University of Virginia Library

9. CHAPTER IX.

It was on the second evening after the incidents
related in the two preceding chapters occurred, that
an elderly gentleman sat at the door of the pleasantly
situated cottage before described, quietly indulging
in the habit-made luxury of puffing the Indian
weed, as, enjoying the bland breezes of the evening,
he caimly looked out upon the broad expanse
of the lake, and the diversified objects of the landscape
around, over which the shades of night were
now rapidly gathering. Now his eye-lids would
droop, and his head sink, slightly, towards his breast,
under the sedative influence of the narcotic fumes
he was imbibing, aided by the cesaeless croakings of
the frogs, whose evening choruses rose from the
marshy shores of the lake in drowsy monotony on
the ear. And now he would partially arouse, and
his eye would light up, for an instant, with returning
consciousness, as his ear caught the new note of
some bird of passage just returned from his hibernal
flight to the warm south, and now for the first time
heard, marking the progress of the season. The
man might have been sixty, though his appearance
indicated a greater number of years; for his head

was nearly white with the frosts that the fatigues
and privations of the camp, in which the vigor of
his manhood had been spent, had prematurely sprinkled
on his head. And yet, his erect figure, and
keenly flashing eye, as his attention became aroused
to objects around him, betokened a spirit still unbroken,
and intellects still unimpaired, in despite
of a shattered constitution, and the ravages which
hardship and time had depicted on his thin, and
war-worn visage. Though at the same time, the
rapid play of the muscles of his face, and the combined
expression of every feature of his countenance,
evidently denoted that, with fine sensibilities, and
much that was generous and noble, he naturally
possessed a sanguine temperament and a firey disposition,
which his growing infirmities had rendered
still more erascible. And such was indeed the case
with Captain Hendee, the person whose appearance
we have been endeavoring to describe. His life had
been one which had been checkered with no ordinary
vicissitudes. He had been an officer in the colonial
army, and out in most of that fearful struggle
with the French and Indians, that, with little intermission,
spread death and desolation through all the
borders of the English colonies in America from
1744 to 1760; and he had suffered imprisonment,
sickness, and all but death, in that terrible warfare.
He had also known the extremes of affluence and
poverty in his pecuniary affairs; while great felicity,
and uncommon bereavements, had marked his domestic
relations. He had buried two wives—each,
while she was spared him, the charm of his existence.
And to add still more to his cup of sorrows, a darling
son, who had been entrusted to the care of an
uncle in his father's absence, soon unaccountably disappeared,
having been abducted and murdered, it
was supposed, by some lurking band of Indians.
One daughter, the child of his last wife, was now
all that remained to him to smoothe the pillow of
age, and prop his declining years. And well did
that beloved and truly lovely daughter fulfil the filial
trust thus imposed. Aware of her parent's infirmities,
as well of temper as of body, she became
the gentle soother of the one, and the watchful nurse
of the other. And ever manifesting the most affectionate
solicitude for his welfare, and always assiduously
attentive to his slightest wants and wishes,
while readily overlooking the harshness, which, in
his fits of petulance, he occasionally showed her,
and which she generally answered only with a tear,
she gained over him, by this, and the super-added
influence of his affection for her, and his sense of
dependance on her for happiness, a control for his
good, that the whole world united would have failed
in attempting to obtain.

A discreet and demure maiden of about thirty,
an old servant, who lived with them in more prosperous
days, still remained with them, and, with one
more person scarcely less regarded, completed all
the permanent members of the family. That other
person was no other than Neshobee, the young Indian,
with whom the reader has already had a partial
acquaintance, without having been before apprised,
however, we believe, of his residence. He was
one of Captain Hendee's trophies of war, having
been captured in an onset on an Indian lodge, to
which a band of murderers had been traced after
one of their masacres on the frontier settlement.
The Indians being taken wholly by surprise, and
nearly all slain by the first fire, this lad was found

burrowed unhurt in a pile of dry leaves in one of
their haunts, and secured by the victors; when the
Captain declared, with a sort of melancholly jest,
that as the hell-hounds, a year or two before, had
deprived him of a son of about the same age, he
would for once follow their custom of supplying the
place of the slain by adopting one captured from
the enemy. And accordingly he took the boy, then
six or eight years old, back with him to his post,
and finally to his family, with whom the captive
had ever since resided.

