University of Virginia Library

5. CHAPTER V.

At first, not altogether insensible at the time of
his fall, our traveller for a few moments remained
conscious of his peril; and a renewed exercise of
the mental energies, brought about, and for a little
while sustained, an increased consciousness, which
perhaps rather added to his pain. It taught him
his own weakness, when he strove vainly to support
himself against the tree to which he had
crawled; and in despair, the acuteness of which
was only relieved by the friendly stupor, arising
from the loss of blood, which came to his aid, he
closed his eyes, and muttering a brief sentence,
which might have been a prayer, he resigned himself
to his fate.

But he was not thus destined to perish. He had
not lain many minutes in this situation when the
tones of a strong voice rang through the forest.
There was a whoop and halloo, and then a catch
of song, and then a shrill whistle, all strangely
mingled together, finally settling down into a rude
strain, which, coming from stentorian lungs, found a
ready echo in every jutting rock and space of
wood for a mile round. The musician went on
merrily from verse to verse of his forest minstrelsy
as he continued to approach; describing in
his strain, with a ready ballad-facility, the numberless
associations of pleasure in the life of the woodman.
Uncouthly, and in a style partaking rather
more of the savage than the civilized taste and temper,
it enumerated the distinct features of each
mode of life with much ingenuity; and, in stanzas
smartly epigrammatic, did not hesitate to decide, as
we may readily imagine, by assigning the preference
to the former.

As the new-comer approached the spot where
lay the form of our elder acquaintance, there was
still a partial though dim light over the forest. The
twilight was richly clear, and there were some
faint yellow lines of the sun's last glances lingering
still, as if reluctant to depart, on the remote horizon.
The moon, too, in the opposite sky, about to come
forth, had sent before her some few faint harbingers
of her approach; and it was not difficult for the
sturdy woodman who now appears, to discern the
body of our traveller, lying, as in part it did, directly
in the path. A few paces farther on stood
his steed, cropping the young grass, and occasionally,
with uplifted head, looking round with something
like human wonderment, for the exercise of
that superiority which heretofore had him in charge.
At the approach of the stranger he did not start,

but seeming conscious of some change for the
better in his own prospects, he fell again to work
upon the herbage as if no interruption had occurred
to his repast.

The song of the woodman ceased as he discovered
the body. With an exclamation, he stooped
down to examine it, and his hands were suffused
with the blood which had found its way through
the garments. He saw that life was not extinct,
and readily understanding the stupor as the consequence
of loss of blood rather than of vital injury,
he paused a few moments as in seeming meditation,
then turning from the master to his unreluctant
steed, he threw himself upon his back, and was
quickly out of sight. In an hour he returned. He
brought with him a wagon and team, such as all
farmers possess in that region, and lifting the inanimate
form into the rude vehicle with a tender
caution that indicated a true humanity, walking
slowly beside the horses, and carefully avoiding all
such obstructions in the road as by disordering the
motion would have given pain to the sufferer, he
carried him safely, and after the delay of a few
hours, into the frontier, and then almost unknown,
village of Chestatee.

It was well for the youth that he had fallen into
such hands. There were few persons in that part
of the world like Mark Forrester. A better heart,
a more honourable spirit lived not; and in spite
of an erring and a neglected education—of evil
associations, and sometimes evil pursuits—he was
still a worthy specimen of manhood. We may as
well here describe him, as he appears to us; for
at this period the youth was still insensible—unconscious
of his deliverance as he was of his deliverer.

