University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

The travellers now moved off together, Arthur
walking, and leading his horse. They soon reached
a point where a sharp ridge, jutting like a buttress
from the side of the mountain, came down abruptly
to the very bank of the rivulet. Up this ridge, not
unaptly called “the Devil's Back-bone,” the path
led. Leaning, as it were, against the mountain—its
position, the narrow, ridgy edge along which the traveller
clambered, and the rough nodules which interrupted
the ascent, like the notches in a hen's ladder,
gave it no small resemblance to this housewifely contrivance.
The steep descent on either hand into
deep dells, craggy and hirsute with stinted trees bristling
from the sides, together with the similarity of
these same nodules to the joints of the spine, had
suggested a name strictly descriptive of the place.
The ruggedness, steepness, and vast height of the
ascent, would naturally provoke some spiteful epithet;
and were the spot to be named again, a hundred
to one it would receive the same name, and no
other.

At the summit of this narrow stair, the travellers
stopped to take breath, and look back on the scene
below. Arthur, who was at the romantic age when
young men are taught to affect an enthusiasm for the
beauties of nature, and to prate about hues and scents,
and light and shade, and prospects in all the variety
of the grand, the beautiful, and the picturesque, had
been feasting his imagination with the thought of the
glorious view to be seen from the pinnacle before
him. Like an epicure about to feast on turtle, who
will not taste a biscuit beforehand lest he should
spoil his dinner, so our young traveller steadily kept
his face toward the hill as he ascended it. Even
when he stopped to take breath, he was careful not
to look behind. Schwartz, on the contrary, who was
in advance, always faced about on such occasions,
filling the pauses with conversation, and looking as
if unconscious of the glorious scene over which his
eye glanced unheeding. Arthur was vexed to see
such indifference, and wondered whether this was
the effect of use, or of the total absence of a faculty
of which poets so much delight to speak.

At length the summit was attained; and now the
youth looked around in anticipated exultation. At
first he felt bound to admire, and, forgetting the unromantic
character of his matter-of-fact companion,
exclaimed: “Oh! how grand! How beautiful!”

“For my part,” said Schwartz, indifferently, “I
cannot say that I see any thing at all rightly, except

it be the little branch down there, with its patches of
meadow and corn-fields, and its smoky cabins. In
the spring of the year, when you cannot see the cabins
for the shaders, and the corn, and oats, and meadow
is all of a color, it looks mightily like a little
green snake. What it is like just now, I cannot say,
as I never saw one of them snakes half-scaled, and
with a parcel of warts on his back: but I have a notion
he would look pretty much so. As to any thing
else—there is something there, to be sure, but what
it is, I am sartain I could never tell, if I did not
know. And as to the distance I hear some folks talk
about—why the farther you look, the less you see,
that's all; until you get away yonder, t'other side of
nowhere; and then you see just nothing at all.”

“But the vastness of the view!” said Arthur.
“The idea of immensity!”

“As to that,” replied Schwartz, “you have only
just to look right up, and you can look a heap farther,
and still see nothing. All the difference is,
you know it is nothing; and down there, you know
there is something, and you cannot see what it is.”

“I am afraid your eyes are bad,” said Arthur.

“I cannot see as well as I could once,” replied
Schwartz; “but if there was any thing to be seen
down there, I should be right apt to see it. I have
clomb this hill, Mr. Trevor, when I could see the
head of a nail in a target fifty yards off, and drive it
with my rifle; and I don't think I saw any thing

more then than. I do now; and that is only just because
there an't nothing there to see.—I God! but
there is, though! There's that chap a coming along;
and I must see the Captain, and tell him all about it
before he comes.”

“I see nobody,” said Arthur.

“That is because you don't look in the right
place,” replied Schwartz. “Look along the road.”

“I don't see the road, except just at the foot of
the mountain.”

“Well! Look through the sights of my rifle.
There! Don't you see a man on horseback?”

“I see something moving,” said Arthur; “but I
cannot tell what it is.”

“Well,” said Schwartz, “when he comes, you'll
see it's a man riding on a white horse, and then, may
be, you'll think if there was any thing else there, I
could see that too.”

He now sounded a small whistle, which hung
by a leathern thong from his shoulder-belt. The
signal was answered from the point of a projecting
crag which jutted out from the face of the cliff, not
more than fifty yards off. At the same moment, a
man was seen to rise up from behind a rock, which
had hitherto concealed him; though, from his lookout
place, he must have had a distinct view of our
travellers from the moment they left the valley. He
now approached and accosted Schwartz in a manner
which showed that he had already recognized him.

Schwartz returned the salutation, and, pointing out
the man on the white horse, said: “If that fellow
should happen to get by without their seeing him, I
want you just to fall in with him, like as if you was a
hunting, and so go with him to the piquet. Never
let on but he knows all the signs, and keep with
him: and when you get him to the piquet, make him
believe that is the camp, and that the Captain will be
there after a while; and so keep him there till the
Captain comes.”

