Chapter 2

Spring was once more afoot in the land. They daily marked her advance as they went. Halfway up the mountains she had climbed: for the maples were blooming in rich dark reds that made the nearer slopes even more splendid of garb than the velvet azure of the distant ranges, the elms had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all bore great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready for kindling for some great festival. It is a wonderful thing to hear a wind singing in myriads of their branches at once. The surging tones of this oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented ravines and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Now and again the flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like effects. The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the forests; the tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be crushed unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high floating of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky, promising rain in due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the farmer's heart not less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil had hardly yet begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each of the stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps and caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.

One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity," for he was something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation. He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,--a type rare in this region,--coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers established in Georgia.

We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which imply a personal and unpleasant reflection. Xerxes Alexander Anxley disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste; for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He even disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his sincerity.

This man Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable, seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings, worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth was shut hard and fast upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and his words were usually framed to doubt one's state of grace and to contravene one's tenets as to final salvation. He rode much of the time with the reins loose on his horse's neck, and perhaps no man in the saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of Cromwell's troopers. His theological disputations grated peculiarly upon Emsden's mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that followed.

"If I hadn't been so traveled that day,--dragged through hell and skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,--I wouldn't have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce," Emsden afterward declared.

For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the "old trading path," as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head. Just above him, on a rugged slope where no trees grew save a scraggy cedar here and there amidst the shelving ledges of rock outcropping through the soft verdant turf, he saw a stealthy, furtive shape; he was aware of a hasty cowed glance over the shoulder, and then a stretching of supple limbs in flight. Before he himself hardly knew it the sharp crack of his rifle rang out,--the aim was almost instinctive.

And it was as true as instinct,--a large black wolf, his pelt glossy and fresh with the renewal of the season, lay stretched dead in an instant upon the slope. Emsden sprang from his horse, tossed the reins to "X," and, drawing his knife, ran up the steep ascent to secure the animal's skin.

Only vaguely, as in a dream, he heard a sudden deep roar, beheld a horned creature leaping heavily upon its fore quarters, tossing its hind legs and tail into the air. Then an infuriated bull, breaking from the bushes, charged fiercely down upon him. Emsden threw himself into a posture of defense as instantly as if he had been a trained bullfighter and the arena his wonted sphere, holding the knife close in front of him, presenting the blade with a quick keen calculation for the animal's jugular. The knife was Emsden's only weapon, for his pistols were in the holster on the saddle, and his discharged rifle lay where he had flung it on the ground after firing. He had only time to wonder that his comrades vouchsafed him no assistance in his extremity. Men of such accurate aim and constant practice could easily risk sending a rifle-ball past him to stop that furious career. He could see the pupil of the bull's wild dilated eyes, fiery as with a spark of actual flame. He could even feel the hot puffs of the creature's breath upon his cheeks, when all at once the horned head so close above his own swerved aside with a snort from the dead body of the wolf at his feet. The bull passed him like a thunderbolt, and he heard the infuriated stamping which fairly shook the ground in the thicket below, where this king of the herds paused to bellow and paw the earth, throwing clods high above the environing copse.

The woods seemed full of maddened, frightened cattle, and Emsden's horse was frantically galloping after the cavalcade of hunters and their pack-train, all the animals more or less beyond the control of the men. He felt it an ill chance that left him thus alone and afoot in this dense wilderness, several days' travel from the station. He was hardly sure that he would be missed by his comrades, themselves scattered, the pack-horses having broken from the path which they had traveled in single file, and now with their burdens of value all foolishly careering wildly through the woods. The first prudential care of the hunters he knew would be to recover them and re-align the train, lest some miscreant, encountering the animals, plunder the estrays of their loads of hard-won deerskins and furs.

The presence of cattle suggested to Emsden the proximity of human dwellings, and yet this was problematic, for beyond branding and occasional saltings the herds ranged within large bounds on lands selected for their suitability as pasturage. The dwellings of these pioneer herdsmen might be far away indeed, and in what direction he could not guess. Since the Cherokee War, and the obliteration of all previous marks of white settlements in this remote region, Emsden was unfamiliar with the more recent location of "cow-pens," as the ranches were called, and was only approximately acquainted with the new site of the settlers' stations. Nothing so alters the face of a country as the moral and physical convulsion of war. Even many of the Indian towns were deserted and half charred,--burned by the orders of the British commanders. One such stood in a valley through which he passed on his homeward way; the tender vernal aspect of this green cove, held in the solemn quiet of the encircling mountains, might typify peace itself. Yet here the blue sky could be seen through the black skeleton rafters of the once pleasant homes; and there were other significant skeletons in the absolute solitude,--the great ribs of dead chargers, together with broken bits and bridles, and remnants of exploded hand-grenades, and a burst gun-barrel, all lying on the bank of a lovely mountain stream at the point where he crossed it, as it flowed, crystal clear, through this sequestered bosky nook.