The domicil of this strikingly contrasted family
was a common cottage, constructed after the fashion
of the better sort of houses in the settlement, of
hewn timber, so exactly squared and laid together,
in the present instance, as to make smooth, compact
walls, neatly white-washed without, and tightly ceiled
with boards within. The interior, which was divided
into two principal rooms, parlor and kitchen,
with a range of bed rooms and other small apartments
abreast, exhibited an odd mingling of the relics
of refined life with the crude substitutes for furniture,
and the various articles usually found in the
houses of a border settlement. On the high mantle-piece
of the best room stood the wide-spreading
antlers of some noble buck, the tips of the various
branches being ornamented with curious sea-shells,
the egg-shells of rare birds, and other devices of
the tasteful young mistress of the establishment.—
Rich mahogany chairs were cushioned with the
feathered skins of the loon, a large water-fowl
abounding in our northern lakes, and remarkable
for the thickness and tenacity of its skin, as well as
for the downy softness of its feathers. A light
stand, of exquisite workmanship, was supplied with a

curiously beaded miniature Indian canoe for a tray,
containing a pair of small clam shells for snuffers.
On wooden pegs in the wall were suspended the remains
of a once superb mirror, the broken parts of
which were artfully concealed by festoons of the
creeping evergreen; while, on one side, a small,
but well selected assortment of books, arranged on
broad shelves, completed the list of all the prominent
articles by which the room was furnished. The furniture
of the kitchen was mostly of the roughest
kind; and the whole room abounded with evidences
of the woodman's life, the walls and ceiling
above being hung with implements of hunting, furs,
pieces of drying venison, and other trophies of the
chase, taken by Neshobee, the young Esau, or red
Nimrod, if the reader please, of the family.

`Come, father,' said Miss Hendee, with a look of
affectionate solicitude, as, rolling up her needlework,
she rose from her seat by his side: `had you
not better take a seat within; I fear you are exposing
yourself too much to the night air to expect
quiet from your rheumatic shoulders to-morrow.'

`No, Alma,' replied the old gentleman, knocking
the ashes from his pipe, `I know just what I can
bear: Old Fahrenheit himself could not make an
instrument that would indicate the state of the air,
whether hot or cold, dry or humid, more exactly
than these sensitive fluids in my old shattered frame.
No, the atmosphere is peculiarly soft and warm this
evening. I think old Boreas has nearly lost his
claws for this season. I just heard a whippoorwill,
or muckawis, as the Indians call it, which they say
never appears here in the spring till winter has got so
far towards the big ice-pond on his return to the
north, that he will no more come back.'

`I knew it was very mild to night, father, but I
thought, perhaps, you were not aware how late you
were remaining in the open air, since you appeared
so deeply engaged in cogitation.'

`True, girl, I have been thinking over matters a
little.'

`What matters, father—may I know?'

`Yes,' replied the other, now rising and following
his daughter into the room we first described,
`yes, Alma, you shall know, for you are, yourself,
one of the parties concerned.'

`I, father?'

`Yes, you are, girl; but in the first place let me
ask you, if you did not think your cousin Sherwood's
manner, in his visit last night, rather singular?'

`I might have thought so, perhaps—in what respect
did you imagine his manner was singular, however?'

`In several—what was it that he seemed to be
hinting about so mysteriously? And did he not
have the air of one who is secretly suspicious of
something?'

`Does my father,' replied the other, evading a
direct answer, `does my father think that any thing
very singular in Mr. Sherwood?'

`Why—why'—said the Captain surprised and
staggered at the question: `Why yes, I had hoped
so; for these secretly suspecting characters I dislike,
Alma, you know. Confound them, yes, I detest
them!'

`And I,' rejoined the girl with a smile, in which
the jocose and serious were significantly blended,
`I am too much my father's daughter, I confess, to
think otherwise, myself.'

`Why! what? how?' hastily exclaimed the Captain,
puzzled and uneasy at the remark of the other.
`Why, what on earth can this all mean. No rupture
brewing between you and Jake, is there?'

`Not that I am aware of, as far as there are any
ties to sever—or, at least, none that I, as yet, have
been the just cause of, though'—

`Though what?' sharply demanded the father,
with increasing irritation: `Zounds! you don't think
the fellow is trying to claw off do you? Curse the
hollow hearted—humph,' what was I going to say?'

`Nothing but the truth, father, I presume,' answered
Alma, looking up with a faint smile and a sort of
cool desperation in her manner.

`Yes, I was!' quickly rejoined the other, hitching
about in his chair. `Blast it! girl, why didn't you
tell me I lied?'

`What, tell my father he lied!' said the girl,
roguishly: `no, no! that would have been the worst
of manners.'

`Yes, yes,' pettishly returned the Captain, `but
why don't you stand up for him? I don't like this
don't care a fig sort of way you have about the business.
Hang me, if I don't believe you are the one,
after all, who wishes to be off?'

`And would you object to my trying to get the
start of him?' again evasively replied the girl, `if I
believed he was intending to desert me?'

`Why, no'—answered the other, `not that I know
of; no, that would be, perhaps, a decent finesse, if
that was the case; but it is not. Then what is all
this bothering and teasing me for?'—he continued,
in a vexed and expostulating tone; `this supposing
things that are not so? You will work me up to a
fever; make me mad, march mad, without letting me

know which of you to be mad at. 'Tis provoking;
insufferable, girl! Why not tell me in your usual
direct off-hand way, at once, how the matter stands
between you and Jake?'

