Part 18

“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 reached the opening, where he paused a moment to kindle a torch with his flints. Then he lowered himself into the aperture, shouting at the top of his voice, “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

It was not until he had gotten into the first chamber that the captives in the inner room could hear him. Sargeant had been sitting with his back propped against the cavern wall, while Caroline, very pale and white-lipped, was lying across his knees, gazing up into the darkness, imagining that she could see his face.

When they heard the cheery shouts of their deliverer they did not instantly attempt to scramble to their feet. Instead the young lover bent over; his lips touched Caroline’s, who instinctively had raised her face to meet his. As his lips touched hers, he whispered:

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

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

They were in that position when the flare of Farmer Harshbarger’s torch lit up their hiding place. Pretty soon they were on their feet and, with their rescuer, figuring out just how long they had been in their prison–their prison of love.

They had gone into the cave on the morning of December 24th; it was now the morning of the 27th; in fact almost noon. Christmas had come and gone.

Caroline still had enough strength in reserve to enable her to climb up the tortuous passage, though her lover did help her some, as all lovers should.

The farmer’s wife had some coffee and buckwheat cakes ready when they arrived at the mansion; which the erstwhile captives of Penn’s Cave sat down to enjoy.

As they were eating, another of Harshbarger’s sons rode up on horseback. He had been to the post office at Earlysburg. He handed Sargeant a tiny, roughly typed newspaper published in Millheim. Across the front page, in letters larger than usual, were the words, “Mexico Declares War on the United States.”

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

“Our country has been drawn into a war with Mexico,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion. “I had hoped it might be avoided. I am First Lieutenant of the Lafayette Greys; I fear I’ll have to go.”

Caroline lost the color which had come back to her pretty cheeks since emerging from the underground dungeon. She reached over, grasping her lover’s now clammy hand. Then, noticing that no one was listening, she said, faintly:

“It is terrible to have you leave me now; but won’t you marry me before you go? I do love you.” “replied Sargeant, with enthusiasm. “I will have more to fight for, with you at home bearing my name.”

Love had broken the bonds of caste.

XXI _The Silent Friend_

Every one who has hunted in the “Seven Brothers’”, as the Seven Mountains are called in Central Pennsylvania, has heard of Daniel Karstetter, the famous Nimrod. The Seven Mountains comprise the Path Valley, Short Bald, Thick Head, Sand, Shade and Tussey Mountains. Though three-quarters of a century has passed since he was in his hey-day as a slayer of big game, his fame is undiminished. Anecdotes of his prowess are related in every hunting camp; by one and all he has been acclaimed the greatest hunter that the Seven Brothers ever produced.

The great Nimrod, who lived to a very advanced age, was born in 1818 on the banks of Pine Creek, a: the Blue Rock, half a mile below the present town of Coburn. In addition to his hunting prowess, he was interested in psychic experiences, and was as prone to discuss his adventures with supernatural agencies as his conflicts with the wild denizens of the forests. There was a particular ghost story which he loved dearly to relate.

Accompanied by his younger brother Jacob, he had been attending a dance one night across the mountains, in the environs of the town of Milroy, for like all the backwoods boys of his time, he was adept in the art of terpsichore. The long journey was made on horseback, the lads being mounted on stout Conestoga chargers.

The homeward ride was commenced after midnight, the two brothers riding along the dark trail in single file. In the wide flat on the top of the “Big Mountain” Daniel fell into a doze. When he awoke, his mount having stumbled on a stone, Jacob was nowhere to be seen. Thinking that his brother had put his horse to trot and gone on ahead, Daniel dismissed the matter of his absence from his mind.

As he was riding down the steep slope of the mountain, he noticed a horseman waiting for him on the path. When they came abreast the other rider fell in beside him, skillfully guiding his horse so that it did not encounter the dense foliage which lined the narrow way. Daniel supposed the party to be his brother, although the unknown kept his lynx-skin collar turned up, and his felt cap was pulled down level with his eyes. It was pitchy dark, so to make sure, Daniel called out:

“Is that you, Jacob?”

His companion did not reply, so the young man repeated his query in still louder tones, but all he heard was the crunching of the horses’ hoofs on the pebbly road.

Daniel Karstetter, master slayer of panthers, bears and wolves, was no coward, though on this occasion he felt uneasy. Yet he disliked picking a quarrel with the silent man at his side, who clearly was not his brother, and he feared to put his horse to a gallop on the steep, uneven roadway. The trip home never before seemed of such interminable length. For the greater part of the distance Daniel made no attempt to converse with his unsociable comrade. Finally, he heaved a sigh of relief when he saw a light gleaming in the horse stable at the home farm. When he reached the barnyard gate he dismounted to let down the bars, while the stranger apparently vanished in the gloom.

