GUY RIVERS:
A
TALE OF GEORGIA.

BY W. GILMORE SIMMS,

AUTHOR OF "THE YEMASSEE," "THE PARTISAN," "MELLICHAMPE,"
"KATHARINE WALTON," "THE SCOUT," "WOODCRAFT," ETC.

"Who wants

A sequel may read on. Th' unvarnished tale

That follows will supply the place of one."

ROGERS' Italy.

New and Revised Edition.

CHICAGO:
DONOHUE, HENNEBERRY & CO.
407-425 DEARBORN STREET
1890

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY
CHICAGO.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

GUY RIVERS

[CHAPTER I.]

THE STERILE PROSPECT AND THE LONELY TRAVELLER.

Our scene lies in the upper part of the state of Georgia, a region at this time fruitful of dispute, as being within the Cherokee territories. The route to which we now address our attention, lies at nearly equal distances between the main trunk of the Chatahoochie and that branch of it which bears the name of the Chestatee, after a once formidable, but now almost forgotten tribe. Here, the wayfarer finds himself lost in a long reach of comparatively barren lands. The scene is kept from monotony, however, by the undulations of the earth, and by frequent hills which sometimes aspire to a more elevated title. The tract is garnished with a stunted growth, a dreary and seemingly half-withered shrubbery, broken occasionally by clumps of slender pines that raise their green tops abruptly, and as if out of place, against the sky.

The entire aspect of the scene, if not absolutely blasted, wears at least a gloomy and discouraging expression, which saddens the soul of the most careless spectator. The ragged ranges of forest, almost untrodden by civilized man, the thin and feeble undergrowth, the unbroken silence, the birdless thickets,—all seem to indicate a peculiarly sterile destiny. One thinks, as he presses forward, that some gloomy Fate finds harbor in the place. All around, far as the eye may see, it looks in vain for relief in variety. There still stretch the dreary wastes, the dull woods, the long sandy tracts, and the rude hills that send out no voices, and hang out no lights for the encouragement of the civilized man. Such is the prospect that meets the sad and searching eyes of the wayfarer, as they dart on every side seeking in vain for solace.

Yet, though thus barren upon the surface to the eye, the dreary region in which we now find ourselves, is very far from wanting in resources, such as not only woo the eyes, but win the very soul of civilization. We are upon the very threshold of the gold country, so famous for its prolific promise of the precious metal; far exceeding, in the contemplation of the knowing, the lavish abundance of Mexico and of Peru, in their palmiest and most prosperous condition. Nor, though only the frontier and threshold as it were to these swollen treasures, was the portion of country now under survey, though bleak, sterile, and uninviting, wanting in attractions of its own. It contained indications which denoted the fertile regions, nor wanted entirely in the precious mineral itself. Much gold had been already gathered, with little labor, and almost upon its surface; and it was perhaps only because of the limited knowledge then had of its real wealth, and of its close proximity to a more productive territory, that it had been suffered so long to remain unexamined.

Nature, thus, in a section of the world seemingly unblessed with her bounty, and all ungarnished with her fruits and flowers, seemed desirous of redeeming it from the curse of barrenness, by storing its bosom with a product, which, only of use to the world in its conventional necessities, has become, in accordance with the self-creating wants of society, a necessity itself; and however the bloom and beauty of her summer decorations may refresh the eye of the enthusiast, it would here seem that, with an extended policy, she had planted treasures, for another and a greatly larger class, far more precious to the eyes of hope and admiration than all the glories and beauties in her sylvan and picturesque abodes. Her very sterility and solitude, when thus found to indicate her mineral treasures, rise themselves into attractions; and the perverted heart, striving with diseased hopes, and unnatural passions, gladly welcomes the wilderness, without ever once thinking how to make it blossom like the rose.

Cheerless in its exterior, however, the season of the year was one—a mild afternoon in May—to mollify and sweeten the severe and sterile aspect of the scene. Sun and sky do their work of beauty upon earth, without heeding the ungracious return which she may make; and a rich warm sunset flung over the hills and woods a delicious atmosphere of beauty, burnishing the dull heights and the gloomy pines with golden hues, far more bright, if for less highly valued by men, than the metallic treasures which lay beneath their masses. Invested by the lavish bounties of the sun, so soft, yet bright, so mild, yet beautiful, the waste put on an appearance of sweetness, if it did not rise into the picturesque. The very uninviting and unlovely character of the landscape, rendered the sudden effect of the sunset doubly effective, though, in a colder moment, the spectator might rebuke his own admiration with question of that lavish and indiscriminate waste which could clothe, with such glorious hues, a region so little worthy of such bounty; even as we revolt at sight of rich jewels about the brows and neck of age and ugliness. The solitary group of pines, that, here and there, shot up suddenly like illuminated spires;—the harsh and repulsive hills, that caught, in differing gradations, a glow and glory from the same bright fountain of light and beauty;—even the low copse, uniform of height, and of dull hues, not yet quite caparisoned for spring, yet sprinkled with gleaming eyes, and limned in pencilling beams and streaks of fire; these, all, appeared suddenly to be subdued in mood, and appealed, with a freshening interest, to the eye of the traveller whom at midday their aspects discouraged only.

And there is a traveller—a single horseman—who emerges suddenly from the thicket, and presses forward, not rapidly, nor yet with the manner of one disposed to linger, yet whose eyes take in gratefully the softening influences of that evening sunlight.

In that region, he who travelled at all, at the time of which we write, must do so on horseback. It were a doubtful progress which any vehicle would make over the blind and broken paths of that uncultivated realm. Either thus, or on foot, as was the common practice with the mountain hunters; men who, at seventy years of age, might be found as lithe and active, in clambering up the lofty summit as if in full possession of the winged vigor and impulse of twenty-five.

Our traveller, on the present occasion, was apparently a mere youth. He had probably seen twenty summers—scarcely more. Yet his person was tall and well developed; symmetrical and manly; rather slight, perhaps, as was proper to his immaturity; but not wanting in what the backwoodsmen call heft. He was evidently no milksop, though slight; carried himself with ease and grace; and was certainly not only well endowed with bone and muscle, but bore the appearance, somehow, of a person not unpractised in the use of it. His face was manly like his person; not so round as full, it presented a perfect oval to the eye; the forehead was broad, high, and intellectual—purely white, probably because so well shadowed by the masses of his dark brown hair. His eyes were rather small, but dark and expressive, and derived additional expression from their large, bushy, overhanging brows, which gave a commanding, and, at times, a somewhat fierce expression to his countenance. But his mouth was small, sweet, exquisitely chiselled, and the lips of a ripe, rich color. His chin, full and decided, was in character with the nobility of his forehead. The tout ensemble constituted a fine specimen of masculine beauty, significant at once of character and intelligence.

