University of Virginia Library

4. IV.

Where, then, was the absentee when his brother
divinities started after the outlawed tribes? Had
he not loved the Indians — had he no sympathy
with his associate gods — and wherefore went he
not upon the sad journey through the many
swamps and the long stretches of sand and forest,
that lay between the Okephanokee, and the rapidly-gushing

waters of the Chatahoochie, wher
both the aborigines and their rude deities had
now taken up their abodes. Alas! for Logoochie!
He loved the wild people, it is true, and
much he delighted in the association of those
having kindred offices with himself; but though
a mimic and a jester, fond of sportive tricks, and
perpetually practising them on all around him, he
was not unlike the memorable buffoon of Paris,
who, while ministering to the amusement of thousands,
possessing them with an infinity of fun and
frolic, was yet, at the very time, craving a precious
mineral from the man of science to cure him
of his confirmed hypochondria. Such was the
condition of Logoochie. The idea of leaving the
old woods and the waters to which he had been
so long accustomed, and which were associated in
his memory with a thousand instances of merriment,
was too much for his most elastic spirits to
sustain; and the summons to depart filled him
with a nameless, and, to him, a hitherto unknown
form of terror. His organ of inhabitiveness had
undergone prodigious increase in the many exercises
which his mind and mood had practised
upon the banks of the beautiful Branch of Sweet
Water, where his favorite home had been chosen
by a felicitous fancy. It was indeed a spot to be
loved and dwelt upon, and he who surveyed its
clear and quiet waters, sweeping pleasantly onward
with a gentle murmur, under the high and
bending pine trees that arched over and fenced it
in, would have no wonder at its effect upon a
spirit so susceptible, amidst all his frolic, as that
of Logoochie. The order to depart made him
miserable; he could not think of doing so; and,
trembling all the while, he yet made the solemn
determination not to obey the command; but
rather to subject himself, by his refusal, to a loss
of caste, and, perhaps, even severer punishment,
should he be taken, from the other powers having
guardianship with himself, over the wandering
red men. With the determination came the execution
of his will. He secreted himself from
those who sought him, and in the hollow of a log
lay secure, even while the hunters uttered their
conjectures and surmises under the very copse in
which he was hidden. His arts to escape were
manifold, and, unless the parties in search of him
knew intimately his practices, he could easily elude
their scrutiny by the simplest contrivances. Such,
too, was the susceptibility of his figure for distortion,
that even Satilla, the three eyed, the messenger
of the Indian divinities, the most acute and
cunning among them, was not unfrequently over-reached
and evaded by the truant Logoochie.
He too had searched for him in vain, and though
having a shrewd suspicion, as he stepped over a
pine knot lying across a path, just about dusk,
that it was something more than it seemed to be,
yet passing on without examining it, and leaving
the breathless Logoochie, for it was he, to gather
himself up, the moment his pursuer was out of
sight, and take himself off in a more secluded
direction. The back of Logoochie was, itself,
little better than a stripe of the tree bark to those
who remarked it casually. From his heel to his
head, inclusive, it looked like so many articulated
folds or scales of the pine tree, here and there
bulging out into excrescences. The back of his
head was a solid knot, for all the world like that
of the scorched pine knot, hard and resinous.
This knot ran across in front, so as to arch above
and overhang his forehead, and was crowned
with hair, that, though soft, was thick and woody
to the eye, and looked not unlike the plates of the
pine-bur when green in season. It rose into a
ridge or comb directly across the head from front
to rear, like the war tuft of a Seminole warrior.
His eyes, small and red, seemed, occasionally, to
run into one another, and twinkled so, that you
could not avoid laughing but to look upon them.
His nose was flat, and the mouth was simply an
incision across his face, reaching nigh to both his
ears, which lapped and hung over like those of a
hound. He was short in person, thick, and
strangely bow-legged; and, to complete the uncouth
figure, his arms, shooting out from under a
high knot, that gathered like an epaulette upon
each shoulder, possessed but a single though rather
long bone, and terminated in a thick, squab, burlike
hand, having fingers, themselves inflexible,
and but of single joints, and tipped, not with
nails, but with claws, somewhat like those of the
panther, and equally fearful in strife. Such was
the vague general outline which, now and then,
the Indian hunter, and, after him, the Georgia
squatter, caught, towards evening, of the wandering
Logoochie, as he stole suddenly from sight
into the sheltering copse, that ran along the edges
of some wide savannah.

The brother divinities of the Creek warriors
had gone after their tribes, and Logoochie alone
remained upon the banks of the Sweet Water
Branch. He remained in spite of many reasons
for departure. The white borderer came nigher
and nigher, with every succeeding day. The
stout log-house started up in the centre of his
favorite groves, and many families, clustering

within a few miles of his favorite stream, formed
the nucleus of the flourishing little town of St.
Mary's. Still he lingered, though with a sadness
of spirit, hourly increasing, as every hour tended
more and more to circumscribe the haunts of his
playful wandering. Every day called upon him
to deplore the overthrow, by the woodman's axe,
of some well remembered tree in his neighborhood;
and though he strove, by an industrious
repetition of his old tricks, to prevent much of this
desolation, yet the divinities which the white man
brought with him were too potent for Logoochie.
In vain did he gnaw by night the sharp edge of
the biting steel, with which the squatter wrought
so much desolation. Alas! the white man had
an art given him by his God, by which he
smoothed out its repeated gaps, and sharpened it
readily again, or found a new one, for the destruction
of the forest. Over and over again, did Logoochie
think to take the trail of his people, and
leave a spot in which a petty strife of this nature
had become, though a familiar, a painful practice;
but then, as he thought of the humiliating acknowledgment
which, by so doing, he must offer to his
brother gods, his pride came to his aid, and he
determined to remain where he was. Then again,
as he rambled along the sweet waters of the
branch, and talked pleasantly with the trees, his
old acquaintance, and looked down upon little
groups of Indians that occasionally came to visit
this or that tumulus of the buried nations, he felt
a sweet pleasure in the thought, that although all
were gone of the old possessors, and a new people
and new gods had come to sway the lands of his
outlawed race, he still should linger and watch
over, with a sacred regard, the few relics, and the
speechless trophies, which the forgotten time had
left them. He determined to remain still, as he
long had been, the presiding genius of the place.