Mark Forrester was a stout, strongly built, yet

active person, some six feet in height, square and
broad-shouldered—exhibiting an outline, wanting,
perhaps, in some of the more rounded and taking
graces of form and figure, yet at the same time far
from any indication of symmetrical deficiency.
There was also not a little of ease and agility, together
with a rude gracefulness in his action, the
result less of the well-combined organization of
his animal man than of the hardy habits of his
woodland course of life. His appearance was
youthful, and the passing glance would perhaps
have rated him at little more than six or seven-and-twenty.
His broad full chest heaving strongly
with a consciousness of might—together with the
generally athletic muscularity of his whole person,
indicated correctly the possession of prodigious
strength. His face was finely southern—it wanted
the calculating lines of cunning,—that false presentiment
of wisdom, fatal to honesty, which so
many, mistaking for the true object, fall down and
worship. His features were frank and fearless—
moderately intelligent, and well-marked—the tout
ensemble indicating an active vitality, strong, and
usually just feelings, and a good-natured familiarity
of character, which enlisted confidence, and seemed
likely to acknowledge few restraints of merely conventional
creation. Nor, in any of these particulars,
did the outward falsely interpret the inward man.
With the possession of a giant's powers, he was
seldom so far borne forward by his impulses, whether
of pride or of passion, as to permit of their
wanton or improper use. His eye, too, had a not
unpleasing twinkle, promising more of good-fellowship
and a heart at ease than may well
consort with a less jaundiced or distempered
spirit. His garb indicated, in part, and was well
adapted to, the pursuits of the hunter and the lahours
of the woodman—we couple these employments
together, for, in the wildernesses of North
America, the dense forests, and broad prairies, they
are utterly inseparable. In a belt, made of buckskin,
which encircled his middle, was stuck, in a
sheath of the same material, a small axe, such as,
among the Indians, was well known to the early
settlers as a deadly implement of war. The head
of this instrument, or that portion of it opposite the
blade, and made in weight to correspond with and
balance the latter when hurled from the hand, was
a pick of solid steel, narrowing down to a point,
and calculated, with a like blow, to prove even
more fatal, as a weapon in conflict, than the more
legitimate member to which it was appended. A
thong of ox-hide, slung over his shoulder, supported
easily a light rifle of the choicest bore; for there
are few matters indeed upon which the wayfarer
in the southern wilds exercises a nicer and more
discriminating taste than in the selection of a companion,
in a pursuit like his, of the very last importance;
and which, in time, he learns to love
with a passion almost comparable to the love of
woman. The dress of the woodman was composed
of a coarse gray stuff, of a make sufficiently
outre to the eye taught in the nice sinuosities of the
city fashions, but which, fitting him snugly, served to
set off his robust and well-made person to the utmost
advantage. A cap of the fox-skin, of domestic
manufacture, the tail of which, studiously
preserved, obviated any necessity for a foreign
tassel, rested slightly upon his head, giving an
unique finish to his appearance, which a fashionable
hat would never have supplied. It accorded
happily with the scenes and circumstances of his
condition, and the forest employ which he so vigorously
pursued. Such, to the eye, was the personage,
who, so fortunately for our hero, plied his craft
in that fearful region; and who, stumbling upon
his insensible form at nightfall, as already narrated,
carefully conveyed him to his own lodgings at the
village inn of Chestatee.

The town of Chestatee—for such it was in the
acceptation of the time and country,—may well
deserve some little description; not for its own
sake and intrinsic importance, but because it will
be found to resemble some ten out of every dozen
of the country towns in all the corresponding
region. It consisted of thirty or forty dwellings,
chiefly of log construction; not, however, so immediately
in the vicinity of one another as to give
any very decided air of regularity and order to
their appearance. As usual, in all the interior settlements
of the South and West, wherever, an
eligible situation presented itself, the squatter laid
the foundation logs of his dwelling, and proceeded
to its erection. No public squares, and streets laid
out by line and rule, marked the conventional progress
of an orderly and methodical society; but,
regarding individual convenience as the very ne
plus ultra in arrangements of this nature, they took
little note of any other, and to them less important,
matters. They built where the land rose into
a ridge of moderate and gradual elevation, commanding
a long reach of prospect—where a good
spring threw out its crystal waters, jetting, in
winter and summer alike, from the hillside or the
rock; or, in its absence, where a fair branch,
trickling over a bed of small and yellow pebbles,
kept up a perpetually clear and undiminishing current—where
the groves were thick and umbrageous;
and lastly, but not less important than either,
where agues and fevers came not, bringing clouds
over the warm sunshine, and taking all the hue, and

beauty, and odour from the flower. These considerations
were at all times the most important to the
settler when once the place of his abode was fairly
determined upon; and with these advantages at
large, the company of squatters, of whom our
hero's acquaintance, Mark Forester, made one, and
one by no means the least important among them,
had regularly, for the purposes of gold-digging,
colonized the little boundary into which, in company
with the reader, we have now ventured to
penetrate.

Preliminary to any farther advance in our narrative,
it may be quite as well to say, that, as might
easily be imagined, the various adventurers of
which this wild congregation was made up were
impelled to their present common centre by motives
and influences as contrariant and manifold as
the differing features of their several countenances.
They came, not only from all parts of the surrounding
country, but many of them from all parts of the
surrounding world; oddly and confusedly jumbled
together, the very olla-podrida of moral and mental
combination. They were chiefly those to whom
the ordinary operations of human trade and labour
had proved tedious or unproductive—with whom
the toils, aims, and impulses of society were deficient
of interest, or, upon whom, an inordinate desire
of a sudden to acquire wealth had exercised
a sufficiently active influence to impel to the novel
employment of gold-finding—or rather gold-seeking,
for it was not always that the search was successful—the
very name of such a pursuit carrying
with it to the bosoms of many no small degree of
charm and persuasion. To these, a wholesome
assortment of other descriptions may be added, of
character and caste such as will be found ordinarily
to compose the frontier and outskirts of civilization,

