Part 6

These last words were secretly pleasing to the Viscount, as it showed that the young woman recognized in him a person of superior sensibilities, but he hurried to the barn until he knew that she had been given time to escape to the house. But he could not help hearing the lamp black maker loudly chiding her for modesty, a trait she had never displayed previously. Pretty soon he saw the fellow making trips to the spring, carrying water buckets into the house. The Viscount sat on the doorstep of the barn, watching the juncos flying about among the savin bushes in the clearing, or his eyes feasting on the cornelian red foliage of the sassafras trees on the hill, inwardly speculating if with her black disguise washed off, the young woman, whose higher nature he had aroused, would be as good looking as he imagined her to be. He made a mental picture of her loveliness, ranking her close beside that of high bred beauties of his own land, of the types depicted by Romney, Kneller and Lely.

It was not long before he saw her emerge from the house, all washed and scrubbed, with her hair neatly combed, clad in a spick and span “butternut” frock. As she came towards him, he noted that she was a trifle above the average height, and her feet, despite the rough brogans she wore, were very small. He saw, to his amazement, that she was the counterpart of his mental picture, only more radiantly lovely. When she drew near, she asked him, her face lighting up very prettily, as she spoke, if he would like to come to the house to rest, that she would soon prepare dinner, and hoped that he would not be too critical of her humble efforts as a cook.

Her eyes seldom met his, but he could see that they were large and grey-brown, with delicately penciled black brows, and black lashes. Her face was rather long and sallow, or rather of a pinkish pallor. Her hair was cameo brown, her nose long and straight, the lines of her mouth delicate and refined, with lips unusually thin. He had noticed, as she came towards him, that her slender form swayed a little forward as she walked, reminding him of the mythical maiden Syrinx, daughter of the River God, whom the jealous-hearted Pan changed into a reed.

The Viscount Adare was far more disconcerted than his hostess, as he followed her to the log house. Just as they approached the door she whispered, “I hope that you will forgive the awful exhibition I made of myself.”

Indoors she sat down on one of the courting blocks by the great open hearth, where pots of various sizes hung from the cranes. The man, who was still trying to get the lamp black out of his curly hair and beard, was only partially dressed, and looked all the world like pictures of the lascivious Lupercalian Pan himself.

The Englishman felt strangely at ease in the cabin, watching the slender, reed-like girl prepare the meal, and enjoyed the dinner with his humble entertainers.

Shortly after the repast another bearded backwoodsman appeared at the door. The lamp black maker had an appointment to go with him to some distant parts of the Shade Mountains to examine bear pens, and asked to be excused. He would not be back until the next day; it was nothing unusual for him to leave his friend alone for a week at a time on similar excursions.

The Viscount was in no hurry to go, as never had a woman appealed to him as did the lamp black maker’s young assistant. Perhaps it was the unconventional character of their first meeting that shocked his love into being; at any rate he was severely smitten; probably John Rolfe was no more so, on his first glimpse of the humane Pocohontas.

After the two hunters had gone, the young woman sat down on the other courting block, on the opposite of the inglenook, and The Viscount decided to ask her to tell him the story of her life. She colored a trifle, saying that no one had ever been interested in her life’s history before, therefore, she might not repeat it very well.

She had been born at sea, of parents coming from the northern part of Ireland. They had settled first in the Cumberland Valley, then, when she was about a dozen years old, decided to migrate to Kentucky. They had not gotten much further than the covered bridge across the Little Juniata, when they were ambushed by robbers, and all the adult members of the party, her parents and an uncle, were slain. The children were carried off, being apportioned among the highwaymen. She fell to the lot of the leader of the band, Conrad Jacobs, who took more than a fatherly interest in her.

He was a middle-aged married man, but he openly said that when the girl was big enough, he would chase his wife away and install her in her place. But she was kindly treated by the strange people, even more so than at home, for her mother had been very severe and unreasonable.

When she was fifteen she saw signs that the outlaw was going to put his plan into effect–to drive his wife out into the forest, like an old horse–and probably would have done so, but for Simon Supersaxo, the lamp black man, who came to the highwayman’s shanty frequently on his hunting trips.

The robber became jealous of the young Nimrod and threatened to shoot him if he came near the premises again. A threat was as good as a promise with such people, so Supersaxo was ready to kill or be killed on sight.

He met the highwayman one evening in front of McCormick’s Tavern, and drawing the bead, shot him dead. He was not arrested, but feted by all the innkeepers for ridding the mountains of a dangerous deterrent to travel, while she, her name was Deborah Conner, went to help keep house for him, along with the outlaw’s widow, but in reality to help make lamp black.

That was four years before. Since old Mother Jacobs had died and Deborah, now nineteen years of age, was being importuned by Supersaxo to marry him.

