Part 15

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, he 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 there 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 stood admiring his work, while he 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 thought, 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 melancholy 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.

Jake 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.

On a centre table, with a top of brown onyx, on which were also several bisque ornaments, lay an ancient 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 for 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 sleeper 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, had 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, the 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 made her open the wrapper as it lay on the kitchen table. On the front page she saw the likeness of 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, “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 road, 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 was 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 the village he planned to locate there Odin, after the supreme deity 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 they 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 over 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.