Our traveller rode a steed, which might be considered, even in the South, where the passion for fine horses is universal, of the choicest parentage. He was blooded, and of Arabian, through English, stocks. You might detect his blood at a glance, even as you did that of his rider. The beast was large, high, broad-chested, sleek of skin, wiry of limb, with no excess of fat, and no straggling hair; small ears, a glorious mane, and a great lively eye. At once docile and full of life, he trod the earth with the firm pace of an elephant, yet with the ease of an antelope; moving carelessly as in pastime, and as if he bore no sort of burden on his back. For that matter he might well do so. His rider, though well developed, was too slight to be felt by such a creature—and a small portmanteau carried all his wardrobe. Beyond this he had no impedimenta; and to those accustomed only to the modes of travel in a more settled and civilized country—with bag and baggage—the traveller might have appeared—but for a pair of moderately-sized twisted barrels which we see pocketed on the saddle—rather as a gentleman of leisure taking his morning ride, than one already far from home and increasing at every step the distance between it and himself. From our privilege we make bold to mention, that, strictly proportioned to their capacities, the last named appurtenances carried each a charge which might have rendered awkward any interruption; and it may not be saying too much if we add, that it is not improbable to this portion of his equipage our traveller was indebted for that security which had heretofore obviated all necessity for their use. They were essentials which might or might not, in that wild region, have been put in requisition; and the prudence of all experience, in our border country, is seldom found to neglect such companionship.

So much for the personal appearance and the equipment of our young traveller. We have followed the usage among novelists, and have dwelt thus long upon these details, as we design that our adventurer shall occupy no small portion of the reader's attention. He will have much to do and to endure in the progress of this narrative.

It may be well, in order to the omission of nothing hereafter important, to add that he seems well bred to the manège—and rode with that ease and air of indolence, which are characteristic of the gentry of the south. His garments were strictly suited to the condition and custom of the country—a variable climate, rough roads, and rude accommodations. They consisted of a dark blue frock, of stuff not so fine as strong, with pantaloons of the same material, all fitting well, happily adjusted to the figure of the wearer, yet sufficiently free for any exercise. He was booted and spurred, and wore besides, from above the knee to the ankle, a pair of buckskin leggins, wrought by the Indians, and trimmed, here and there, with beaded figures that gave a somewhat fantastic air to this portion of his dress. A huge cloak strapped over the saddle, completes our portrait, which, at the time of which we write, was that of most travellers along our southern frontiers. We must not omit to state that a cap of fur, rather than a fashionable beaver, was also the ordinary covering of the head—that of our traveller was of a finely-dressed fur, very far superior to the common fox skin cap worn by the plain backwoodsmen. It declared, somewhat for the superior social condition of the wearer, even if his general air and carriage did not sufficiently do so.

Our new acquaintance had, by this time, emerged into one of those regions of brown, broken, heathery waste, thinly mottled with tree and shrub, which seem usually to distinguish the first steppes on the approach to our mountain country. Though undulating, and rising occasionally into hill and crag, the tract was yet sufficiently monotonous; rather saddened than relieved by the gentle sunset, which seemed to gild in mockery the skeleton woods and forests, just recovering from the keen biting blasts of a severe and protracted winter.

Our traveller, naturally of a dreamy and musing spirit, here fell unconsciously into a narrow footpath, an old Indian trace, and without pause or observation, followed it as if quite indifferent whither it led. He was evidently absorbed in that occupation—a very unusual one with youth on horseback—that "chewing of the cud of sweet and bitter thought"—which testifies for premature troubles and still gnawing anxieties of soul. His thoughts were seemingly in full unison with the almost grave-like stillness and solemn hush of everything around him. His spirit appeared to yield itself up entirely to the mournful barrenness and uninviting associations, from which all but himself, birds and beasts, and the very insects, seemed utterly to have departed. The faint hum of a single wood-chuck, which, from its confused motions, appeared to have wandered into an unknown territory, and by its uneasy action and frequent chirping, seemed to indicate a perfect knowledge of the fact, was the only object which at intervals broke through the spell of silence which hung so heavily upon the sense. The air of our traveller was that of one who appeared unable, however desirous he might be, to avoid the train of sad thought which such a scene was so eminently calculated to inspire; and, of consequence, who seemed disposed, for this object, to call up some of those internal resources of one's own mind and memory, which so mysteriously bear us away from the present, whatever its powers, its pains, or its pleasures, and to carry us into a territory of the heart's own selection. But, whether the past in his case, were more to be dreaded than the present; or whether it was that there was something in the immediate prospect which appealed to sterile hopes, and provoking memories, it is very certain that our young companion exhibited a most singular indifference to the fact that he was in a wild empire of the forest—a wilderness—and that the sun was rapidly approaching his setting. The bridle held heedlessly, lay loose upon the neck of his steed; and it was only when the noble animal, more solicitous about his night's lodging than his rider, or rendered anxious by his seeming stupor, suddenly came to a full stand in the narrow pathway, that the youth seemed to grow conscious of his doubtful situation, and appeared to shake off his apathy and to look about him.

He now perceived that he had lost the little Indian pathway which he had so long pursued. There was no sign of route or road on any side. The prospect was greatly narrowed; he was in a valley, and the trees had suddenly thickened around him. Certain hills, which his eyes had hitherto noted on the right, had disappeared wholly from sight. He had evidently deflected greatly from his proper course, and the horizon was now too circumscribed to permit him to distinguish any of those guiding signs upon which he had relied for his progress. From a bald tract he had unwittingly passed into the mazes of a somewhat thickly-growing wood.

"Old Blucher," he said, addressing his horse, and speaking in clear silvery tones—"what have you done, old fellow? Whither have you brought us?"

The philosophy which tells us, when lost, to give the reins to the steed, will avail but little in a region where the horse has never been before. This our traveller seemed very well to know. But the blame was not chargeable upon Blucher. He had tacitly appealed to the beast for his direction when suffering the bridle to fall upon his neck. He was not willing, now, to accord to him a farther discretion; and was quite too much of the man to forbear any longer the proper exercise of his own faculties. With the quickening intelligence in his eyes, and the compression of his lips, declaring a resolute will, he pricked the animal forward, no longer giving way to those brown musings, which, during the previous hour, had not only taken him to remote regions but very much out of his way besides. In sober earnest, he had lost the way, and, in sober earnest, he set about to recover it; but a ten minutes' farther ride only led him to farther involvements; and he paused, for a moment, to hold tacit counsel with his steed, whose behavior was very much that of one who understands fully his own, and the predicament of his master. Our traveller then dismounted, and, suffering his bridle to rest upon the neck of the docile beast, he coursed about on all sides, looking close to the earth in hopes to find some ancient traces of a pathway. But his search was vain. His anxieties increased. The sunlight was growing fainter and fainter; and, in spite of the reckless manner, which he still wore, you might see a lurking and growing anxiety in his quick and restless eye. He was vexed with himself that he had suffered his wits to let fall his reins; and his disquiet was but imperfectly concealed under the careless gesture and rather philosophic swing of his graceful person, as, plying his silent way, through clumps of brush, and bush, and tree, he vainly peered along the earth for the missing traces of the route. He looked up for the openings in the tree-tops—he looked west, at the rapidly speeding sun, and shook his head at his horse. Though bold of heart, no doubt, and tolerably well aware of the usual backwoods mode of procedure in all such cases of embarrassment, our traveller had been too gently nurtured to affect a lodge in the wilderness that night—its very "vast contiguity of shade" being anything but attractive in his present mood. No doubt, he could have borne the necessity as well as any other man, but still he held it a necessity to be avoided if possible. He had, we are fain to confess, but small passion for that "grassy couch," and "leafy bower," and those other rural felicities, of which your city poets, who lie snug in garrets, are so prone to sing; and always gave the most unromantic preference to comfortable lodgings and a good roof; so, persevering in his search after the pathway, while any prospect of success remained, he circled about until equally hopeless and fatigued; then, remounted his steed, and throwing the bridle upon his neck, with something of the indifference of despair, he plied his spurs, suffering the animal to adopt his own course, which we shall see was nevertheless interrupted by the appearance of another party upon the scene, whose introduction we reserve for another chapter.

