Part 20 (1/2)
The next week we returned to Cincinnati, and thence to Philadelphia. On my way from New York to Providence I became acquainted in the train with a modest, gentlemanly man, who told me he was a great-grandson or descendant of Thomson who wrote the ”Seasons.” I thought him both great and grand in an incident which soon occurred. A burly, bull-necked fellow in the car was attacked with an epileptic fit. He roared, kicked, screamed like a wildcat; and among fifty men in the vehicle, I venture to say that only Thomson and I, in a lesser degree, showed any plain common sense. I darted at the epileptic, grappled with him, held him down by what might be called brutal kindness, for I held his head down, while I sat on his arm and throttled him _sans merci_--I avow it--and tore off in haste his neckcloth (his neck was frightfully swelled), while Thomson brought cold water from the ”cooler,” with which we bathed his face freely, and chafed his pulse and forehead. Little by little he recovered. The other pa.s.sengers, as usual, did nothing, and a little old naval officer, who had been fifty years in service (as Thomson told me), simply kicked and screamed convulsively, ”Take him away! take him away!”
The epileptic was George Christy, the original founder of the Christy Minstrels. I can never think of this scene without exclaiming, ”_Vive_ Thomson!” for he was the only man among us who displayed quiet self-possession and _savoir faire_. As for me, my ”old Injun” was up, and I had ”sailed in” for a fight by mere impulse. _Vive_ Thomson! _Bon sang ne peut mentir_.
I went to Providence, where I was empowered to return to Cannelton to pay Goshorn $5,000, and renew the leases on Elk River. I should have to travel post to antic.i.p.ate the Yankee. It was not concealed from me that even if I succeeded, I had before me a very dangerous and difficult task.
But after what I had already gone through with I was ready for anything.
I was really developing rapidly a wild, reckless spirit--the ”Injun” was coming out of me. My old life and self had vanished like dreams. Only now and then, in the forests or by torrents, did something like poetry revisit me; _literature_ was dead in me. Only once did I, in a railway train, compose the ”Maiden mit nodings on.” I bore it in my memory for years before I wrote it out.
I arrived in Philadelphia. The next morning I was to rise early and fly westward. No time to lose. Before I rose, my sister knocked at the door and told us the awful news that President Lincoln had been murdered!
As I went to the station I saw men weeping in the streets, and everybody in great grief, conversing with strangers, as if all had lost a common relation. Everywhere utter misery! I arrived in Pittsburg. It was raining, and the black pall of smoke which always clothes the town was denser than ever, and the long black streamers which hung everywhere as mourning made the whole place unutterably ghastly. In the trains nothing but the murder was spoken of. There was a young man who had been in the theatre and witnessed the murder, which he described graphically and evidently truthfully.
I reached Cincinnati, and as soon as possible hurried on board the steamboat. We went along to Charleston, and it will hardly be believed that I very nearly missed the whole object of my journey by falling asleep. We had but one more very short distance to go, when, overcome by fatigue, I dropped into a nap. Fortunately I was awakened by the last ringing of the bell, and, seizing my carpet-bag, ran ash.o.r.e just as the plank was to be withdrawn.
I went directly to Goshorn's hotel. He was a stout, burly man, shrewd in his way, good-natured, but not without temper and impulses. He looked keenly after business, played the fiddle, and performed a few tricks of legerdemain. He had a ladylike wife, and both were very kind to me, especially after they came to know me pretty well. The lady had a nice, easy horse, which ere long was lent me freely whenever I wanted to ride.
One day it was missing. The master grieved. They had named it after me in compliment. ”Goshorn,” I said, ”in future I shall call _you Horse- gone_.” But he was not pleased with the name. However, it was recovered by a miracle, for the amount of horse-stealing which went on about us then was fabulous.
After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in ”ile” bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men and rebels. _He_ could pa.s.s the lines and go anywhere. At one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Richmond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go with him into the city! I had a neighbour named Fa.s.sit, an uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed the natives. One morning there came to Mr. Fa.s.sit a letter imploring him to return: ”Come back, o come agin and bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. We dont make war on _Ile_.” And I, being thus respected, went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed if _not_ particularly charming life all winter and the spring, to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will appear in the sequence.
The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and home--with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows _liked_ me. One said to me one day, ”You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. What's the reason?” I explained it that he had only met with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the _liking_ which I have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk.
Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. ”Money won't be of much use,” he said; ”what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents.” He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superst.i.tious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something _utterly_ unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that sc.r.a.p of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a young _raven_. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all my life.
During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and we went headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, unless the boatmen know every rock and point, for the dugout canoe goes over at a touch, and there is no life to be saved in the rapids. Now we were flying like a swallow, and could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pa.s.s, just in the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an inch for a canoe to pa.s.s, but to do this it was necessary to have moonlight enough to see the King Rock, which rose in the stream close by the pa.s.sage, and at the critical instant to ”fend off” with the hand and prevent the canoe from driving full on the rock. A terrible storm was coming up, thunder was growling afar, and clouds fast gathering in the sky.