Previous to the Englishman’s coming that morning, she had never felt any shame at working in the lamp black hut with her employer, or appearing before passers-by unclad, but now a great light had come to her; she was free to confess that she was changed and humiliated.

The Viscount looked her over and over, and far into those wonderful stone grey eyes that mirrored a refined soul lost in the wilderness. Then he made bold to speak:

“Deborah”, he said, “since you have been so frank with me in telling the story of your life, I will freely confess to you that I loved you the minute my eyes rested on you, even in your unbecoming homespun cap, and lamp black from head to foot. I realize that your being here is but an accident, and my coming the instrument to take you away. I will marry you, and strive always to make you happy, if you will come away with me, and I will take you to England where, among people of refined tastes, you will shine and always be at peace.”

Deborah opened her thin delicate mouth in surprise, and her eyes became like grey stars. “Really, do you mean that”? she said.

“I mean every word,” replied The Viscount Adare.

“I know that I feel differently towards you than any man I have seen, so I must love you, and I will always be happy with you,” resumed the girl. “And while I owe Simon Supersaxo a deep debt of gratitude for saving me from being forced into marrying that horrid old road-agent, I owe myself more, and you more still. I will go with you whenever you are ready to take me, no matter what my conscience will tell me later. Though I’ll say to you honestly that I never thought there was any life for me further than to make lamp black, until you came.”

She explained to him that at Christmastime the lamp black man always went with a party of companions on a great elk hunt to the distant Sinnemahoning Country, and if The Viscount would return then, she would arrange to meet him at a certain place at a certain day and hour, and go away with him. “There is a little clearing or old field on the top of the ridge, beyond this house,” and pointing her slender white hand, showed to him through the open door. “Meet me there on the day before Christmas, and I will be free to go away with you rejoicing.”

The balance of the visit was passed in pleasant amity, until towards nightfall, when The Viscount shouldered his pack and seized his staff, and started away, not for Pittsburg, but eastward again. Deborah, her slender reed-like figure swaying in the autumn breeze, walked with him to the edge of the clearing. She kissed him goodbye among the savin bushes, and he kissed her many times in return, until they parted at the carnelian-leafed sassafras trees on the hill, and he commenced the ascent of the steep face of Chestnut Ridge.

The trip back to Philadelphia was taken impatiently, but with a different kind of impatience; he wanted the entire intervening time obliterated, until he could get back to his strange exotic mountain love. In Philadelphia he engaged passage for England the first week in January, and wrote letters abroad to complete the arrangements for taking his wife-to-be to his ancestral home. He could never forget the last afternoon in the Quaker City. Christmas was coming, and the spirit of this glad festival was in the air, even more so than in “Merrie England.” He was walking through Chancellor Street when he came upon two blind Negro Christmas-singers, former sailors, who had lost their sight in the premature explosion of a cannon on the deck of a frigate on the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War. He stopped, elegant gentleman that he was, listened enraptured to their songs of simple faith: “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow.”

“If they had so much to be thankful for,” he mused, “how much more have I, with lovely Deborah only a few days in the future.”

Then he gave them each five shillings and moved on. A little further down the street, he met an old Negro Woman selling sprigs of holly with bright red berries. He bought a sprig. “I’ll take it to Deborah,” he said to himself.

He returned to Harrisburg by the stage coach, accompanied by a Negro body-servant well recommended by the British Consul. At Harrisburg he purchased four extra good horses. With these and the Negro he retraced his previous journey. He left the Negro and the horses at McCormick’s Tavern, continuing the balance of the journey on foot, his precious sprig of holly, with the bright red berries, fastened on the top of his staff, that had often been decked with the _edelweiss_ and the Alpine rose. Deborah had said that she knew all the mountain paths back to McCormick’s, so they could reach there quickly, and be mounted on fast horses almost before her employer missed them.

His heart was beating fast as he neared his trysting place, the little clearing on the ridge, the morning before Christmas. Peering through the trees, he observed that Deborah was not there, but surely she would soon come, the sun was scarcely over the Chestnut Ridge to the east! A grey fog hung over the valley, obscuring the little cabin in the cove.

He waited and waited all day long, but no Deborah appeared. He walked all over the top of the ridge to see if there were other clearings, lest he had gotten to the wrong one. There were no others, just as she had said. Cold beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead; he was angry; he was jealous; the day was closing bitterly cold. “The woman that I want, she will not come.”

Finally as the sun was going down behind the western summits of the Alleghenies, he untied the sprig of holly from the end of his mountain-staff, and bending over, stuck it in the fast freezing earth, a symbol of his faithless adventure, and started down the mountain, straight towards Deborah Supersaxo’s cabin.

At the foot of the hill he met her coming towards him–her face was deadly pale, her thin lips white as death–instantly his hate changed to tender love again.