[CHAPTER II.]

THE ENCOUNTER—THE CHEVALIER D'INDUSTRIE.

Thus left to himself, the good steed of our traveller set off, without hesitation, and with a free step, that promised, at least, to overcome space hurriedly, if it attained not the desired destination. The rider did not suffer any of his own doubts to mar a progress so confidently begun; and a few minutes carried the twain, horse and man, deeply, as it were, into the very bowels of the forest. The path taken by the steed grew every moment more and more intricate and difficult of access, and, but for the interruption already referred to, it is not impossible that a continued course in the same direction, would have brought the rider to a full stop from the sheer inaccessibleness of the forest.

The route thus taken lay in a valley which was necessarily more fertile, more densely packed with thicket, than the higher road which our rider had been pursuing all the day. The branches grew more and more close; and, what with the fallen trees, the spreading boughs, the undergrowth, and broken character of the plain, our horseman was fain to leave the horse to himself, finding quite enough to do in saving his eyes, and keeping his head from awkward contact with overhanging timber. The pace of the beast necessarily sunk into a walk. The question with his rider was, in what direction to turn, to extricate himself from the mazes into which he had so rashly ridden? While he mused this question, Blucher started suddenly with evidently some new and exciting consciousness. His ears were suddenly lifted—his eyes were strained upon the copse in front—he halted, as if reluctant to proceed. It was evident that his senses had taken in some sights, or sounds, which were unusual.

Of course, our traveller was by no means heedless of this behavior on the part of the beast. He well knew the superior keenness of the brute senses, over those of the man; and his own faculties were keenly enlisted in the scrutiny. There might be wolves along the track—the country was not wanting in them; or, more to be feared, there might be a panther lurking along some great overhanging forest bough. There was need to be vigilant. Either of these savages would make his propinquity known, at a short distance, to the senses of an animal so timid as the horse. Or, it might be, that a worse beast still—always worst of all when he emulates the nature of the beast—man!—might be lurking upon the track! If so, the nature of the peril was perhaps greater still, to the rider if not the steed. The section of the wild world in which our traveller journeyed was of doubtful character; but sparingly supplied with good citizens; and most certainly infested with many with whom the world had quarrelled—whom it had driven forth in shame and terror.

The youth thought of all these things. But they did not overcome his will, or lessen his courage. Preparing himself, as well as he might, for all chances, he renewed his efforts to extricate himself from his thick harborage; pressing his steed firmly, in a direction which seemed to open fairly, the sky appearing more distinctly through the opening of the trees above. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes busy, watching right and left. Still, he could see nothing, hear nothing, but the slight footfall of his own steed. And yet the animal continued uneasy, his ears pricked up, his head turning, this way and that, with evident curiosity; his feet set down hesitatingly, as if uncertain whether to proceed.

Curious and anxious, our traveller patted the neck of the beast affectionately, and, in low tones, endeavored to soothe his apprehensions:

"Quietly, Blucher, quietly? What do you see, old fellow, to make you uneasy? Is it the snug stall, and the dry fodder, and the thirty ears, for which you long. I'faith, old fellow, the chance is that both of us will seek shelter and supper in vain to-night."

Blucher pricked up his ears at the tones, however subdued, of his rider's voice, which he well knew; but his uneasiness continued; and, just when our young traveller, began to feel some impatience at his restiffness and coyness, a shrill whistle which rang through the forest, from the copse in front, seemed at once to determine the correctness of sense in the animal, and the sort of beast which had occasioned his anxieties. He was not much longer left in doubt as to the cause of the animal's excitement. A few bounds brought him unexpectedly into a pathway, still girdled, however, by a close thicket—and having an ascent over a hill, the top of which was of considerable elevation compared with the plain he had been pursuing. As the horse entered this pathway, and began the ascent, he shyed suddenly, and so abruptly, that a less practised rider would have lost his seat.

"Quiet, beast! what do you see?"

The traveller himself looked forward at his own query, and soon discovered the occasion of his steed's alarm. No occasion for alarm, either, judging by appearances; no panther, no wolf, certainly—a man only—looking innocent enough, were it not for the suspicious fact that he seemed to have put himself in waiting, and stood directly in the midst of the path that the horseman was pursuing.

Our traveller, as we have seen, was not wholly unprepared, as well to expect as to encounter hostilities. In addition to his pistols, which were well charged, and conveniently at hand, we may now add that he carried another weapon, for close quarters, concealed in his bosom. The appearance of the stranger was not, however, so decided a manifestation of hostility, as to justify his acting with any haste by the premature use of his defences. Besides, no man of sense, and such we take our traveller to be, will force a quarrel where he can make his way peacefully, like a Christian and a gentleman. Our young traveller very quietly observed as he approached the stranger—

"You scare my horse, sir. Will it please you to give us the road?"

"Give you the road?—Oh! yes! when you have paid the toll, young master!"

The manner of the man was full of insolence, and the blood, in a moment, rushed to the cheeks of the youth. He divined, by instinct, that there was some trouble in preparation for him, and his teeth were silently clenched together, and his soul nerved itself for anticipated conflict. He gazed calmly, however, though sternly, at the stranger, who appeared nothing daunted by the expression in the eyes of the traveller. His air was that of quiet indifference, bordering on contempt, as if he knew his duties, or his man, and was resolved upon the course he was appointed to pursue. When men meet thus, if they are persons of even ordinary intelligence, the instincts are quick to conceive and act, and the youth was now more assured than ever, that the contest awaited him which should try his strength. This called up all his resources, and we may infer that he possessed them in large degree, from his quiet forbearance and deliberation, even when he became fully sensible of the insolence of the person with whom he felt about to grapple.

