University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XIV.

THE RETURN TO WINSTON—"BOOTLESS HOME AND
WEATHER-BEATEN BACK."

We remained at Conway's next day until about
one or two o'clock. Our horses had broken out of
the dale on the Potomac, and had returned to Towers's
the day after we abandoned them. They had
been put back, and again had left—which escapes,
in justice to the rhododendron fencing, we must record
it, were effected through the barricade at the
point of entrance into the dale; in other words,
they had escaped by the way they got in: we had
not secured the bars effectually. They had been
seen passing by Conway's only a few hours before
we arrived. Supposing Towers would send them
back this morning, we waited, keeping a lookout
from the house.

In the meantime, Conway's two boys were despatched
to the dale, six miles off, for our saddles
and bridles, &c.; and with instructions to go up the
mountain beyond, to the Elk-lick, and get Mr. Botecote's
Yankee blanket—which was left there hung
upon a tree, as the reader will remember, when
Peter made his first proposition to turn back.

It was a beautiful morning of the early summer,

and we lay idly about on the grass, basking in the
sunshine, and commenting upon many things pleasantly
enough. As the conversation referred chiefly
to our expedition and its incidents, we will relate
some of it before we leave.

Mr. Botecote was restored to all his natural vivacity
and pleasantry. His eye twinkled, and his
countenance was bright. He was again in his
proper element of civilization.

"Well, gentlemen," he observed, "I've been
thinking about it, and it is my opinion that there
is no life like this of the wilderness, after all. It's
astonishing, Galen, what an amount of hardship a
man can endure! No man can tell what he is until
he is tried. Powell, do you think that tract of
land can be bought?"

"No doubt of it, Mr. Botecote."

"How many acres are there?"

"Five thousand."

"And for how much?"

"Sixty cents an acre."

"That's three thousand dollars. I'll buy it."

"It's the finest tract in all the country; there's
not fifty acres of bad land in the whole of it, and it's
all finely watered," answered Powell, encouraging
the purchase.

"I'll join you in the purchase, Peter," said Adolphus.
"As soon as we get back to Winston, we'll
write, right away, and secure it."

"I'm afraid we've lost Peter and Adolphus," observed
the artist.

"Oh, that's certain—indeed, I doubt whether
they will go back with us at all," replied the Master.

"I can't imagine a more happy life," said Peter,
"than a man could live out here—here in the midst
of these grand mountains, these noble trees, these
perfect waters; the wilderness close at hand for his
recreation, with its innumerable deer and trout;
the railroad only some ten or twenty miles off, and
which you can reach by a road through beautiful
glades all the way—that is, after you have got
over the Backbone. Adolphus, we must build
ourselves a lodge upon our estate. I shall construct
something after the old Saxon architecture,
that shall look baronial—have great, huge fireplaces,
to burn whole loads of wood in at a time;
—and a big hall, hung round with trophies of the
chase—"

And here Galen broke in: "Yes—and when our
friends come up, we will summon Powell and Conway,
and all the other foresters, and make inroads
into the wilderness—encamp out there, and fish,
and shoot the deer."

"Deer!—Nothing so small as that—bears and
panthers—elk at the least," said the artist.

"I would have the Canaan as a park," said the
Master, "and cut, But, drives through the gorges
and defiles of the mountains; bridge the laurel, and

have a tower at the falls of the Blackwater, with a
good cook in it—such a one as Peter would recommend—and
lounges and cushions of the softest—
with a harp or so, and two or three grand pianos,
to play swelling themes in accord with the sublime
music of the torrent roaring down the Alleganies!"

"I am not building castles, gentlemen," observed
Peter with earnestness; "far from it, gentlemen!
Never was more in earnest in my life. Why, that
five thousand acres, and the others that I would buy
in the course of time, would be an immense inheritance
to my children! Why, sir, in twenty years,
the whole of it would be worth fifty dollars an acre
at the least. The railroad, when finished, will open
out the country to market at once: it will make
tidewater at your door! As fine a country as our
Valley is, I would infinitely rather live here!"