“Kill me if you wish,” she cried out before he had time to speak, and held out her arms to show her non-resistance, “for I have been unworthy. I broke my faith with you, and was not going to come; I repented at leaving Supersaxo, who had been so good to me when I was in distress. I was going to leave you in the lurch. Then, then,” and here tears trickled down her ghastly cheeks, “I was sitting on the courting log by the fire, commending myself for my loyalty, when a few minutes ago one of his friends came in to say that the day before yesterday, while looking at somebody’s bear pen near the Karoondinha, it fell in on him and broke his neck. I was just coming up the hill to tell you, if you were still waiting, how wicked I had been to you, and how I had been punished. Kill me if you wish, I can never be happy any more.”

The Viscount Adare did not hesitate a moment, but flinging down his staff, he rushed to the girl and caught her in his arms. “Doubly blessed are we this night, dear Deborah, for there is now no impediment to our happiness; no misdirected sense of duty can cast a shadow on the joy that lies before us. I want you now more than ever before, after this final trial, and you must come with me!”

“Never say must again,” said Deborah, sweetly, looking up into his eyes, “I am your willing slave; I will go with you to the ends of the earth: I want to redeem this day by years of devotion, years of love.”

Picking up his staff, The Viscount Adare and the mountain girl resumed their journey, past the now deserted log house and the lamp black shack where they had first met, up the steep mountain, and off towards McCormick’s Tavern, near where, in a deep pine grove, the Negro body-servant would be waiting with the horses.

That is all that has been recorded in the mountains concerning the lamp black girl and The Viscount Adare. In England there is an oil painting of a certain Viscountess of the name that bears a striking resemblance to the one time Deborah Conner.

Up on the ridge, in the little clearing, one or more of the seeds of the sprig of holly took root, and grew a fine tree. In order that this story may be localized, it is said that this is one of the points furthest north of any specimen of the native holly in Pennsylvania. In time it died off, but not before other scions sprang up, and there has always been a thrifty holly tree on the hill, as if to commemorate a lover’s tryst, whose heart when on the point of breaking from hideous despair, found the fullness of his happiness suddenly, and whose story is an inspiration to all aching hearts.

VII _The Second Run of the Sap_

The selective draft, according to Dr. Jacobs, a very intelligent Seneca Indian, residing on the Cornplanter Reservation in Warren County, was practiced by Pennsylvania Indians in some of their earlier conflicts, notably in the bloody warfare in the Cherokee country.

In the war against the Cherokees, there was a popular apathy at home, as it was not undertaken to repel an unjust invasion, but for the purpose of aggression, after the murder of a number of Cherokees by the Lenape, and as such did not appeal to the just and patient tribesmen in general.

In order to increase the invading armies beyond the limits of the volunteer quotas of warriors and chiefs, who were of patrician antecedents, the draft was resorted to, with the result that a formidable host departed for the Southland, ravaging the enemy’s country, and bringing in many prisoners.

The Cherokees were not completely vanquished, as they were victorious in some of the conflicts, and also made numerous prisoners. Some of these were tortured to death, others were adopted by families that had lost their sons, while a few escaped and made their way Northward.

The war was followed by the usual period of upheaval and reconstruction, and the moral code of the redmen suffered as much as did modern civilization as an aftermath of the world war. Many Cherokee prisoners were brought to Pennsylvania and put at menial work, or bartered as slaves while others intermarried with the northern tribes, so that Cherokee blood become a component part of the make-up of the Pennsylvania aboriginies. The Cherokee legends and history lingered wherever a drop of their blood remained, so that the beginnings of some, at least, of our Pennsylvania Indian folk-lore hark back to the golden age of the Cherokees.

They certainly have been the martyr-race, the Belgians of the North American Indians, even to the time of their brutal expulsion from their Carolina homes during the Nineteenth Century by U. S. troops at the behest of selfish land-grabbers, and sentenced to die of exhaustion and broken hearts along the dreary trek to the distant Indian Territory.

Among the bravest and most enthusiastic of the Pennsylvania invaders was the young warrior In-nan-ga-eh, chief of the draft, who led the drafted portion of the army against the Cherokee foemen. He was of noble blood, hence himself exempt from the draft, but he was a lover of war and glory, and rejoiced to lead his less well-born, and less patriotic compatriots into the thick of battle. Although noble rank automatically exempted from the draft, the young scions of nobility enlisted practically to a man, holding high commissions, it is true, yet at all times bold and courageous.

In-nan-ga-eh was always peculiarly attractive to the female sex. Tall, lithe and sinewy, he was a noted runner and hunter, as well as famed for his warlike prowess. At twenty-two he was already the veteran of several wars, notably against the Ottawas and the Catawbas, and thirsted for a chance to humble his southern rivals, the Cherokees. He wished to make it his boast that he had fought and conquered tribes on the four sides of the territory where he lived, making what is now the Pennsylvania country the ruling land, the others all vassal states.