As yet, however, judging from other appearances, there was no violence meditated by the stranger. He was simply insolent, and he was in the way. He carried no weapons—none which met the sight, at least, and there was nothing in his personal appearance calculated to occasion apprehension. His frame was small, his limbs slight, and they did not afford promise of much activity. His face was not ill favored, though a quick, restless black eye, keen and searching, had in it a lurking malignity, like that of a snake, which impressed the spectator with suspicion at the first casual glance. His nose, long and sharp, was almost totally fleshless; the skin being drawn so tightly over the bones, as to provoke the fear that any violent effort would cause them to force their way through the frail integument. An untrimmed beard, run wild; and a pair of whiskers so huge, as to refuse all accordance with the thin diminutive cheeks which wore them; thin lips, and a sharp chin;—completed the outline of a very unprepossessing face, which a broad high forehead did not tend very much to improve or dignify.

Though the air of the stranger was insolent, and his manner rude, our young traveller was unwilling to decide unfavorably. At all events, his policy and mood equally inclined him to avoid any proceeding which should precipitate or compel violence.

"There are many good people in the world"—so he thought—"who are better than they promise; many good Christians, whose aspects would enable them to pass, in any crowd, as very tolerable and becoming ruffians. This fellow may be one of the unfortunate order of virtuous people, cursed with an unbecoming visage. We will see before we shoot."

Thus thought our traveller, quickly, as became his situation. He determined accordingly, while foregoing none of his precautions, to see farther into the designs of the stranger, before he resorted to any desperate issues. He replied, accordingly, to the requisition of the speaker; the manner, rather than the matter of which, had proved offensive.

"Toll! You ask toll of me! By what right, sir, and for whom do you require it?"

"Look you, young fellow, I am better able to ask questions myself, than to answer those of other people. In respect to this matter of answering, my education has been wofully neglected."

The reply betrayed some intelligence as well as insolence. Our traveller could not withhold the retort.

"Ay, indeed! and in some other respects too, not less important, if I am to judge from your look and bearing. But you mistake your man, let me tell you. I am not the person whom you can play your pranks upon with safety, and unless you will be pleased to speak a little more respectfully, our parley will have a shorter life, and a rougher ending, than you fancy."

"It would scarcely be polite to contradict so promising a young gentleman as yourself," was the response; "but I am disposed to believe our intimacy likely to lengthen, rather than diminish. I hate to part over-soon with company that talks so well; particularly in these woods, where, unless such a chance come about as the present, the lungs of the heartiest youth in the land would not be often apt to find the echo they seek, though they cried for it at the uttermost pitch of the pipe."

The look and the language of the speaker were alike significant, and the sinister meaning of the last sentence did not escape the notice of him to whom was addressed. His reply was calm, however, and his mind grew more at ease, more collected, with his growing consciousness of annoyance and danger. He answered the stranger in a vein not unlike his own.

"You are pleased to be eloquent, worthy sir—and, on any other occasion, I might not be unwilling to bestow my ear upon you; but as I have yet to find my way out of this labyrinth, for the use of which your facetiousness would have me pay a tax, I must forego that satisfaction, and leave the enjoyment for some better day."

"You are well bred, I see, young sir," was the reply, "and this forms an additional reason why I should not desire so soon to break our acquaintance. If you have mistaken your road, what do you on this?—why are you in this part of the country, which is many miles removed from any public thoroughfare?"

"By what right do you ask the question?" was the hurried and unhesitating response. "You are impertinent!"

"Softly, softly, young sir. Be not rash, and let me recommend that you be more choice in the adoption of your epithets. Impertinent is an ugly word between gentlemen of our habit. Touching my right to ask this or that question of young men who lose the way, that's neither here nor there, and is important in no way. But, I take it, I should have some right in this matter, seeing, young sir, that you are upon the turnpike and I am the gate-keeper who must take the toll."

A sarcastic smile passed over the lips of the man as he uttered the sentence, which was as suddenly succeeded, however, by an expression of gravity, partaking of an air of the profoundest business. The traveller surveyed him for a moment before he replied, as if to ascertain in what point of view properly to understand his conduct.

"Turnpike! this is something new. I never heard of a turnpike and a gate for toll, in a part of the world in which men, or honest ones at least, are not yet commonly to be found. You think rather too lightly, my good sir, of my claim to that most vulgar commodity called common sense, if you suppose me likely to swallow this silly story."

"Oh, doubtless—you are a very sagacious young man, I make no question," said the other, with a sneer—"but you'll have to pay the turnpike for all that."

"You speak confidently on this point; but, if I am to pay this turnpike, at least, I may be permitted to know who is its proprietor."

"To be sure you may. I am always well pleased to satisfy the doubts and curiosity of young travellers who go abroad for information. I take you to be one of this class."

"Confine yourself, if you please, to the matter in hand—I grow weary of this chat," said the youth with a haughty inclination, that seemed to have its effect even upon him with whom he spoke.

"Your question is quickly answered. You have heard of the Pony Club—have you not?"

"I must confess my utter ignorance of such an institution. I have never heard even the name before."

"You have not—then really it is high time to begin the work of enlightenment. You must know, then, that the Pony Club is the proprietor of everything and everybody, throughout the nation, and in and about this section. It is the king, without let or limitation of powers, for sixty miles around. Scarce a man in Georgia but pays in some sort to its support—and judge and jury alike contribute to its treasuries. Few dispute its authority, as you will have reason to discover, without suffering condign and certain punishment; and, unlike the tributaries and agents of other powers, its servitors, like myself, invested with jurisdiction over certain parts and interests, sleep not in the performance of our duties; but, day and night, obey its dictates, and perform the various, always laborious, and sometimes dangerous functions which it imposes upon us. It finds us in men, in money, in horses. It assesses the Cherokees, and they yield a tithe, and sometimes a greater proportion of their ponies, in obedience to its requisitions. Hence, indeed, the name of the club. It relieves young travellers, like yourself, of their small change—their sixpences; and when they happen to have a good patent lever, such a one as a smart young gentleman like yourself is very apt to carry about him, it is not scrupulous, but helps them of that too, merely by way of pas-time."

And the ruffian chuckled in a half-covert manner at his own pun.

"Truly, a well-conceived sort of sovereignty, and doubtless sufficiently well served, if I may infer from the representative before me. You must do a large business in this way, most worthy sir."

"Why, that we do, and your remark reminds me that I have quite as little time to lose as yourself. You now understand, young sir, the toll you have to pay, and the proprietor who claims it."

"Perfectly—perfectly. You will not suppose me dull again, most candid keeper of the Pony Turnpike. But have you made up your mind, in earnest, to relieve me of such trifling encumbrances as those you have just mentioned?"

"I should be strangely neglectful of the duties of my station, not to speak of the discourtesy of such a neglect to yourself, were I to do otherwise; always supposing you burdened with such encumbrances. I put it to yourself, whether such would not be the effect of my omission."

"It most certainly would, most frank and candid of all the outlaws. Your punctiliousness on this point of honor entitles you, in my mind, to an elevation above and beyond all others of your profession. I admire the grace of your manner, in the commission of acts which the more tame and temperate of our kind are apt to look upon as irregular and unlovely. You, I see, have the true notion of the thing."

