Part 16

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. It impressed me as very unusual, being entirely free from undergrowth, except the furze grass one sees on poor, worked-out land.

“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 woman 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, with 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 what 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, piquant 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.

The girl stood looking at Doane. He was young, strong, and had a fairly decent face. How could he be 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 deliver 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 penetrating 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 quickly 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.”

“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, and 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 in 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.

“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.

“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 would 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 left 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.

But 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 up 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 above 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’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.” “ Naganit 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.”

Quetajaku, 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_