as rejected by the wholesome current, and
driven, like the refuse and the scum of the waters,
in confused stagnation to their banks and margin.
Here, alike, came the spendthrift and the
indolent, the dreamer and the outlaw, congregating,
though guided by varying and contradictory
impulses, in the formation of a common caste,
and in the pursuit of a like object—some with the
view to profit and gain; others, simply from no
alternative being left them, and that of gold-seeking,
with a better sense than their neighbours, being
in their own contemplation, truly, a dernier
resort. The reader can better conceive than we
describe, the sort or rather the sorts of people,
passions and pursuits herding thus confusedly together,
and with the various objects of which we
speak. Others, indeed, came into the society, like
the rude but honest woodman to whom we have
already afforded the civility of an introduction,
almost purely from a spirit of adventure, that,
growing impatient of the confined boundaries of
its birth-place, longed to tread new forests, and
contend with new enemies among its recesses. A
spirit, we may add, the same, or not materially
differing with that, which, at an earlier period of
human history, though in a condition of society
not dissimilar, begot the practices denominated
by a most licentious courtesy those of chivalry.
But, of whatever stuff the moral of this people
may have been made up, it is not less certain than
natural that the mixture was still incoherent—the
parts had not yet entirely coalesced together.
Though ostensibly in the pursuit of the same interest
and craft, they had any thing but a like fortune,
and the degree of concert and harmony
which subsisted between them was but shadowy
and partial. A mass so heterogeneous in its origin
and tendency might not so readily amalgamate.
Strife, discontent, and contention were not unfrequent;
and the labourers at the same instrument,
mutually depending on each other, not uncommonly
came to blows over it. The successes of any
one individual—for, as yet, their labours were unregulated
by arrangement, and each worked on his
own score—procured for him the hate and envy
of some of the company; while it aroused the ill-disguised
dissatisfaction of all; and nothing was
of more common occurrence, than, when striking
upon a fruitful and productive section, even among
those interested in the discovery, to find it a disputed
dominion. Copartners no longer, a division
of the spoils, when accumulated, was usually
terminated by a resort to blows; and the bold
spirit and the strong hand, in this way, not uncommonly
acquired the share for which it was too indolent
to toil in the manner of its companions.
The issue of these conflicts, as may be imagined,
was sometimes wounds and bloodshed, and occasionally
death: the field, we need scarcely add,
since this is the history of all usurpation,—remaining,
in every such case, in possession of the
party proving itself most strong or courageous.
Nor need this history surprise—it is history, veracious
and sober history of a period, still within
recollection, and of events of almost recent occurrence.
The wild condition of the country—the
absence of all civil authority, and almost of laws,
certainly of officers sufficiently daring to undertake
their honest administration, and shrinking from the
risk of incurring for the performance of their duties
the vengeance of those, who, though disagreeing
among themselves, at all times made common
cause against the ministers of justice as against a
common enemy—may readily account for the frequency
and impunity with which these desperate
men committed crime, and defied its consequences.

But we are now fairly in the centre of the village—a
fact of which, in the case of most southern
and western villages, it is necessary distinctly,
and in so many words, to apprize the traveller. In
those parts, the scale by which towns are laid out
is always magnificent. The founders seem to have
calculated usually upon a population of millions;
and upon spots and sporting-grounds, measurable by
the olympic coursers, and the ancient fields of combat,
when scythes and elephants and chariots made
the warriors, and the confused cries of a yelping
multitude composed the conflict itself. There was
no want of room, no risk of narrow streets and
pavements, no deficiency of area in the formation
of public squares. The houses scattered around
the traveller, dotting at long and unfrequent intervals
the ragged wood which enveloped them, left
few stirring apprehensions of their firing one another.
The forest, where the land was not actually
built upon stood up in its primitive simplicity
undishonoured by the axe. Such was the condition
of the settlement at the period when our hero
so unconsciously entered it. It was night, and the
lamps of the village were all in full blaze, illuminating
with an effect the most picturesque and attractive
the fifty paces immediately encircling
them. Each dwelling boasted of this auxiliar and
attraction; and in this particular but few cities
afford so abundantly the materials for a blaze as
our country villages. Two or more slight posts
are erected at convenient distances from each
other in front of the building—a broad scaffold, sufficiently
large for the purpose, is placed upon them,
on which a thick coat of clay is plastered; at evening
a pile is built upon this of dry timber and the rich
pine which overruns and mainly marks the forests

of the south. These piles, in a blaze, serve the
nightly strollers of the settlement as guides and
beacons, and with their aid, our hero, safely driven
by Forrester, wound his way into the little village
of Chestatee.

