIG SNYDER COUNTY WILD CAT

289Caroline 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.

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, 291the 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 encounterencounter 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 292the 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. 293After 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 294a 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 295though 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 gutteralgutteral, 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, 296manifested 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-groundbattle-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 builthe built a small fire near the mammoth carcasses, where he warmed his much benumbed hands. Then he examined the 297dead 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 tufttuft 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 299to 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 AnnapalpeteuAnnapalpeteu 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 300they begged him to rest for a day. But his will forced him on; he wanted to be virilevirile and win the beautiful AnnapalpeteuAnnapalpeteu.

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 301country 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 302his 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 303he 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 304lover, 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 305wanted her good time in life; her joy of living was at its height, her sense of enjoyment at its zenith.

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.

306The 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, 307the guardian. The aged redman expressed surprise at seeing him again.

“I have“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, 308old 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.

309Old 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.

XXIII Compensations

It seemed that Andrew McMeans and Oscar Wellendorf were born to be engaged in rivalryrivalry, 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 311of 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 312Pennsylvania 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 occasionoccasion 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 PennsylvaniaPennsylvania 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. 313French 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 314from 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.

315"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 CincinnattiCincinnatti 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 316in 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 317around 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 AlleghenyAllegheny 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 318ordered 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 319and 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 theunconscious 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 320after the accident when the two rival rafts, with the stalwart young pilots atat 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, franticallyfrantically 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 partyparty, 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 doctorsdoctors 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 outcomeoutcome 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 321years 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.

RUINS OF FORT BARNET. BUILT IN 1740. (Photograph Taken 1895.)

The old grandmother watched McMeans’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, 322“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 323of 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, 324and 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 325the 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 327to 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 328her 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 329him, 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 330their 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 331learned 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 spiritualspiritual 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.

332Drawn 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 333classes; 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, 334it was in the remote valley in which he had taught school, and where news of his early demise occasioned profound regret.

Years passedpassed, 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.

335She 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 arrivalarrival of a ship from China, so 336as 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 337physical 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.”

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.

338“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 youryour 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 340was 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 341polluted 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 342west, 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 343Quaker 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 344he 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 345the 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 346return, 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:

The concluding lines of which were:

347But 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 348Smoke, 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.

349Stewardson 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 350his 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.”

351Then 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 352to 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 353the 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 354over 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.

355He 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,

356