Mr. Peter Botecote, it will be perceived, was a
very altered man in his feelings this morning. He
was no longer the knight of the gloomy countenance.
But rowdy and ragamuffin as he seemed
externally to the eye, the soul of Philip Sydney was
in him, or any highly imaginative, poetic, and sublimated
gentleman; and Hope spread before him
all her illusions—

and all-happy visions of the wilderness didn't spare
his aching sight. But, we are not deriding Peter.

Much of that gentleman's enthusiasm has substantial
foundation. The railroad must put this noble country
alongside of the sea; and the forest must be
cleared away for the plough, and the water-power
everywhere must be used, and the coal dug out of
the earth, and the ores, the gypsum, the salt, and
the lumber, turned into wealth; and therefore the
land (such land! that can be bought now from sixty
cents to a dollar an acre!) must be worth fifty dollars—and
that at no very distant day. But all this
is to be done by the hardy enterprise of men in
whose souls poetry and imagination are not predominant—by
men with necessity at their elbow,
who are resolute upon acquisition, and who have
been trained to the rougher realities of life; not by
a set of daintily-nurtured gentlemen, to whom life
has been but little else than an agreeable pastime,
whose disquiet has been only the loss of some pleasurable
gratification, whose greatest suffering has consisted
in being lost for a day in the wilds of the Canaan—a
wilderness—but a wilderness of plenty of
deer and trout.

"Peter is delightful to me this morning, gentlemen;
I never saw a happier countenance," observed
the Master.

"Perfectly delicious," responded the artist; "he's
blossoming like the rose in the wilderness:—

"He is happy, sure enough," said Trip. "And
he looks natural to me to-day out of his eyes. But
yesterday, sitting down on that soft, mushy log, I
don't think his nearest neighbor would have recognised
him."

"There was a grand gloom on him just about
that time: he looked like the pictures of Napoleon
on the rock at St. Helena."

"I never had any idea of Philips's grand, gloomy,
and peculiar—a sceptred hermit, &c., before. I
see now, however, distinctly the sort of picture of
a man the Irish orator must have had in his mind."

"Signor, you ought to have sketched him."

"I have him in my mind's eye, gentlemen: Marius,
sitting among the ruins of Carthage, won't be
able to hold a candle to him, after I shall have
limned him!"

"Trip, you needn't say anything," retorted Peter;
"for when the hunters admitted we were lost, your
eyes grew very big."

"Well, it did look a little scary to me about that
time," answered Trip, "particularly when I saw the
Signor there hunting about for the snails, and putting
them in his pockets. You see, I thought of
Towell's story about the lost man out there. And,
now I think of it, I shall retract to Connells my disbelief
as soon as I get a sight of him."

"Call him Towers, if you please, my dear fellow,
Trip; just put your mind upon it—Towers—Towers!
It would be some amends to him."

And here Peter frankly acknowledged the fact
that he was very much broken down and a good
deal disconsolate at times; but that, notwithstanding,
the pleasure of the expedition was very great
to him.

"And, gentlemen," he continued, with much enthusiasm,
"I'll go in with you again, at any time
you may choose to name, provided only you let me
have about a month's notice, so that I may put myself
in training beforehand. Indeed, I think, the
next time, I'll take it afoot from home. They have
got to making these wagons now to run so easy, that
a man who uses them must lose eventually all his
walking powers—that fine elasticity of muscle—
that wiry agility—that free, unimpeded respiration
—that everything that is native and to the manner
born, I may say, to man, as my experience of the
wilderness satisfies me—that—in fine, gentlemen,
I shall foot it, I think, for the rest of my days!"

"Right, Peter—down with the wagon!" said the
artist.

"And up with the saddle-horse again!" replied
the Master. "I will join with you in any reformation
of the times that has for its object the ascendency
of the saddle. Bring the republic back to
that, and I shall have hopes of it. This foot-work
is sufficiently cared for over the land; any fellow
that has two legs can get at it. But how many of
our people are there of this generation who can ride