Having said this, he again turned his eye toward
the object moving below, and gazed intently for a
few minutes. Arthur, in the mean time, was left to
admire the prospect, and soon began to suspect that
Schwartz's ideas of the picturesque were not so far
wrong. Indeed, there is nothing to admire from the
spot, but the road that leads to it. From the foot of
the mountain to the coast, there is an expanse of
nearly three hundred miles, with no secondary ridges.
As seen from that elevation, the whole is level to the
eye, and presents one sheet of unbroken forest. Arthur
found time to correct his preconceptions by the
testimony of his own senses, while Schwartz continued
to observe the movements of the distant traveller.
At last he said: “That will do. They have
stopped him; and he will not get away to-night.”

They now moved on quietly through a forest of
lofty chestnuts, and along a path which wound its
way among the scorched trunks of innumerable trees,

prostrated by the fires that annually sweep through
such uninhabited fracts. The soil seemed fertile,
and abounding in luxuriant though coarse pasturage;
and the high table-land of the mountain was more
level than the peopled district below. Yet all was
solitary and silent; nor was a vestige of habitation
seen for miles. On inquiring the cause of this, Arthur
was told that the country, at that elevation, was too
cold to be inviting, as nothing would grow there but
grass and oats, and that it was all shingled over with
conflicting patents.

“They that claim the land,” said Schwartz, “will
not go to law about it with one another: because
they would have to survey it, and that would cost a
mint of money; so they all club to keep it as a summer
range for their stock. It belongs to some of
them, and that is enough.”

He had not long done speaking, when he suddenly
stopped, and, raising his rifle, fired, and began
quietly to load again.

“What did you shoot at?” asked Arthur, looking
in the direction of the shot.

“A monstrous fine buck,” replied Schwartz.

“Where is he? I did not see him.”

“You did not look in the right place. He is down
and kicking; and I always like to load my gun before
I go up to them, because, you see, a deer, when he is
wounded, is as dangerous as a painter.”

“A painter!” said Arthur. “What harm is there
in a painter, more than another man?”

“O!” said Schwartz, laughing, “it an't no man
at all. I don't just rightly know how you high
larnt gentlemen call his name, but he is as ugly a
varmint as you'd wish to see; most like a big cat.
Sometimes the drotted Yankees gets hold of them
and puts them in a cage; and then they call them
tigers. I God! I catched a young one once and
sold him to one of these fellows; and the next time
I seed him, he was carrying the cretur about with
him for a show. And he did not remember me; and
so I axed him what it was; and he said 'twas an
Effrican tiger right from Duck river! Lord! how
the folks did laugh; 'cause you see, sir, Duck river
is just a little way down here in Tennessee, not over
five hundred miles off; and Effrica, they tell me, is
away t'other side of the herring-pond, where the negurs
come from.”

By this time the rifle was loaded, and they advanced
toward the fallen deer. They were quite near
before Arthur discovered him; and, at the moment,
the animal (a noble buck of ten branches) recovered
himself so far as to regain his feet. He still staggered,
but the sudden sight of his enemy seemed, at
once, to stiffen his limbs with horror, and give them
strength to support him. In an instant his formidable
antlers were pointed; and, with eyes glaring and
blood-shot, and his hair all turned the wrong way, he
was in act to spring forward. At the instant, the report
of the rifle was again heard, and, pitching on

the points of his horns, he turned fairly heels over
head, and lay with his legs in air, and quivering in
death. Schwartz now drew his knife across the animal's
throat, and proceeded to disembowel him, when
Arthur asked what he would do with the carcass.

“I'll just hang him up in a sapling,” said he,
“till I meet one of our men. There ought to be one
close by, and I can send him for him. Where there's
a hundred mouths to feed, such a buck as this is a
cash article.”

At this moment, the snapping of a dry stick caught
his ear; and, looking up, he saw a man approaching.

“I don't know that fellow,” said he, looking hard at
him. “But it's all one. I can make him know me.”

The usual salutation now passed, and the stranger
said: “If I may be so bold, stranger, I'd be glad to
know what parts you are from?”

“From Passamaquoddy,” said Schwartz.

“Can you tell me the price of skins down there
away?”

“Twenty-five cents and a quarter a pound,” replied
Schwartz.

A few more simple questions and out-of-the-way
answers were exchanged, when Schwartz, addressing
the other, in an under tone, said: “You are one of the
new recruits, I reckon?” The other nodded; and
Schwartz went on to ask their number. Being told
they were fifty, he said, gravely: “Now, there you
are wrong. You are right enough to pass me, after

I gave you the word; but then that's no reason you
should tell me any thing. I just asked you, you see,
to give you a 'caution; cause a fellow might come
along here that would give you the word as straight
as any body, and be a spy all the time. So the right
way would be, just to pass him and keep dark, that's
the rule; and, by the time he'd find out how many
men we've got, may be he'd find out something else
he would not like quite so well. But come, let us
take the deer up to the road, and you can walk your
post and watch it, till I can send somebody for it
from the piquet.”