Forming a square, in the very centre of the town,
a cluster of four huge fabrics, in some sort sustained
the pretensions of the settlement to this epithet.
This ostentatious collection, some of the
members of which appeared placed there rather
for show than service, consisted of the court-house,
the jail, the tavern, and the shop of the blacksmith
—the two last-mentioned being at all times the
very first in course of erection, and the essential
nucleus in the formation of the southern and western
settlement. The court-house and its apt corollary
the jail, standing directly opposite and
fronting each other, carried in their faces a family
outline of sympathetic and sober gravity. There
had been some effort at pretension and dignity in
their construction, both being unnecessarily and
cumbrously large, awkward, and unwieldy; and,
occupying, as they did, the only portion of the village
which had been stripped of its forest covering,
bore an aspect of mutual and ludicrous
wildness and vacancy. They had both been built
upon a like plan and equal scale; and the only
difference existing between them, but one that was
immediately perceptible to the eye, was the superfluous
abundance of windows in the former, and
the deplorable deficiency in this particular which
characterized the latter. A moral agency had
most probably prompted the architect to the distinction
here hit upon—and he felt, doubtless, in
admitting free access to the light in the house of
justice, and in excluding it almost entirely from that
of punishment, that he had recognised the proprieties

of a most excellent taste and true judgment.
These apertures, clumsily wrought in the logs of
which the buildings were made, added still more
to their generally uncouth appearance. There
was yet, however, another marked difference between
the court-house and jail, which we should
not omit to notice. The former had the advantage
of its neighbour and ally, in being surmounted
by a small tower or cupola, in which
a bell of moderate size hung suspended, permitted
to speak only on such important occasions as the
opening of court, Sabbath service, and the respective
anniversaries of the birthday of Washington
and the Declaration of Independence. This building,
thus distinguished above its fellows, served
also all the purposes of a place of worship, whenever
some wandering preacher found his way to the
settlement; an occurrence, at the time we write,
of most occasional character. To each of the
four vast walls of the jail, in a taste certainly not
bad, if we consider the design and character of the
fabric, but a single window was allotted—that too
of the very smallest description for human uses,
and crossed at right angles with rude and slender
bars of iron, the choicest specimens of workmanship
from the neighbouring smithy. The
distance between each of these four equally important
buildings was by no means inconsiderable,
if we are required to make the scale for our
estimate, that of the cramped and diminished limits
accorded to like matters in cities, where men and
women appear to increase in due proportion as the
field lessens upon which they must encounter in the
great struggle for existence. Though neighbours
in every substantial respect, the four fabrics were
most uncharitably remote, and stood frowning
coldly and gloomily over and against one another—
scarcely relieved of the cheerless and sombre
character of their rough outsides, even when thus
brightly illuminated by the glare thrown upon
them by the several blazes, flashing out upon
the scene they were approaching, from the twin
lamps, advanced some twenty paces from, and in
front of, the tavern, through whose wide and unsashed
windows an additional lustre, as of many
lights, gave cheering indications of life and good
lodgings within. At a point equidistant from, and
forming one of the angles of the same square with
each of these, the broader glare from the smith's
furnace streamed in bright lines across the plain
between, pouring through the unclayed logs of
the hovel, in which, at his craft, the industrious proprietor
was even then busily employed. Occasionally,
the sharp click of his hammer, ringing
upon and redounding from his anvil, and a full
blast from his capacious bellows, indicated the busy
animation, if not the sweet concert, the habitual
cheerfulness and charm, of a more civilized and
better regulated society.

Nor was the smith, at the moment of our entrance,
the only noisy member of the little village.
The more pretending establishment to which we
are rapidly approaching, threw out its clamours,
and the din of many voices gathered upon the
breeze in most wild and incoherent confusion.
Deep bursts of laughter, and the broken stanza of
an occasional catch roared out at intervals, promised
something of relief to the dull mood; while, as
the sounds grew more distinct, the quick ear of
Forrester was enabled to distinguish the voices of
the several revellers. But even Forrester was not
at a little loss, seemingly, to account for the rather
extravagant degree of their hilarity. He knew
how slight were the links of fellowship between

the gold diggers generally, and felt satisfied that
some unwonted occasion must have arisen for the
uproar. A nearer approach soon informed him
of the mystery; but all further speculations of his
own were arrested by a deep groan and an impatient
movement in the bottom of his wagon. Forgetting
all other matters, he procured assistance,
and avoiding the chief entrance to the inn, carried
our wounded traveller to a quiet couch in the
upper story of the building, then set off, at once, in
seach of the self-constituted surgeon of that insulated
region.