The ruffian looked with some doubt upon the youth—inquiringly, as if to account in some way for the singular coolness, not to say contemptuous scornfulness, of his replies and manner. There was something, too, of a searching malignity in his glance, that seemed to recognise in his survey features which brought into activity a personal emotion in his own bosom, not at variance, indeed, with the craft he was pursuing, but fully above and utterly beyond it. Dismissing, however, the expression, he continued in the manner and tone so tacitly adopted between the parties.

"I am heartily glad, most travelled young gentleman, that your opinion so completely coincides with my own, since it assures me I shall not be compelled, as is sometimes the case in the performance of my duties, to offer any rudeness to one seemingly so well taught as yourself. Knowing the relationship between us so fully, you can have no reasonable objection to conform quietly to all my requisitions, and yield the toll-keeper his dues."

Our traveller had been long aware, in some degree, of the kind of relationship between himself and his companion; but, relying on his defences, and perhaps somewhat too much on his own personal capacities of defence, and, possibly, something curious to see how far the love of speech in his assailant might carry him in a dialogue of so artificial a character, he forbore as yet a resort to violence. He found it excessively difficult, however, to account for the strange nature of the transaction so far as it had gone; and the language of the robber seemed so inconsistent with his pursuit, that, at intervals, he was almost led to doubt whether the whole was not the clever jest of some country sportsman, who, in the guise of a levyer of contributions upon the traveller, would make an acquaintance, such as is frequent in the South, terminating usually in a ride to a neighboring plantation, and pleasant accommodations so long as the stranger might think proper to avail himself of them.

If, on the other hand, the stranger was in reality the ruffian he represented himself, he knew not how to account for his delay in the assault—a delay, to the youth's mind, without an object—unless attributable to a temper of mind like that of Robin Hood, and coupled in the person before him, as in that of the renowned king of the outlaws, with a peculiar freedom and generosity of habit, and a gallantry and adroitness which, in a different field, had made him a knight worthy to follow and fight for Baldwin and the Holy Cross. Our young traveller was a romanticist, and all of these notions came severally into his thoughts. Whatever might have been the motives of conduct in the robber, who thus audaciously announced himself the member of a club notorious on the frontiers of Georgia and among the Cherokees for its daring outlawries, the youth determined to keep up the game so long as it continued such. After a brief pause, he replied to the above politely-expressed demand in the following language:—

"Your request, most unequivocal sir, would seem but reasonable; and so considering it, I have bestowed due reflection upon it. Unhappily, however, for the Pony Club and its worthy representative, I am quite too poorly provided with worldly wealth at this moment to part with much of it. A few shillings to procure you a cravat—such as you may get of Kentucky manufacture—I should not object to. Beyond this, however (and the difficulty grieves me sorely), I am so perfectly incapacitated from doing anything, that I am almost persuaded, in order to the bettering of my own condition, to pay the customary fees, and applying to your honorable body for the privilege of membership, procure those means of lavish generosity which my necessity, and not my will, prevents me from bestowing upon you."

"A very pretty idea," returned he of the road; "and under such circumstances, your jest about the cravat from Kentucky is by no means wanting in proper application. But the fact is, our numbers are just now complete—our ranks are full—and the candidates for the honor are so numerous as to leave little chance for an applicant. You might be compelled to wait a long season, unless the Georgia penitentiary and Georgia guard shall create a vacancy in your behalf."

"Truly, the matter is of very serious regret," with an air of much solemnity, replied the youth, who seemed admirably to have caught up the spirit of the dialogue—"and it grieves me the more to know, that, under this view of the case, I can no more satisfy you than I can serve myself. It is quite unlucky that your influence is insufficient to procure me admission into your fraternity; since it is impossible that I should pay the turnpike, when the club itself, by refusing me membership, will not permit me to acquire the means of doing so. So, as the woods grow momently more dull and dark, and as I may have to ride far for a supper, I am constrained, however unwilling to leave good company, to wish you a fair evening, and a long swing of fortune, most worthy knight of the highway, and trusty representative of the Pony Club."

With these words, the youth, gathering up the bridle of the horse, and slightly touching him with the rowel, would have proceeded on his course; but the position of the outlaw now underwent a corresponding change, and, grasping the rein of the animal, he arrested his farther progress.

"I am less willing to separate than yourself from good company, gentle youth, as you may perceive; since I so carefully restrain you from a ride over a road so perilous as this. You have spoken like a fair and able scholar this afternoon; and talents, such as you possess, come too seldom into our forests to suffer them, after so brief a sample, to leave us so abruptly. You must come to terms with the turnpike."

"Take your hands from my horse, sirrah!" was the only response made by the youth; his tone and manner corresponding with the change in the situation of the parties. "I would not do you harm willingly; I want no man's blood on my head; but my pistols, let me assure you, are much more readily come at than my purse. Tempt me not to use them—stand from the way."

"It may not be," replied the robber, with a composure and coolness that underwent no change; "your threats affect me not. I have not taken my place here without a perfect knowledge of all its dangers and consequences. You had better come peaceably to terms; for, were it even the case that you could escape me, you have only to cast your eye up the path before you, to be assured of the utter impossibility of escaping those who aid me. The same glance will also show you the tollgate, which you could not see before. Look ahead, young sir, and be wise in time; and let me perform my duties without hindrance."

Casting a furtive glance on the point indicated by the ruffian, the youth saw, for the first time, a succession of bars—a rail fence, in fact, of more than usual height—completely crossing the narrow pathway and precluding all passage. Approaching the place of strife, the same glance assured him, were two men, well armed, evidently the accomplices of the robber who had pointed to them as such. The prospect grew more and more perilous, and the youth, whose mind was one of that sort which avails itself of its energies seemingly only in emergencies, beheld his true course, with a moment's reflection, and hesitated not a single moment in its adoption. He saw that something more was necessary than to rid himself merely of the ruffian immediately before him, and that an unsuccessful blow or shot would leave him entirely at the mercy of the gang. To escape, a free rein must be given to the steed, on which he felt confident he could rely; and, though prompted by the most natural impulse to send a bullet through the head of his assailant, he wisely determined on a course which, as it would be unlooked for, had therefore a better prospect of success.

Without further pause, drawing suddenly from his bosom the bowie-knife commonly worn in those regions, and bending forward, he aimed a blow at the ruffian, which, as he had anticipated, was expertly eluded—the assailant, sinking under the neck of the steed, and relying on the strength of the rein, which he still continued to hold, to keep him from falling, while at the same time he kept the check upon the horse.

This movement was that which the youth had looked for and desired. The blow was but a feint, for, suddenly turning the direction of the knife when his enemy was out of its reach, he cut the bridle upon which the latter hung, and the head of the horse, freed from the restraint, was as at once elevated in air. The suddenness of his motion whirled the ruffian to the ground; while the rider, wreathing his hands in the mane of the noble animal, gave him a free spur, and plunged at once over the struggling wretch, in whose cheek the glance of his hoof left a deep gash.