a real horse! Cavalry are as essential to our national
greatness as infantry. While many go afoot,
it is essential that some at least should go a-horseback.
Where would the nation be to-day, if it had
not been for that race of men who were trained in
the saddle—those men of `earth's first blood'—the
gentlemen who rode the blooded horses that were
descended from the loins of the Godolphin Arabian?
Don't tell me, Peter, that these men, heroic as they
would have been anyhow, had not some elevation
given to their heroism by the nobilities of nature
begotten of the saddle. Imagine Washington without
his charger! Think of him, if you can, afoot!
Or can the idea of him even enter into your brain,
as a man driving a fast trotter, at about two twenty,
over a plank-road! Could Alexander of Macedon
ever have been Alexander the Great, had he not
been the Alexander who could ride Bucephalus?
Shakspeare understood all about it when he made
Richard rage about Bosworth-field for a horse!"—

here ranted Peter, breaking in upon the Master;
and, throwing himself into a very theatrical position,
he went on, and enacted the whole of the battle-scene
—out-raging Kean or Booth even—to the great
wonderment of Powell and Conway, and the whole
of Conway's family, who came out bewildered to
the performance. At length, having got through

the play, Peter went on to learn from his two foresters
the expense of clearing the timber from his
proposed estate;—which information was, when
summed up and digested, in and about as follows:

A good day-laboror would belt an acre a day;
and he could be hired for fifty cents a day. One
man, therefore, in a hundred days, would belt or
deaden one hundred acres. Ten men, in that time,
would belt a thousand acres, and at a cost of five
hundred dollars. A thousand acres of the forest
then, could be easily deadened by the next spring.
As soon as this is done, the ground being freed from
the tax made upon it by the growth of the trees,
and the sun let in, it would, in the first season,
grow up in timothy, the spontaneous growth of
these wilds. This thousand acres in that condition
would graze, the first year, some five hundred head
of cattle, which could be had at a dollar a head for
the season. The estate would yield, then, for the
first year, five hundred dollars. The next year, the
same thousand acres would graze a thousand head
of cattle—that is a thousand dollars it would yield
the second year. The third year you could harrow
over the ground, sow some grass-seed additional,
maybe, in places, and go to making hay for winter
use. This year you could buy young cattle at
eight and ten dollars a piece, and having the hay to
keep them over winter, sell them the next year at
eighteen or twenty dollars a head. Some two hundred

acres of the thousand being kept for hay, you
could cut from them at least two tons to the acre.
A ton of hay is good allowance for the support of a
steer through the winter. Therefore you could
keep some four hundred head over the winter; four
hundred would be worth seven or eight thousand
dollars gross—equal to some three or four thousand
dollars clear. The fourth year the roots of the trees
would be all dead, and your land fit for cultivation
—for raising wheat, rye, oats, potatoes, or whatever
else the climate and soil would allow; and by this
time the land kept in timothy would grow from
three to five tons of hay to the acre.

From this digest of the information communicated
by Powell, the reader will perceive that the
speculation will be a grand one in a money point
of view; and Peter and Adolphus were already, in
their mind's eye, great cattle-raisers, with numerous
herdsmen, and almost innumerable bullocks over
their vast possessions—say some fifty thousand
acres apiece—here on the slopes and lawns of the
Backbone; and their houses were filled, during
the summer months, with gentlemen and ladies,
who hunted and rode, fished, eat the trout, the
broils, and roasts and pastries of the deer, with
bear's meat, and panther or wild-cat collops—
grew fat and defied the world below, in the pastimes
of the wilderness—then a wilderness made
easy of ingress and egress by fine graded roads, cut

out by the great proprietors, Peter and Galen—
whose two castles of old Saxon architecture, built
on either slope of the mountain, would enable the
Backbone to frown down on the Potomac on the
one side, on the Blackwater on the other, as—

In the meantime, while all this future was entering
deep into the hearts of the two lords paramount
of these regions—the duke of Canaan, and the
baron of the Backbone—Andante and the Master
were stretched out upon the grass, a little distance
off, commenting upon the scene around them.

"Did you ever see a more perfectly ruffian-looking
couple of fellows in your life, than those
two great landholders yonder."

"They put me in mind of the vagabond banditti
that used to infest the stage in Fra Diavolo."

"I don't think you look any better, Guy!"

"Nor I, you, Signor! If I were to meet you
alone on the highway, I would give you a very
wide berth. I don't think I have ever seen in
painting, or read of in description, a more unmitigated
ruffian than you look!"