Something of a job this transit was, for with the spring freshets the water was high and the current strong, and he was compelled to use only one hand for swimming, the other holding high out of the water's reach his powder horn. For, despite any treaties of peace, this was no country for a man to traverse unarmed, and an encounter with an inimical wandering Indian might serve to make for his comrades' curiosity concerning his fate, when they should chance to have leisure to feel it, a perpetual conundrum.

He had never, however, made so lonely a journey. Not one human being did he meet--neither red man nor white--in all the long miles of the endless wilderness; naught astir save the sparse vernal shadows in the budding woods and the gentle spring zephyr swinging past and singing as it went. Now and again he noted how the sun slowly dropped down the skies that were so fine, so fair, so blue that it seemed loath to go and leave the majestic peace of the zenith. The stars scintillated in the dark night as if a thousand bivouac fires were kindled in those far spaces of the heavens responsive to the fire which he kept aglow to cook the supper that his rifle fetched him and to ward off the approach of wolf or panther while he slept. He was doubtless in jeopardy often enough, but chance befriended him and he encountered naught inimical till the fourth day when he came in at the gate of the station and met the partners of the hunt, themselves not long since arrived.

They waited for no reproaches for their desertion. They were quick to upbraid. As they hailed him in chorus he was bewildered for a moment, and stood in the gateway leaning on his rifle, his coonskin cap thrust back on his brown hair, his bright, steady gray eyes concentrated as he listened. His tall, lithe figure in his buckskin hunting shirt and leggings, the habitual garb of the frontiersmen, grew tense and gave an intimation of gathering all its forces for the defensive as he noted how the aspect of the station differed from its wonted guise. Every house of the assemblage of little log cabins stood open; here and there in the misty air, for there had been a swift, short spring shower, fires could be seen aglow on the hearths within; the long slant of the red sunset rays fell athwart the gleaming wet roofs and barbed the pointed tops of the palisades with sharp glints of light, and a rainbow showed all the colors of the prism high against the azure mountain beyond, while a second arch below, a dim duplication, spanned the depths of a valley. The frontiersmen were all in the open spaces of the square excitedly wrangling--and suddenly he became conscious of a girlish face at the embrasure for the cannon at the blockhouse, a face with golden brown hair above it, and a red hood that had evidently been in the rain. "Looking out for me, I wonder?" he asked himself, and as this glow of agitated speculation swept over him the men who plied him with questions angrily admonished his silence.

"He has seen a wolf! He has seen a wolf! 'Tis plain!" cried old Mivane, as he stood in his metropolitan costume among the buckskin-clad pioneers. "One would know that without being told!"

"You shot the wolf and stampeded the cattle, and the herders at the cow-pens on the Keowee River can't round them up again!" cried one of the settlers.

"The cattle have run to the Congarees by this time!" declared another pessimistically.

"And it was _you_ that shot the wolf!" cried "X" rancorously.

"The herders are holding _us_ responsible and have sent an ambassador," explained John Ronackstone, anxiously knitting his brows, "to inform us that not a horse of the pack-train from Blue Lick Station shall pass down to Charlestown till we indemnify them for the loss of the cattle."

"Gadso! they can't _all_ be lost!" exclaimed old Mivane floutingly.

"No, no! the herders go too far for damages--too far! They are putting their coulter _too_ deep!" said a farmer fresh from the field. He had still a bag of seed-grain around his neck, and now and again he thrust in his hand and fingered the kernels.

"They declare they'll seize our skins," cried another ambiguously,--then, conscious of this, he sought to amend the matter,--"Not the hides we wear,"--this was no better, for they were all arrayed in hides, save Richard Mivane. "Not the hides that we were born in, but our deerhides, our peltry,--they'll seize the pack-train from Blue Lick, and they declare they'll call on the commandant of Fort Prince George to oppose its passing with the king's troops."

An appalled silence fell on the quadrangle,--save for the fresh notes of a mockingbird, perching in jaunty guise on the tower of the blockhouse, above which the rainbow glowed in the radiant splendors of a misty amber sky.