Daniel led his mount to the horse stable, where he found his brother Jacob sitting by the old tin lantern, fast asleep. He awakened him and asked him when he had gotten home. Jacob stated that his horse had been feeling good, so he let him canter all the way. He had been sleeping, but judged that he had been home at least half an hour. He had met no horseman on the road.

Daniel was convinced that his companion had been a ghost, or, as they are called in the “Seven Brothers,” a _gshpook_. But he made no further comment that night.

A year afterwards, in coming back alone from a dance in Stone Valley, he was again joined by the silent horseman, who followed him to his barnyard gate. He gave up going to dances on that account. At least once a year, or as long as he was able to go out at night, he met the ghostly rider. Sometimes, when tramping along on foot after a hunt, or, in later years, coming back from market at Bellefonte in his Jenny Lind, he would find the silent horseman at his side. After the first experience, he never attempted to speak to the night rider, but he became convinced that it meant him no harm.

As his prowess as a hunter became recognized, he had many jealous rivals among the less successful Nimrods. In those old days threats of all kinds were freely made. He heard on several occasions that certain hunters were setting out to “fix” him. But a man who could wrestle with panthers and bears knew no such thing as fear.

One night, while tramping along in Green’s Valley, he was startled by some one in the path ahead of him shouting out in Pennsylvania German, “Hands up!” He was on the point of dropping his rifle, when he heard the rattle of hoof beats back of him. The silent horseman in an instant was by his side, the dark horse pawing the earth with his giant hoofs. There was a crackling of brush in the path ahead, and no more threats of _hend uff_.

The ghostly rider followed Daniel to his barn yard gate, but was gone before he could utter a word of thanks. As the result of this adventure, he became imbued with the idea that he possessed a charmed life. It gave him added courage in his many encounters with panthers, the fierce red bears and lynxes.

Apart from his love of hunting the more dangerous animals, Daniel enjoyed the sport of deer-stalking. He maintained several licks, one of them in a patch of low ground over the hill from the entrance to the “dry” part of Penn’s Cave. At this spot he constructed a blind, or platform, between the two ancient tupelo trees, about twenty feet from the ground, and many were the huge white-faced stags which fell to his unerring bullets during the rutting season.

One cold night, according to an anecdote frequently related by one of his descendants, while perched in his eyrie overlooking the natural clearing which constituted the _lick_, and in sight of a path frequented by the fiercer beasts, which led to the opening of the “dry” cave, he saw, about midnight, a huge pantheress, followed by a large male of the same species, come out into the open.

“The pantheress strolled from the path,” so the story went, "and came and laid herself down at the roots of the tupelo trees, while the panther remained in the path, and seemed to be listening to some noise as yet inaudible to the hunter.

"Daniel soon heard a distant roaring; it seemed to come from the very summit of the Brush Mountain, and immediately the pantheress answered it. The the panther on the path, his jealousy aroused, commenced to roar with a voice so loud that the frightened hunter almost let go his trusty rifle and held tighter to the railing of his blind, lest he might tumble to the earth. As the voice of the animal that he had heard in the distance gradually approached, the pantheress welcomed him with renewed roarings, and the panther, restless, went and came from the path to his flirtatious flame, as though he wished her to keep silence, as though to say, ‘Let him come if he dares; he will find his match’.

"In about an hour a panther, with mouse-color, or grey coat, stepped out of the forest, and stood in the full moonlight on the other side of the cleared place, the moonbeams illuminating his form with a glow like phosphorescence. The pantheress, eyeing him with admiration, raised herself to go to him, but the panther, divining her intent, rushed before her and marched right at his adversary. With measured step and slow, they approached to within a dozen paces of each other, their smooth, round heads high in the air, their bulging yellow eyes gleaming, their long, tufted tails slowly sweeping down the brittle asters that grew about them. They crouched to the earth–a moment’s pause–and then they bounded with a hellish scream high in the air and rolled on the ground, locked in their last embrace.

"The battle was long and fearful, to the amazed and spellbound witness of this midnight duel. Even if he had so wished, he could not have taken steady enough aim to fire. But he preferred to watch the combat, while the moonlight lasted. The bones of the two combatants cracked under their powerful jaws, their talons painted the frosty ground with blood, and their outcries, now gutteral, now sharp and loud, told their rage and agony.

"At the beginning of the contest the pantheress crouched herself on her belly, with her eyes fixed upon the gladiators, and all the while the battle raged, manifested by the slow, catlike motion of her tail, the pleasure she felt at the spectacle. When the scene closed, and all was quiet and silent and deathlike on the lick, and the moon had commenced to wane, she cautiously approached the battle-ground and, sniffing the lifeless bodies of her two lovers, walked leisurely to a nearby oak, where she stood on her hind feet, sharpening her fore claws on the bark.