The sturdy mountaineer at once shouldered the animal;
and, striding along to the road, threw him down,
and quietly betook himself to eating the chestnuts that
covered the ground. The traveller moved on, and
presently came to the piquet.

Here was a small party quartered in a rude and
ruinous cabin, near which was an enclosure around a
beautiful fountain, that welled up from a natural basin
of stone. In this were confined twenty or thirty calves.
A few horses were piqueted at hand, and the sides
of the adjoining hills were covered with a numerous
herd of fat cattle, browsing on the faded, but still
succulent vegetation. The time was come when they
should have been driven down for the winter, to the
farms of their owners below, but they were left here
that the men might have the use of the milk. Should
their hunting at any time prove unsucessful, there
was always a beef at hand.

Here Schwartz was known, and joyfully welcomed.
He stopped only to tell of the deer, and moved
on. “You have a curious system here,” said Arthur;
“I see the people here know you, but how did you
manage with that new recruit. I watched you, and
I did not see you give him any sign, and he did not
ask for a countersign.”

“That is all because you don't know what foolish
answers I gave to his questions. You see, we ha'nt
got no countersign rightly; 'cause you see, when I
stop a man, I want to know who he is, but I don't
want to tell him any thing about myself. But if I
ax a man for the countersign, just so I might as well
tell him I am on guard at once. So we've just got,
may be, twenty simple questions; and when we ask
them, our own folks know what answer to give, and
the answer is sure to be one that nobody would give
unless he was in the secret.”

“And pray how did you find out that I was Arthur
Trevor?”

“O! nothing easier, sir. That man, that gave
you the map, was not no more lame than you. But
I told him to be sure and not give it to nobody but
you, and then to limp so as you'd be sure to notice it.
You see, it was I that was to try fall in with you,
and pilot you; but, after that, I got upon another
scheme. As to the other paper, that was to serve you
with our folks, because there was a mark there you
did not notice, that any of them would know; and

then they would be middling sure you were the man
you said you were. They would have been civil to
you, and let you pass, but then they would have sent
a man or two to the camp with you. And now, Mr.
Trevor, here is something that I can see, and I have a
notion it's worth looking at.”

While he was yet speaking, Arthur's ears had been
saluted by a brawling sound, which he now recognized
as the rush of water. Turning his head toward it,
he perceived that it proceeded from a deep and shaggy
dell, which the path was now approaching, and along
the verge of which it presently wound. Here the
plain broke sheer down into a gulph of vast depth,
at the bottom of which a considerable stream was
seen. It dashed rapidly along, pouring it's sparkling
waters over successive barriers of yellow rock, that
sent up a golden gleam from beneath the crystal sheet
that covered them. The mountain-pine, the fir, the
kalmia, and numberless other evergreens, which nearly
filled the gorge, afforded only occasional glimpses
of the water; while they set off the picturesque appearance
of so much as they permitted to be seen.
As they advanced, they came to a part where the
trees had been cut from the brow of the cliff; and,
several of those below having been removed, a clearer
view was afforded.

Here, at the depth of two hundred feet, figures
were seen moving to and fro, while, right opposite,
under a beetling cliff, that screened them from above,

were groups clustered around fires, kindled against the
rock, behind a rude breast-work of logs. The whole
breadth of the stream was here exposed to view, apparently
twenty or thirty yards wide. Though shallow,
by reason of its rapidity it seemed to pour a
vast volume of water.

Standing on the brow of the cliff, Schwartz now
uttered a shout, and immediately half a dozen men,
seizing their rifles, moved up the glen, and were soon
hidden under the bank on which the travellers stood.
They now went on, and presently reached a point at
which the path, turning short to the left, dived into
the abyss, leading down a rugged ledge that sloped
along the face of the cliff, in the direction opposite
to that of their approach. It reached the very bottom,
nearly under the point from which the shout of
Schwartz had given notice of his presence. Here he
stopped; and, requesting Arthur to wait a moment,
he descended. He had not gone far before his name
was repeated by a dozen voices, and immediately he
was heard to say: “Yes, it is Schwartz; and I have a
friend with me.”

“Bring him down,” was the answer; upon which
Schwartz, returning, requested Arthur to follow him,
and mind his footing. Arthur obeyed, and descended,
not without some appearance of danger, sometimes
leaping and sometimes crawling, until he reached
the group stationed at the foot of this rude stairway.
Here let us leave him for a while, and go back
to enquire who and whence he was.