The steed bounded forward; nor did the youth seek to restrain him, though advancing full up the hill and in the teeth of his enemies. Satisfied that he was approaching their station, the accomplices of the foiled ruffian, who had seen the whole affray, sunk into the covert; but, what was their mortification to perceive the traveller, though without any true command over his steed, by an adroit use of the broker bridle, so wheel him round as to bring him, in a few leaps, over the very ground of the strife, and before the staggering robber had yet fully arisen from the path. By this manoeuvre he placed himself in advance of the now approaching banditti. Driving his spurs resolutely and unsparingly into the flanks of his horse, while encouraging him with well known words of cheer, he rushed over the scene of his late struggle with a velocity that set all restraint at defiance—his late opponent scarcely being able to put himself in safety. A couple of shots, that whistled wide of the mark, announced his extrication from the difficulty—but, to his surprise, his enemies had been at work behind him, and the edge of the copse through which he was about to pass, was blockaded with bars in like manner with the path in front. He heard the shouts of the ruffians in the rear—he felt the danger, if not impracticability of his pausing for the removal of the rails, and, in the spirit which had heretofore marked his conduct, he determined upon the most daring endeavor. Throwing off all restraint from his steed, and fixing himself firmly in the stirrup and saddle, he plunged onward to the leap, and, to the chagrin of the pursuers, who had relied much upon the obstruction, and who now appeared in pursuit, the noble animal, without a moment's reluctance, cleared it handsomely.

Another volley of shot rang in the ears of the youth, as he passed the impediment, and he felt himself wounded in the side. The wound gave him little concern at the moment, for, under the excitement of the strife, he felt not even its smart; and, turning himself upon the saddle, he drew one of his own weapons from its case, and discharging it, by way of taunt, in the faces of the outlaws, laughed loud with the exulting spirit of youth at the successful result of an adventure due entirely to his own perfect coolness, and to the warm courage which had been his predominating feature from childhood.

The incident just narrated had dispersed a crowd of gloomy reflections, so that the darkness which now overspread the scene, coupled as it was with the cheerlessness of prospect before him, had but little influence upon his spirits. Still, ignorant of his course, and beginning to be enfeebled by the loss of blood, he moderated his speed, and left it to the animal to choose his own course. But he was neither so cool nor so sanguine, to relax so greatly in his speed as to permit of his being overtaken by the desperates whom he had so cleverly foiled. He knew the danger, the utter hopelessness, indeed, of a second encounter with the same persons. He felt sure that he would be suffered no such long parley as before. Without restraining his horse, our young traveller simply regulated his speed by a due estimate of the capacity of the outlaws for pursuit a-foot; and, without knowing whither he sped, having left the route wholly to the horse, he was suddenly relieved by finding himself upon a tolerably broad road, which, in the imperfect twilight, he concluded to be the same from which, in his mistimed musings he had suffered his horse to turn aside. He had no means to ascertain the fact, conclusively, and, in sooth, no time; for now he began to feel a strange sensation of weakness; his eyes swam, and grew darkened; a numbness paralyzed his whole frame; a sickness seized upon his heart; and, after sundry feeble efforts, under a strong will, to command and compel his powers, they finally gave way, and he sunk from his steed upon the long grass, and lay unconscious;—his last thought, ere his senses left him, being that of death! Here let us leave him for a little space, while we hurriedly seek better knowledge of him in other quarters.

[CHAPTER III.]

YOUNG LOVE—THE RETROSPECT.

It will not hurt our young traveller, to leave him on the greensward, in the genial spring-time; and, as the night gathers over him, and a helpful insensibility interposes for the relief of pain, we may avail ourselves of the respite to look into the family chronicles, and show the why and wherefore of this errant journey, the antecedents and the relations of our hero.

Ralph Colleton, the young traveller whose person we have described, and whose most startling adventure in life, we have just witnessed, was the only son of a Carolinian, who could boast the best blood of English nobility in his veins. The sire, however, had outlived his fortunes, and, late in life, had been compelled to abandon the place of his nativity—an adventurer, struggling against a proud stomach, and a thousand embarrassments—and to bury himself in the less known, but more secure and economical regions of Tennessee. Born to affluence, with wealth that seemed adequate to all reasonable desires—a noble plantation, numerous slaves, and the host of friends who necessarily come with such a condition, his individual improvidence, thoughtless extravagance, and lavish mode of life—a habit not uncommon in the South—had rendered it necessary, at the age of fifty, when the mind, not less than the body, requires repose rather than adventure, that he should emigrate from the place of his birth; and with resources diminished to a cipher, endeavor to break ground once more in unknown forests, and commence the toils and troubles of life anew. With an only son (the youth before us) then a mere boy, and no other family, Colonel Ralph Colleton did not hesitate at such an exile. He had found out the worthlessness of men's professions at a period not very remote from the general knowledge of his loss of fortune: and having no other connection claiming from him either countenance or support, and but a single relative from whom separation might be painful, he felt, comparatively speaking, but few of the privations usually following such a removal. An elder brother, like himself a widower, with a single child, a daughter, formed the whole of his kindred left behind him in Carolina; and, as between the two brothers there had existed, at all times, some leading dissimilar points of disposition and character, an occasional correspondence, due rather to form than to affection, served all necessary purposes in keeping up the sentiment of kindred in their bosoms. There were but few real affinities which could bring them together. They never could altogether understand, and certainly had but a limited desire to appreciate or to approve many of the several and distinct habits of one another; and thus they separated with but few sentiments of genuine concern. William Colleton, the elder brother, was the proprietor of several thousand highly valuable and pleasantly-situated acres, upon the waters of the Santee—a river which irrigates a region in the state of South Carolina, famous for its wealth, lofty pride, polished manners, and noble and considerate hospitality. Affluent equally with his younger brother by descent, marriage had still further contributed toward the growth of possessions, which a prudent management had always kept entire and always improving. Such was the condition of William Colleton, the uncle of the young Ralph, then a mere child, when he was taken by his father into Tennessee.

There, the fortune of the adventurer still maintained its ancient aspect. He had bought lands, and engaged in trade, and made sundry efforts in various and honorable ways, but without success. Vocation after vocation had with him a common and certain termination, and after many years of profitless experiment, the ways of prosperity were as far remote from his knowledge and as perplexing to his pursuit, as at the first hour of his enterprise. In worldly concerns he stood just where he had started fifteen years before; with this difference for the worse, however, that he had grown older in this space of time, less equal to the tasks of adventure; and with the moral energies checked as they had been by continual disappointments, recoiling in despondency and gloom, with trying emphasis, upon a spirit otherwise noble and sufficiently daring for every legitimate and not unwonted species of trial and occasion. Still, he had learned little, beyond hauteur and querulousness, from the lessons of experience. Economy was not more the inmate of his dwelling than when he was blessed with the large income of his birthright; but, extravagantly generous as ever, his house was the abiding-place of a most lavish and unwise hospitality.