"She glared up ferociously at the hunter in the blind, as if she meant to vent her anger by climbing after him. In the moonlight her golden eyes appeared so terrifying that Daniel dropped his rifle, and it fell to the earth with a sickening thud. As he reached after it, the flimsy railing gave way and he fell, literally into the arms of the pantheress. At that moment the rumble of horses’ hoofs, like thunder on some distant mountain, was heard. Just as the panther was about to rend the helpless Nimrod to bits, the unknown rider came into view. Scowling at the intruder, mounted on his huge black horse, the brute abandoned its prey and ambled off up the hill in the direction of the dry cave.

"Daniel seized his firearm and sent a bullet after her retreating form, but it apparently went wild of its mark. Meanwhile, before he had time to express his gratitude to the strange deliverer, he had vanished.

"Daniel was dumbfounded. As soon as he had recovered from the blood-curdling episodes, he built a small fire near the mammoth carcasses, where he warmed his much benumbed hands. Then he examined the dead panthers, but found that their hides were too badly torn to warrant skinning.

"Disgusted at not getting his deer, and being even cheated out of the panther pelts, he dragged the ghastly remains of the erstwhile kings of the forest by their tails to the edge of the entrance to the dry cave. There he cut off the long ears in order to collect the bounty, and then shoved the carcasses into the opening. They fell with sickening thuds into the chamber beneath, to the evident horror of the pantheress, which uttered a couple of piercing screams as the horrid remnants of the recent battle royal landed in her vicinity.

“Then Jacob shouldered his rifle and started out in search of small game for breakfast. That night he went to another of his licks on Elk Creek, near Fulmer’s Sink, where he killed four superb stags,” so the story concludes.

But to his dying day he always placed the battle of the panthers first of all his hunting adventures. And his faith in the unknown horseman as his deliverer and good genius became the absorbing, all-pervading influence of his life.

XXII _The Fountain of Youth_

Old Chief Wisamek, of the Kittochtinny Indians, had lost his spouse. He was close to sixty years of age, which was old for a redman, especially one who had led the hard life of a warrior, exposed to all kinds of weather, fasts and forced marches. Though he felt terribly lonely and depressed in his state of widowerhood, the thought of discarding the fidelity of the eagle, which, if bereaved, never takes a second mate, and was the noble bird he worshipped, seemed repugnant to him until he happened to see the fair and buxom maid Annapalpeteu.

He was rheumatic, walking with difficulty; he tired easily, was fretful, all sure signs of increasing age; but what upset him most was the sight of his reflection in his favorite pool, a haggard, weazened, wrinkled face, with a nose like the beak of an eagle, and glazed eyes as colorless as clay. When he opened his mouth the reflected image seemed to be mostly toothless, the lips were blue and thin. He had noticed that he did not need to pluck the hairs from his skull any more to give prominence to his warrior’s top-knot; the proud tuft itself was growing sparse and weak; to keep it erect he was now compelled to braid it with hair from a buffalo’s tail.

Brave warrior that he was, he hated to pay his court to the lovely Annapalpeteu when on all sides he saw stalwart, six-foot youths, masses of sinews and muscle, clear-eyed, firm-lipped, always ambitious and high-spirited, more suited to be her companions.

But one afternoon he saw his copper-colored love sitting by the side of the Bohundy Creek, beating maize in a wooden trough. Her entire costume consisted of a tight petticoat of blue cloth, hardly reaching to the knees, and without any ruffles. Her cheeks and forehead were neatly daubed with red. She seemed very well content with her coadjutor, a bright young fellow, who, except for two wild cat hides appropriately distributed, was quite as naked as the ingenuous beauty. That Annapalpeteu had a cavalier was now certain, and immediately it rankled what flames remained in his jaded body; he must have her at any cost.

Down by the Conadogwinet, across the Broad Mountain, lived Mbison, a wise man. Old Wisamek would go there and consult him, perhaps obtain from him some potion to permanently restore at least a few of the fires of his lost youth. Though his will power had been appreciably slackening of late years, he acted with alacrity on the idea of visiting the soothsayer. Before sundown he was on his way to the south, accompanied by several faithful henchmen. Carrying a long ironwood staff, he moved on with unwonted agility; it was very dark, and the path difficult to follow, when he finally consented to bivouac for the night. The next morning found him so stiff that he could hardly clamber to his feet. His henchmen assisted him, though they begged him to rest for a day. But his will forced him on; he wanted to be virile and win the beautiful Annapalpeteu.

The journey, which consumed a week, cost the aged Strephon a world of effort. But as he had been indefatigable in his youth, he was determined to reach the wise man’s headquarters walking like a warrior, and not carried there on a litter like an old woman. Bravely he forged ahead, his aching joints paining miserably, until at length he came in sight of his Promised Land.