"The king's troops? Would the commandant respond?" anxiously speculated one of the settlers.

The little handful of pioneers, with their main possessions in the fate of the pack-train, looked at one another in dismay.

"And tell me, friend Feather-pate, why did it seem good to you to shoot a wolf in the midst of a herd of cattle?" demanded Richard Mivane.

Ralph Emsden, bewildered by the results of this untoward chance, and the further catastrophe shadowed forth in the threatened seizure of the train, rallied with all his faculties at the note of scorn from this quarter.

"Sir, I did not shoot the wolf among the cattle. There was not a horn nor a hoof to be seen when I fired."

Mivane turned to "X" with both hands outstretched as much as to say, "Take _that_ for your quietus!" and shouldering his stick, which had an ivory head and a sword within, strode off after his jaunty fashion as if there were no more to be said.

It was now Alexander Anxley's turn to sustain the questioning clamor. "I will not deny"--"That is, I said"--"I meant to say,"--but these qualifications were lost in the stress of Emsden's voice, once more rising stridently.

"Not a horn nor a hoof to be seen till after I had fired. I didn't know there were any cow-pens about--didn't use to be till after you had crossed the Keowee. But if there _had_ been, is a man to see a wolf pull down a yearling, say, and not fire a rifle because Madam Cow will take the high-strikes or Cap'n Bull will go on the rampage? Must I wait till I can make a leg,"--he paused to execute an exaggerated obeisance, graceful enough despite its mockery,--"'Under your favor, Cap'n Bull,' and 'With your ladyship's permission,' before I kill the ravening brute, big enough to pull down a yearling? Don't talk to me! Don't talk to me!" He held out the palms of his hands toward them in interdiction, and made as if to go--yet went not!

For a reactionary sentiment toward him had set in, and there were those fair-minded enough, although with their little all at stake, to admit that he had acted with reasonable prudence, and that it was only an unlucky chance which had sent the panic through the herds with such disastrous effect.

"The herders should not stop the pack-train, if I had my will," declared one of the settlers with a belligerent note.

"No, no," proclaimed another; "not if it takes all the men at Blue Lick Station to escort it!"

"Those blistered redcoats at Fort Prince George are a deal too handy to be called on by such make-bates as the herders on the Keowee River."

"Fudge! The commandant would never let a bayonet stir."

"Gad! I'd send an ambassador for an ambassador. Tit for tat," declared Emsden. "I'd ask 'em what's gone with all our horses,--last seen in those desolated cow-pens,--that the voice of mourning is now lifted about!"

There was a chuckle of sheer joy, so abrupt and unexpected that it rose with a clatter and a cackle of delight, and culminated in a yell of pleasurable derision.

Now everybody knew that the horses bought in that wild country would, unless restrained, return every spring to "their old grass," as it was called,--to the places where they had formerly lived. When this annual hegira took place in large numbers, some permanent losses were sure to ensue. The settlers at Blue Lick had experienced this disaster, and had accepted it as partly the result of their own lack of precaution during the homing fancy of the horses. But since the herders manifested so little of the suavity that graces commercial intercourse, and as some of the horses had been seen in their cow-pens, it was a happy thought to feather the arrow with this taunt.

"And who do you suppose will promise to carry such a message to those desperate, misguided men, riding hither an' thither, searching this wild and woeful wilderness for hundreds o' head o' cattle lost like needles in a hayrick, and eat by wolves an' painters by this time?" demanded "X" derisively.

"I promise, I promise!--and with hearty good will, too!" declared Emsden. "And I'll tell 'em that we are coming down soon armed to the teeth to guard our pack-train, and fight our way through any resistance to its passage through the country on the open trading-path. And I'll acquaint the commandant of Fort Prince George of the threats of the herders against the Blue Lick Stationers, and warn him how he attempts to interfere with the liberties of the king's loyal subjects in their peaceful vocations."

Thus Emsden gayly volunteered for the mission.

The next morning old Richard Mivane, thinking of it, shook his head over the fire,--and not only once, but shook it again, which was a great deal of trouble for him to take. Having thus exerted his altruistic interest to the utmost, Richard Mivane relapsed into his normal placidity. He leaned back in his arm-chair, the only one at the station, fingering his gold-lined silver snuffbox, with its chain and ladle, his eyes dwelling calmly on the fire, and his thoughts busy with far away and long ago.