His brother, William Colleton, on the other hand, with means hourly increasing, exhibited a disposition narrowing at times into a selfishness the most pitiful. He did not, it is true, forego or forget any of those habits of freedom and intercourse in his household and with those about him, which form so large a practice among the people of the south. He could give a dinner, and furnish an ostentatious entertainment—lodge his guest in the style of a prince for weeks together, nor exhibit a feature likely to induce a thought of intrusion in the mind of his inmate. In public, the populace had no complaints to urge of his penuriousness; and in all outward shows he manifested the same general characteristics which marked the habit of the class to which he belonged.

But his selfishness lay in things not so much on the surface. It was more deep and abiding in its character; and consisted in the false estimate which he made of the things around him. He had learned to value wealth as a substitute for mind—for morals—for all that is lofty, and all that should be leading, in the consideration of society. He valued few things beside. He had different emotions for the rich from those which he entertained for the poor; and, from perceiving that among men, money could usurp all places—could defeat virtue, command respect denied to morality and truth, and secure a real worship when the Deity must be content with shows and symbols—he gradually gave it the chief place in his regard. He valued wealth as the instrument of authority. It secured him power; a power, however, which he had no care to employ, and which he valued only as tributary to the maintenance of that haughty ascendency over men which was his heart's first passion. He was neither miser nor mercenary; he did not labor to accumulate—perhaps because he was a lucky accumulator without any painstaking of his own: but he was, by nature an aristocrat, and not unwilling to compel respect through the means of money, as through any other more noble agency of intellect or morals.

There was only one respect in which a likeness between the fortunes of the two brothers might be found to exist. After a grateful union of a few years, they had both lost their wives. A single child, in the case of each, had preserved and hallowed to them the memories of their mothers. To the younger brother Ralph, a son had been born, soothing the sorrows of the exile, and somewhat compensating his loss. To William Colleton, the elder brother, his wife had left a single and very lovely daughter, the sweet and beautiful Edith, a girl but a few months younger than her cousin Ralph. It was the redeeming feature, in the case of the surviving parents, that they each gave to their motherless children, the whole of that affection—warm in both cases—which had been enjoyed by the departed mothers.

Separated from each other, for years, by several hundred miles of uncultivated and untravelled forest, the brothers did not often meet; and the bonds of brotherhood waxed feebler and feebler, with the swift progress of successive years. Still, they corresponded, and in a tone and temper that seemed to answer for the existence of feelings, which neither, perhaps, would have been so forward as to assert warmly, if challenged to immediate answer. Suddenly, however, when young Ralph was somewhere about fifteen, his uncle expressed a wish to see him; and, whether through a latent and real affection, or a feeling of self-rebuke for previous neglect, he exacted from his brother a reluctant consent that the youth should dwell in his family, while receiving his education in a region then better prepared to bestow it with profit to the student. The two young cousins met in Georgia for the first time, and, after a brief summer journey together, in which they frequented the most favorite watering places, Ralph was separated from Edith, whom he had just begun to love with interest, and despatched to college.

The separation of the son from the father, however beneficial it might be to the former in certain respects of education, proved fatal to the latter. He had loved the boy even more than he knew; had learned to live mostly in the contemplation of the youth's growth and development; and his absence preyed upon his heart, adding to his sense of defeat in fortune, and the loneliness and waste of his life. The solitude in which he dwelt, after the boy's departure, he no longer desired to disturb; and he pined as hopelessly in his absence, as if he no longer had a motive or a hope to prompt exertion. He had anticipated this, in some degree, when he yielded to his brother's arguments and entreaties; but, conscious of the uses and advantages of education to his son, he felt the selfishness to be a wrong to the boy, which would deny him the benefits of that larger civilization, which the uncle promised, on any pretexts. A calm review of his own arguments against the transfer, showed them to be suggested by his own wants. With a manly resolution, therefore, rather to sacrifice his own heart, than deny to his child the advantages which were held out by his brother, he consented to his departure. The reproach of selfishness, which William Colleton had not spared, brought about his resolve; and with a labored cheerfulness he made his preparations, and accompanied the youth to Georgia, where his uncle had agreed to meet him. They parted, with affectionate tears and embraces, never to meet again. A few months only had elapsed when the father sickened. But he never communicated to his son, or brother, the secret of his sufferings and grief. Worse, he never sought relief in change or medicine; but, brooding in the solitude, gnawing his own heart in silence, he gradually pined away, and, in a brief year, he was gathered to his fathers. He died, like many similarly-tempered natures, of no known disorder!

The boy received the tidings with a burst of grief, which seemed to threaten his existence. But the sorrows of youth are usually short-lived, particularly in the case of eager, energetic natures. The exchange of solitude for the crowd; the emulation of college life; the sports and communion of youthful associates—served, after a while, to soothe the sorrows of Ralph Colleton. Indeed, he found it necessary that he should bend himself earnestly to his studies, that he might forget his griefs. And, in a measure he succeeded; at least, he subdued their more fond expression, and only grew sedate, instead of passionate. The bruises of his heart had brought the energies of his mind to their more active uses.

From fifteen to twenty is no very long leap in the history of youth. We will make it now, and place the young Ralph—now something older in mind as in body—returned from college, finely formed, intellectual, handsome, vivacious, manly, spirited, and susceptible—as such a person should be—once again in close intimacy with his beautiful cousin. The season which had done so much for him, had been no less liberal with her; and we now survey her, the expanding flower, all bloom and fragrance, a tribute of the spring, flourishing in the bosom of the more forward summer.

Ralph came from college to his uncle's domicil, now his only home. The circumstances of his father's fate and fortune, continually acting upon his mind and sensibilities from boyhood, had made his character a marked and singular one—proud, jealous, and sensitive, to an extreme which was painful not merely to himself, but at times to others. But he was noble, lofty, sincere, without a touch of meanness in his composition, above circumlocution, with a simplicity of character strikingly great, but without anything like puerility or weakness.

The children—for such, in reference to their experience, we may venture to call them—had learned to recognise in the progress of a very brief period but a single existence. Ralph looked only for Edith, and cared nothing for other sunlight; while Edith, with scarcely less reserve than her bolder companion, had speech and thought for few besides Ralph. Circumstances contributed not a little to what would appear the natural growth of this mutual dependence. They were perpetually left together, and with few of those tacit and readily understood restraints, unavoidably accompanying the presence of others older than themselves. Residing, save at few brief intervals, at the plantation of Colonel Colleton, they saw little and knew less of society; and the worthy colonel, not less ambitious than proud, having become a politician, had left them a thousand opportunities of intimacy which had now become so grateful to them both. Half of his time was taken up in public matters. A leader of his party in the section of country in which he lived, he was always busy in the responsibilities imposed upon him by such a station; and, what with canvassing at election-polls and muster-grounds, and dancing attendance as a silent voter at the halls of the state legislature, to the membership of which his constituents had returned him, he saw but little of his family, and they almost as little of him. His influence grew unimportant with his wards, in proportion as it obtained vigor with his faction—was seldom referred to by them, and, perhaps, if it had been, such was the rapid growth of their affections, would have been but little regarded. He appeared to take it for granted, that, having provided them with all the necessaries called for by life, he had done quite enough for their benefit; and actually gave far less of his consideration to his own and only child than he did to his plantation, and the success of a party measure, involving possibly the office of doorkeeper to the house, or of tax-collector to the district. The taste for domestic life, which at one period might have been held with him exclusive, had been entirely swallowed up and forgotten in his public relations; and entirely overlooking the fact, that, in the silent goings-on of time, the infantile will cease to be so, he never seemed to observe that the children whom he had brought together but a few years before might not with reason be considered children any longer.