He was indiscriminate in his love making, having no respect for birth or caste, being different from his reserved and honorable fellow aristocrats, consequently at his departure for the south, he was mourned for by over a score of maidens of various types and degrees. If he cared for any one of these admirers, it was Liddenah, a very beautiful, kindly and talented maiden, the daughter of the noted wise man or sooth-sayer, Wahlowah, and probably the most remarkable girl in the tribe.

That she cared for such an unstable and shallow-minded youth to the exclusion of others of superior mental gifts and seriousness of purpose, amply proved the saying that opposites attract, for there could have been no congeniality of tastes between the pair. Temperamentally they seemed utterly unsuited, as Liddenah was artistic and musically inclined, and a chronicler of no mean ability, yet she would have given her life for him at any stage of the romance. She possessed ample self-control, but when he went away her inward sorrow gnawing at her heart almost killed her. She may have had a presentiment of what was in store!

During invasions of this kind, communication with home was maintained by means of runners who carried tidings, good or bad, bringing back verbal lists of the dead, wounded and missing, some of which they shamefully garbled.

In-nan-ga-eh was decorated several times for conspicuous bravery, and was reported in the vanguard of every attack, until at length came the shocking news of his ambush and capture. Over a score of the most beautiful maidens along the Ohe-yu and Youghiogheny were heartbroken to distraction, but none more so than the lovely and intellectual Liddenah. This was the crowning blow, her lover taken by his cruel foes, being perhaps boiled alive, or drawn and quartered. Seated alone in her lodge house by the banks of The Beautiful River, she pictured all sorts of horrors befalling her beloved, and of his own deep grief at being held prisoner so far from his homeland.

It was a humiliation to be captured, and by a band of Amazons, who begged permission to entrap the fascinating enemy. Finding him bathing in a deep pool, they surrounded it, flinging at him slightly poisoned darts, which made him partially overcome by sleep, so that he was only able to clamber out on the bank, there to be secured by his fair captors and led in dazed triumph to their chief.

The Chieftain was elated at the capture, and treated the handsome prisoner with all the deference due to his rank. Instead of boiling him in oil, or flaying him, he was feted and feasted, and the warlike bands became demoralized by catering to his pleasure.

It was not long before the chief’s daughter, Inewatah, fell in love with him, and as her illustrious father, Tekineh, had lost a son in the war, In-nan-ga-eh was given the choice of becoming the chief’s adopted son or his son-in-law. He naturally chose the latter, as the wife-to-be was both beautiful and winning.

The war resulted in defeat for the Cherokees, although the old chief escaped to fastnesses further south with his beautiful daughter and alien son-in-law. All went well for a year and a half after the peace when In-nan-ga-eh, began to feel restless and listless for his northern mountains, the playground of his youth. He wanted to go on a visit, and asked the chief’s permission, giving as his word of honor, his love for the chieftain’s daughter, that he would properly return.

The Cherokee bride was as heartbroken as Liddenah; she had first asked that she might accompany him on the trip, which was refused, but she accepted the inevitable stoically outwardly, but with secret aching bosom.

In-nan-ga-eh was glad to get away; being loved too much was tiresome; life was too enervating in the warm sunshine on Soco Creek; he liked the camp and the hunting lodge; love making, too much of it, palled on him. He wanted to be let alone.

Accompanied by a bodyguard of selected Cherokees, he hurriedly made his way to the North. One morning to the surprise and delight of all, he appeared at his tribal village by the Ohe-yu, as gay and debonair as ever. As he entered the town almost the first person he saw was Liddenah. She looked very beautiful, and he could see at one glance how she loved him, yet perversely he barely nodded as he passed.

When he was re-united with his parents, who treated him as one risen from the dead, his sisters began telling him about the news of the settlement, of his many friends, of Liddenah. Her grief had been very severe, it shocked her mother that she should behave so like a European and show her feelings to such an extent. Then the report had come that he had been put to death by slow torture. “Better that,” Liddenah had said openly in the market place, “than to remain the captive of barbarians.”

Once it was taken for granted that he was dead, Liddenah began to receive the attentions of young braves, as they came back from the South laden with scalps and other decorations of their victorious campaign against the Cherokees. Liddenah gave all to understand that her heart was dead; she was polite and tolerant, but, like the eagle, she could love only once.

There was one young brave named Quinnemongh who pressed his suit more assiduously than the rest, and aided by Liddenah’s mother, was successful. The pair were quietly married about a year after In-nan-ga-eh’s capture, or several months before he started for the North, leaving his Cherokee bride at her father’s home on the Soco.

Quinnemongh was not such a showy individual as In-nan-ga-eh, but his bravery was unquestioned, his reliability and honor above reproach. He made Liddenah a very good husband. In turn she seemed to be happy with him, and gradually overcoming her terrible sorrow.