The men had heard me talking the day before as to how storms were formed in circles, and it had deeply impressed them. When Goshorn asked them what we had better do, they said, ”Leave it all to Mr. Leland; he knows everything.” I looked at the moon and saw that the clouds were not driving dead against it, but _around_ while closing in, and I know not by what strange inspiration I added, ”You will have just time to clear King Rock!”
It was still far away. I laid down my paddle and drew my blanket round me, and smoked to the storm, and sang incantations to myself. It was a fearful trial, actually risking death, but I felt no fear--only a dull confidence in fate. Closer grew the clouds--darker the sky--when during the very last second of light King Rock came in sight. Goshorn was ready with his bull-like strength and gave the push; and just as we shot clear into the channel it became dark as pitch, and the rain came down in a torrent. Goshorn pitched his hat high into the air--_aux moulins_--and hurrahed and cried in exulting joy.
”Now, Mr. Leland, sing us that German song you're always so jolly with--_lodle yodle tol de rol de rol_!”
From that hour I was _Kchee-Bo-o-in_ or Grand Pow-wow to Sam Fox and his friends. He believed in me, even as I believe in myself when such mad ”spells” come over me. One day he proved his confidence. It was bright and suns.h.i.+ny, and we were paddling along when we saw a ”summer duck”
swimming perhaps fifty yards ahead. Sam was sitting in the bow exactly between me and the duck. ”Fire at it with your revolver!” cried Sam.
”It is too far away,” I replied, ”and you are right in the way.”
Sam bent over sideways, glaring at me with his one strange eye. It was just about as close a shot as was William Tell's at the apple. But I knew that reputation for nerve depended on it, so I fired. As the duck rose it dropped a feather.
”I knew you'd hit!” cried Sam triumphantly. And so I had, but I should not like to try that shot again.
Reflex action of the brain and secondary automatism! It must be so--Haeckel, thou reasonest well. But when the ”old Injun” and my High- Dutch ancestor are upon me, I reason not at all, and then I see visions and dream dreams, and it always comes true, without the _least_ self-deception or delusion.
It is a marvellous thing that in these canoes, which tip over so easily, men will pa.s.s over mill-dams ten or twelve feet high, as I myself have done many a time, without upsetting. The manner of it is this. The canoe is a log hollowed out. This is allowed to pa.s.s over till it dips like a seesaw, or falls into the stream below. It is a dangerous, reckless act, but generally succeeds. One day Sam Fox undertook to shoot our dug-out over a fall. So he paddled hard, and ran the canoe headlong to edge, he being in the bow. But it stuck halfway, and there was my Samuel, ere he knew it, high in the air, paddling in the atmosphere, into which thirty feet of canoe was raised.
Meanwhile, the legal business and renewal of the leases and the payment of money was performed accurately and punctually. Talk about _manna_ in the wilderness! _money_ in the wilderness came to the poor souls impoverished by the war as a thousandfold nicer. But over and above that, half a pound of coffee or a drink of whisky would cause a thrill of delight. One day, stopping at a logger's camp, I gave a decent-looking man a tin cup full of whisky. The first thing he did was to put it to the mouth of a toddling two-year-old child and it took a good pull. I remonstrated with him for it, when he replied, ”Well, you see, sir, we get it so seldom, that whisky is a kind o' _delicacy_ with us.”
Sometimes the log huts were twenty miles apart. In such isolation there is no rivalry of ostentation, and men care only to _live_. One day we came to a log house. The occupant had several hundred acres of very good land, and only a half acre under cultivation. He was absent at a county court for amus.e.m.e.nt. All that I could see in the cabin was a rude seat, an iron pot and spoon, and a squirrel-gun. There were two cavities or holes in the bare earth floor, in which the old man and his wife slept, each wrapped in a blanket. Even our boatman said that such carelessness was unusual. But all were ignorant of a thousand refinements of life of which the poorest English peasant _knows_ something, yet every one of these people had an independence or pride far above all poverty.
One night we stopped at the house of a man who was said to possess $150,000 (30,000 pounds) worth of land. The house was well enough. His two bare-legged daughters, girls of seventeen or eighteen, lounged about smoking pipes. I gave one a cigar. She replied, ”I don't keer if I do try it. I've allays wanted to know what a cigar smokes like.” But she didn't like it. Apropos of girls, I may say that there is a _far_ higher standard of morals among these people than among the ignorant elsewhere.
It was indeed a wild country. One day Goshorn showed me a hill, and a hunter had told him that when standing on it one summer afternoon he had seen in a marshy place the very unusual spectacle of forty bears, all wallowing together in the mud and playing at once. Also the marks of a bear's claws on a tree. Game was plenty in this region. All the time that I stayed with Goshorn we had every day at his well-furnished table bear's meat, venison, or other game, fish, ham, chickens, &c.
There was a great deal of very beautiful scenery on Elk River, and some of its ”incidents” were marvellously strange. The hard sandstone rocks had worn into shapes resembling castles and houses, incredibly like buildings made by man. One day I saw and copied a vast square rock through which ran to the light a perfect Gothic archway sixty feet high, with a long wall like the side of a castle, and an immense square tower.