The soothsayer, who had been apprised of his coming by a dream, was in front of his substantial lodge-house to greet him. Seldom had he received a more distinguished client than Wisamek, so he welcomed him with marked courtesy and deference.

After the first formalities, the old chief, who had restrained himself with difficulty, asked how he could be restored to a youthful condition, so that he could rightfully marry a beautiful maiden of eighteen summers. The wise man, who had encountered similar supplicants in the past, informed him that the task was a comparatively easy one. It would involve, however, however, first drinking the waters of the Warm Springs (in what is now Perry County), then another journey across mountains.

Wisamek shouted for joy when he heard these words, and impatiently demanded where he would have to go to be finally restored to youth.

“Across many high mountain ranges, across many broad valleys, across many swift streams, through a country covered with dark forests and filled with wild beasts, to the northwest of here, is a wonderful cavern. In it rises a deep stream of greenish color, clear as crystal, the fountain of youth. At its heading you will find a very old man, Gamunk, who knows the formula. Give him this talisman, and he will allow you to bathe in the marvelous waters and be young again.”

With the final words he handed Wisamek a red bear’s tooth, on which was cleverly carved the form of an athletic youth. The old chief’s hands trembled so much that he almost dropped the precious fetich. But he soon recovered his self-control and thanked the wise man. Then he ordered his henchmen to give the soothsayer gifts, which they did, loading him with beads, pottery, wampum and rare furs.

Despite the invitation to remain until he was completely rested, Wisamek determined to depart at once for the warm springs and the fountain of youth. He drank the warm water copiously, enjoying the beautiful surroundings at the springs. He was so stimulated by his high hope and the mineral waters that he climbed the steep ridges, crossed the turbulent streams and put up with the other inconveniences of the long march much better than might have been the case. During the entire journey he sang Indian love songs, strains which had not passed his lips in thirty years.

His followers, gossiping among themselves, declared that he looked better already. Perhaps he would not have to bathe in the fountain after all. He might resume his youth, because he willed it so. Indians were strong believers in the power of mind over matter.

When he reached the vicinity of the cave he was fortunate enough to meet the aged Indian who was its guardian. Though his hair was snow white and he said he was so old that he had lost count of the years, Gamunk’s carriage was erect, his complexion smooth, his eyes clear and kindly. He walked along with a swinging stride, very different from Wisamek’s mental picture of him. The would-be bridegroom, who handed him the talisman, was quick to impart his mission to his new-found friend.

“It is true,” he replied, “after a day and a night’s immersion in the cave’s water you will emerge with all the appearance of youth. There is absolutely no doubt of it. Thousands have been here before.”

With these reassuring words Wisamek again leaped for joy, gyrating like a young brave at a cantico.

The party, accompanied by the old guardian, quickly arrived at the cave’s main opening, where beneath them lay stretched the calm, mirror-like expanse of greenish water.

“Can I begin the bath now?” asked the chief, impatiently. “I am anxious to throw off the odious appearance of age.” “replied the old watchman, who took him by the hand, leading to the ledge where it was highest above the water. “Jump off here,” he said quietly. Wisamek, who had been a great swimmer in his youth and was absolutely fearless of the water, replied that he would do so. “But remember you must remain in the water without food until this hour tomorrow,” said the guardian.

As he leaped into the watery depths the chief shouted he would remain twice as long if he could be young again. Wisamek was true to his instructions; there was too much at stake; he dared not falter.

The next morning his henchmen were at the cave’s mouth to greet his reappearance. They were startled to see, climbing up the ledge with alacrity, a tall and handsome man, as young looking as themselves. There was a smile on the full, red lips, a twinkle in the clear eye of the re-made warrior as he stood among them, physically a prince among men.

The homeward journey was made with rapidity. Wisamek traveled so fast that he played out his henchmen who were half his age.

Annapalpeteu, who was seated in front of her parents’ cabin weaving a garment, noticed a youth of great physical beauty approaching, at the head of Chief Wisamek’s clansmen. She wondered who he could be, as he wore Wisamek’s headdress of feathers of the osprey or “sea eagle.” When he drew near he saluted her, and, not giving her time to answer, joyfully shouted: “Don’t you recognize me? I am your good friend Wisamek, come back to win your love, after a refreshing journey through the distant forests.”

Annapalpeteu, who was a sensible enough girl to have admired the great warrior for his prowess, even though she had never thought of him seriously as a lover, was now instantly smitten by his engaging appearance. The henchmen withdrew, leaving the couple together. They made marked progress with their romance; words of love were mentioned before they parted.

It was not long before the betrothal was announced, followed shortly by the wedding festival. At the nuptials the bridegroom’s appearance was the marvel of all present. It was hinted that he had been somewhere and renewed his youth, but as the henchmen were sworn to secrecy, how it had been done was not revealed.