He was old enough now to enter into the past as a sort of heritage, a promised land which memory had glozed with a glamour that can never shine upon the uncertain aspects of the future. The burning sense of regret, the anguish of nostalgia, the relinquishment of an accustomed sphere, its prospects and ideals, the revolt against the uncouth and rude conditions of the new status, the gradual reluctant naturalization to a new world,--these were forgotten save as the picturesque elements of sorrow and despair that balanced the joys, the interest, the devil-may-care joviality, the adventure, the strange wild companionship,--all that made the tale worth rehearsing in the flare and the flicker of the fireside glow.

The rains had come. The dark slate-tinted clouds hung low over the station, but every log house, freshly dight with whitewash of the marly clay, after the Indian method, still shone in the shadow as if the sun were upon it. The turf was green, despite the passing of many feet, and where a slight depression held water, a few ducks, Carolina bred, were quacking and paddling about; now and then these were counted with great interest, for they had a trick of taking to the woods with others of their kind, and relapsing to savagery,--truly distressing to the domestic poultry prospects of the station. The doors of the Mivane cabin were all ajar,--the one at the rear opening into a shed-room, unfloored, which gave a vista into more sheds, merely roofed spaces, inclosed at either end. A loom was in the shed-room, and at it was seated on the bench in front, as a lady sits at an organ, the mistress of the house, fair but faded, in a cap and a short gown and red quilted petticoat, giving some instruction, touching an intricate weave, to a negro woman, neatly arrayed in homespun, with a gayly turbaned head, evidently an expert herself, from the bland and smiling manner and many self-sufficient and capable nods with which she perceived and appropriated the knotty points of the discourse.

In the outer shed, Cæsar, clad like the Indians and the pioneers in buckskin, was mending the plough-gear, and talking with great loquacity to another negro, of the type known then and later as "the new nigger," the target of the plantation jokes, because of his "greenness," being of a fresh importation. He possibly remembered much of Africa, but he accepted without demur and with admiring and submissive meekness stories of the great sights that Cæsar protested he had seen there,--Vauxhall Gardens and Temple Bar (which last Cæsar thought in his simplicity was a bar for the refreshment of the inner man) and a certain resort indisputably for that purpose called White's Chocolate House,--all represented as pleasantly and salubriously situated in the interior of Guinea. But after all, if a story is well told, why carp at slight anachorisms?

Richard Mivane's attention had been diverted from the thread of his own reminiscences by the fact that the little flax-wheel of Peninnah Penelope Anne had ceased to whirl, and the low musical monody of its whir that was wont to bear a pleasant accompaniment to the burden of his thoughts was suddenly silent. He lifted his eyes and saw that she was gazing dreamily into the flare of the great fire, the spinning-wheel still, the end of the thread motionless in her hand. The burnished waves of her golden brown hair were pushed a bit awry, and her face was so wan and thoughtful that even her dress of crimson wool did not lessen its pallor. The voices of the three children on the floor grated on the old man's mood as they were busied in defending a settler's fort, insecurely constructed of stones and sticks, and altogether roofless, garrisoned by a number of pebbles, while a poke full of wily Indian kernels of corn swarmed to the attack.

"Why is my pretty pet so idle?" he asked, for while the wheel should whirl he could dream.

She made no answer, only turned her troubled, soft hazel eyes upon him.

"And have you seen a wolf, too, that you have lost your tongue?"

At the word "wolf" she burst into tears. And then, discarding all caution in the breaking down of her reserve, she sprang up, overturning the wheel and rushing to his chair.

Now Richard Mivane had never encouraged his grandchildren to clamber over his chair. He protested great fear of the sticky fingers of the more youthful in contact with his preternaturally fine clothes; he declared they reminded him of squirrels, which he detested; he was not sure they did not look like rats. All this was of great effect; for his many contemptuous whimsical prejudices were earnestly respected.

For instance, whenever 'possum was served at the pioneer board they who partook carried their plates for the purpose to a side table. "The look of the animal's tail is enough for me--it curls," he would say.

"So does a pig's tail curl," his son used to remonstrate sensibly.

"Not having kept a straight course so long,--then twirling up deceitfully like a second thought. This fellow is a monstrosity,--and his wife has a pocket for a cradle,--and I don't know who they are nor where they came from,--they were left over from before the Flood, perhaps,--they look somehow prehistoric to me. I am not acquainted with the family."

And turning his head aside he would wave away the dainty, the delight of the pioneer epicure time out of mind.