`Father,' said Alma seriously, `I most certainly
would tell you, if I knew myself.'

`Well, if that don't cap the whole, now!' said
the Captain, eyeing his daughter with an incredulous
and somewhat contemptous expression, `a
courted girl know nothing of her own courtship!
Your caged squirrel, that hangs in the kitchen yonder,
knows nothing of nuts, does he?'

`Now, father you wrong me,' said the other, a
little piqued at the taunt, and now perceiving the
necessity of being more explicit on a subject, which
she felt reluctant to discuss, lest she should, by such
frankness as she could wish to use, displease her
sensitive parent. `Mr. Sherwood once certainly
made me proposals; and I, knowing how much you
had the project at heart, acquiesced, or rather, I did
not reject him; since that time he has not often reminded
me of the subject. His own affairs he
keeps to himself; and a few silly compliments on his
part completes the whole story of what you call our
courtship.'

`Beggarly account!' muttered the Captain, with
an air of disappointment, `beggarly account, as the
fellow says in the play: cold business this, for a love
affair, or I am no judge, I'll be shot if I am! But
zounds!' he continued, again kindling up, `Why, I
thought it was all a settled business! And it was
settled—and would be now, if your powers of winning
were exerted to have it so! What will become
of us the Lord only knows, if this falls
through.'

`O, I would borrow no trouble on that score, Sir,'
observed Alma.

`But I shall though'—rejoined the other. `The
truth is, Alma, we are poor—poor as Job, when the
devil had done his damnedest! We owe Jake's father,
which, as he is sole heir, is the same as Jake
himself, for nearly all we have. If my little Edward
could have been spared me—but the noble boy is
gone; and that family have been the vortex in which
all my property and expectations have been swallowed
up: I do not say that the property went wrongfully;
but it went. Even before Jake came here, I
had thought of the possibility, that you might become
the channel by which this property would be
diverted back again into my family. And when he
made proposals to you, and I understood you accepted
them, I confess I was gratified. It gladdened
my old desolate and despairing heart with the thought
that it would ensure my comfort in my decripit and
helpless old age, while it would give you the home
and wealth which I never could furnish you; and
now to have the only bright streak I have seen for
years in my dark future, suddenly blotted out—to
have the only pleasant cup that has been presented
to me for so long, thus dashed from my very lips!—
And by whose hand?' he added, with startling
fierceness, as, trembling with rising passion, he shook
his clenched fist before the face of his unoffending
daughter. `By whose hand, I say? Girl, girl, if I
really thought'—

`I will marry him, father,' replied the girl bursting
into tears, which were drawn forth more, however,
by the picture he had drawn of his hopes and
sorrows, than by his menaces; `O, I will—I will
marry him, for your sake, dear father, if it breaks
my heart!'

`Hang it! no, you shant!' exclaimed the excited
old man, touched to the quick at the sight of his
daughter's tears, and his whole feelings undergoing
a revulsion as sudden as rose the tempest of his
passion; `no, you sha'nt! Brand me for a brute,
if you shall! No—no—no'—he repeated till his
increasing emotion fairly choked his utterance, and
he could articulate no more.

The tide of passion, having risen to its height,
was now left to subside in the pause that followed.

`Let us now dismiss this painful subject from our
thoughts,' at length said the daughter, the first to
recover her composure; `and do not let the matter
further disturb your feelings, my dear and generous-hearted
father: For whatever be the final result,
rest assured, that I will never marry without your
full consent.'

`Dutiful—noble girl!' sobbed the old man, dashing
away a tear; `God has left me a consolation in
you, my dear daughter, which I ought to be thankful
for, and which, but for my accursed temper, I
should repay with better treatment.'

`O, do not name it, father, do not name it,' replied
the daughter with a sweet and cheering smile;
`if we should go upon faults, I may have scores of
them, any of which, perhaps, would outweigh the
solitary one you tax yourself with.'

Miss Hendee had never before ventured so far in
manifesting a disposition to thwart the known feelings
and wishes of her irritable father. But her late
accidental interview with Warrington, whom she
never expected again to see, had forced upon her
mind a comparison between her two lovers, which
made her more painfully sensible than ever how
much she must sacrifice in becoming the wife of

Sherwood, whose true character, as deeply veiled as
he had endeavored to keep it with this family, she
had in some measure penetrated, and she could not
forego this opportunity of letting her father see how
heavy upon her heart hung the chain, that she was
wearing only out of regard to his happiness; and
yet scarcely more now than before, did she meditate
on throwing off this chain, by which she had
passively suffered herself to be bound. But determining
to defer any consummation, which might,
for the present, be urged upon her, she suffered herself
only to hope the event of circumstances more
auspicious for reconciling the now conflicting duties,
which she owed herself, and, with all his faults,
her still loved parent.