"Trip, sprawled out yonder, comes up to my idea
of a red republican crippled in the leg at a barricade."

"I can understand very well, why we should
look like a set of vagabonds who would steal sheep,

and pigs, and poultry; but that is not it. There is a
look about us of a set of men who would rob, and
murder, burn, plunder and ravage a whole country.
There is no such look about Powell and Conway."

"I understand it this way," said Andante, "I
think it quite likely, that degrade us from our rank
as gentlemen—take away all the restraints of civilization
from us—in other words, put us down on
the Spanish main, and we would discover some
qualities that would be considered right respectable
among pirates."

"What! do you think that of But!"

"No, I except him. If he was to embark in life
on the Spanish main, I think he would be taken and
hung."

Here Mr. Butcut, hearing something about his
being captured and hung, the visioned bliss, and
power, and dominion over great estates, &c., &c.,
which filled and thrilled his brain all the morning,
were all obliterated from his mind by the unhappy
idea; and turning his thoughts altogether away
from the Blackwater, he entered into a very earnest
maintenance of the opinion, that he would make as
good a pirate as any gentleman present.

"In fact, gentlemen," he said, concluding his
defence of himself, "I believe, barring, always, the
walking and starving, I would be as efficient a man
as any of you, upon any marauding expedition,
whether by sea or land."

"Feed him enough, and carry him—and I believe
so too," said Trip.

After this very just remark of Triptolemus's,
which was assented to on all hands, our horses
came in sight, emerging from the woods; and we
began preparations for our departure.

Having paid all expenses at the Hotel Conway,
handsomely—shaken hands kindly with all the
family (amounting to some eight or ten, big and
little), especially taking care not to forget the oldest
daughter of the old forester, who had a soft hand
and a kindling eye, and was a very modest, and
very pretty maiden of some seventeen summers,
we turned our steps Towers-ward; and half of us
a-foot, and half a-horse, we defiled into the forest,
presenting to the eye a very good picture of the
vagabond picturesque in scenery. As we went out
we might have passed well enough for the nobler
order of outlaws—such as Robin Hood, and Little
John, and Will Scarlet; and Butcut would have
done for the jolly friar—but now, all tattered and
torn, the glory of our trim array all gone—our
plumage drooping, and general aspect beggarly,
we more resembled a band of the inferior banditti
who infest the neighborhood of pig-pens and poultry
yards. Still we were picturesque of aspect; and
as we followed the winding horsepath, up the hillsides
and down the steeps—now through the little
streams that made their way to the Potomac—into

the dells, and through them, and up out of them
again, until we reached the cone of the Backbone;
and so, on and along it, until we came out into the
northwestern highway—there were many points of
view in which an artist could have made a picture
of our march, worthy of being hung up anywhere
in the halls and bowers of our land. Indeed, the
Signor says, that he has it now in his mind's eye,
and that some day, when his genius is sufficiently
inspired, he will render the expedition as memorable
as that of Xenophon, by putting it on canvass as it
wound its way out dismantled through the romantic
scenery of the Backbone; choosing this one of its
many aspects, by which to perpetuate its remembrance,
because, as there is dignity in sufferings
endured, its great toils and hardships will be impressed
more fully upon the mind, by the tatterdemallion
aspect that so thoroughly belonged to it, as
it approached its end.

After reaching the highway we have nothing
more to record, except that the travellers along the
road, in every instance, gave us the track by shying
off to the right or the left, out of our way; and that
they returned our salutation with a glad and subservient
courtesy; which shows that the people
who travel these regions, are either very civil in
their manners, or that they took us for a band of
most desperate ruffians, which, we leave the judicious
reader to determine. Thus, in full and undisputed

possession of the right of way to the whole
or any part of the northwestern turnpike that we
chose to take, we at length, at about five o'clock in
the afternoon of the fifth day, dismounted at Towers's
gate, all alive and well—restored by Heaven to the
regions of civilization—toughened, roughened, high
in health, strong in limb, and joyously elate with
the achievement of our hardy enterprise; as—

though not quite so—

And so ends the adventure into the Canaan
wilderness of Randolph.

Here, also, ends this Blackwater Chronicle.