After the conversation just detailed, the parties
soon repaired to the kitchen, where, in his great
arm-chair before the cheerful fire, the Captain was
accustomed to spend his evenings, sometimes listening
to the silver-toned voice of his daughter as she
sung some favorite song, or read some favorite author,
and sometimes recounting the thrilling incidents,
that had marked his adventures while battling
the subtle foe of the wilderness. One of his
most attentive auditors, when engaged in the latter
employment, was Neshobee, with whom the veteran
also often amused himself in conversation, either
imparting information to the native, or listening to
the shrewd and original remarks made by the latter
in answer to the various questions by which he was
purposely interrogated. Perceiving now, however,
that the place of this almost necessary adjunct to
his happiness was vacant, the Captain immediately
inquired of Ruth, the servant maid before mentioned,
if she knew whither the Indian had gone.

`He is out in the field, Captain,' replied the person
addressed, with some signs of uneasiness in her
looks, `and I wonder what strange thing he sees or
hears to-night, that makes him act so oddly? I
have been out, and called to him; but he paid no
attention to me, and kept on his pranks, sometimes
listening with his ear to the ground, and then dodging
or crawling from one stump to another.'

`Aha?' said the Captain, with a look of interest;
`those are generally pranks that mean something
with an Indian. I wonder who can be prowling
about us now?'

`Mercy!' exclaimed Ruth in alarm; `if it should
be the Green Mountain Boys!—

`The worst would be their own, I think,' coolly
observed the Captain; `that is, if they come to
show us such play as it is said they have shown
some on Otter Creek.'

`What would you do, father, in case they should
come on such an errand?' asked Alma, with an air
of mingled curiosity and concern.

`What would I do, child? Why, I would put a
rifle bullet through the first one who should attempt
to enter, even if it should be Warrington himself.
Besure, I know but little of this cursed dispute
about titles. They may have as much right to
lands that they have bought, and first improved, as
the Yorkers, for aught that I know; and I was never
for hanging them for fighting in such a case. But
here—why, zounds! do you think when I have got
the first possession, and done so much upon the
place, that I am a going to give it up to the greedy
dogs? No! not if their great devil and all generalissamo,
Ethan Allen, should come on with all his
forces, would I give it up without a fight! Hoo!—
they shall have my heart's blood first!'

`I trust there will be no necessity for bloodshed
any where, father, rejoined the daughter quite composedly;
`I have reason to—that is, I do not believe
the Green Mountain Boys will make the least
attempt to molest us.'

`Well—well, girl,' said the Captain, scanning the
other closely, and at first with rather a puzzled air,
which soon, however, gave way to a look of approbation;
`I must say that does not seem much like
borrowing trouble, as most of you women do in
such cases. However, I have been taught by the
Indians, and sometimes have paid dear for my
schooling too, that this borrowing trouble is not always
so bad a thing after all; as it generally keeps
us well guarded against a surprise. But here comes
our scout; so let us hear his report. Well, Neshobee,
they say you are scouting to-night—what is in
the wind?'

`Me hark um, but no tell um,' replied the Indian,
quietly taking his place by the fire.

The dog in the yard now gave one of those faint,
indecisive sort of yelps, usual with the animal when
doubtful whether he has heard something that
should require his notice.

`Beagle thinks pretty much as you do, Neshobee,'
said the Captain, comprehending the tone of
the dog: `But hark!' he added, as the animal
barked again, and in a more decided manner; `I
can't read that so easily. What do you make of it,
boy?'

`Beag say that no four foot coming, Cappen,' said
the native unconcernedly.

`Is the rifle well loaded Neshobee?' asked the
Captain, glancing at the firearms suspended by hooks
on the wall.

`Yas!'

`And the fowling piece?'

`Me spose um.'

`Very well, down with them then! Alma, step
and bring me my pistols! and in the mean time we
will bar the door—Ruth lend a hand! If these fellows,'
continued the Captain, coolly assissting to exto
execute the several commands he had so rapidly
given to his household—`if these fellows had any
honest errand, they would come up to the house at
once, like men, instead of skulking around at a distance,
as they evidently are. We may as well be
prepared for them.'

`Father,' said Alma returning with the required
pistols, and now manifesting the most lively concern.
`Father, I do beg of you not to think of firing on
any one rashly—ascertain what they want, at all
events. Your apprehensions, I think, are wholly
groundless—I cannot think—indeed I am very
sure'—

A gentle rap, rap, rap! on the outside of the door
caused the speaker suddenly to suspend. All now
stood hushed in silence, till the rapping was repeated,
in several louder and more distinct knocks.