Children, indeed! What years had they not lived—what volumes of experience in human affections and feelings had the influence and genial warmth of a Carolina sun not unfolded to their spirits—in the few sweet and uninterrupted seasons of their intercourse. How imperious were the dictates of that nature, to whose immethodical but honest teachings they had been almost entirely given up. They lived together, walked together, rode together—read in the same books, conned the same lessons, studied the same prospects, saw life through the common medium of mutual associations; and lived happy only in the sweet unison of emotions gathered at a common fountain, and equally dear, and equally necessary to them both. And this is love—they loved!

They loved, but the discovery was yet to be made by them. Living in its purest luxuries—in the perpetual communion of the only one necessary object—having no desire and as little prospect of change—ignorant of and altogether untutored bythe vicissitudes of life—enjoying the sweet association which had been the parent of that passion, dependent now entirely upon its continuance—they had been content, and had never given themselves any concern to analyze its origin, or to find for it a name. A momentary doubt—the presages of a dim perspective—would have taught them better. Had there been a single moment of discontent in their lives at this period, they had not remained so long in such ignorance. The fear of its loss can alone teach us the true value of our treasure. But the discovery was at hand.

A pleasant spring afternoon in April found the two young people, Ralph and Edith—the former now twenty years of age, and the latter in the same neighborhood, half busied, half idle, in the long and spacious piazza of the family mansion. They could not be said to have been employed, for Edith rarely made much progress with the embroidering needle and delicate fabric in her hands, while Ralph, something more absorbed in a romance of the day, evidently exercised little concentration of mind in scanning its contents. He skimmed, at first, rather than studied, the pages before him; conversing occasionally with the young maiden, who, sitting beside him, occasionally glanced at the volume in his hand, with something of an air of discontent that it should take even so much of his regard from herself. As he proceeded, however, in its perusal, the story grew upon him, and he became unconscious of her occasional efforts to control his attention. The needle of Edith seemed also disposed to avail itself of the aberrations of its mistress, and to rise in rebellion; and, having pricked her finger more than once in the effort to proceed with her work while her eyes wandered to her companion, she at length threw down the gauzy fabric upon which she had been so partially employed, and hastily rising from her seat, passed into the adjoining apartment.

Her departure was not attended to by her companion, who for a time continued his perusal of the book. No great while, however, elapsed, when, rising also from his seat with a hasty exclamation of surprise, he threw down the volume and followed her into the room where she sat pensively meditating over thoughts and feelings as vague and inscrutable to her mind, as they were clear and familiar to her heart. With a degree of warm impetuosity, even exaggerated beyond his usual manner, which bore at all times this characteristic, he approached her, and, seizing her hand passionately in his, exclaimed hastily—

"Edith, my sweet Edith, how unhappy that book has made me!"

"How so, Ralph—why should it make you unhappy?"

"It has taught me much, Edith—very much, in the last half hour. It has spoken of privation and disappointment as the true elements of life, and has shown me so many pictures of society in such various situations, and with so much that I feel assured must be correct, that I am unable to resist its impressions. We have been happy—so happy, Edith, and for so many years, that I can not bear to think that either of us should be less so; and yet that volume has taught me, in the story of parallel fortunes with ours, that it may be so. It has given me a long lesson in the hollow economy of that world which men seek, and name society. It has told me that we, or I, at least, may be made and kept miserable for ever."

"How, Ralph, tell me, I pray you—how should that book have taught you this strange notion? Why? What book is it? That stupid story!" was the gasping exclamation of the astonished girl—astonished no less by the impetuous manner than the strong language of the youth; and, with the tenderest concern she laid her hand upon his arm, while her eyes, full of the liveliest interest, yet moistened with a tearful apprehension, were fixed earnestly upon his own.

"It is a stupid book, a very stupid book—a story of false sentiment, and of mock and artificial feelings, of which I know, and care to know, nothing. But it has told me so much that I feel is true, and that chimes in with my own experience. It has told me much besides, that I am glad to have been taught. Hear me then, dear Edith, and smile not carelessly at my words, for I have now learned to tremble when I speak, in fear lest I should offend you."

She would have spoken words of assurance—she would have taught him to think better of her affections and their strength; but his impetuosity checked her in her speech.

"I know what you would say, and my heart thanks you for it, as if its very life depended upon the utterance. You would tell me to have no such fear; but the fear is a portion of myself now—it is my heart itself. Hear me then, Edith—my Edith, if you will so let me call you."

Her hand rested on his assuringly, with a gentle pressure. He continued—

"Hitherto we have lived with each other, only with each other—we have loved each other, and I have almost only loved you. Neither of us, Edith (may I believe it of you?) has known much of any other affection. But how long is this to last? that book—where is it? but no matter—it has taught me that, now, when a few months will carry us both into the world, it is improper that our relationship should continue. It says we can not be the children any longer that we have been—that such intercourse—I can now perceive why—would be injurious to you. Do you understand me?"

The blush of a first consciousness came over the cheek of the maiden, as she withdrew her hand from his passionate clasp.

"Ah! I see already," he exclaimed: "you too have learned the lesson. And is it thus—and we are to be happy no longer!"

"Ralph!"—she endeavored to speak, but could proceed no further, and her hand was again, silently and without objection, taken into the grasp of his. The youth, after a brief pause, resumed, in a tone, which though it had lost much of its impetuousness, was yet full of stern resolution.

"Hear me, Edith—but a word—a single word. I love you, believe me, dear Edith, I love you."

The effect of this declaration was scarcely such as the youth desired. She had been so much accustomed to his warm admiration, indicated frequently in phrases such as these, that it had the effect of restoring to her much of her self-possession, of which the nature of the previous dialogue had a little deprived her; and, in the most natural manner in the world, she replied—perhaps too, we may add, with much of the artlessness of art—

"Why, to be sure you do, Cousin Ralph—it would be something strange indeed if you did not. I believe you love me, as I am sure you can never doubt how much you are beloved by me!"

"Cousin Ralph—Cousin Ralph!" exclaimed the youth with something of his former impetuosity, emphasizing ironically as he spoke the unfortunate family epithet—"Ah, Edith, you will not understand me—nor indeed, an hour ago, should I altogether have understood myself. Suddenly, dear Edith, however, as I read certain passages of that book, the thought darted through my brain like lightning, and I saw into my own heart, as I had never been permitted to see into it before. I there saw how much I loved you—not as my cousin—not as my sister, as you sometimes would have me call you, but as I will not call you again—but as—as—"

"As what?"

"As my wife, Edith—as my own, own wife!"

He clasped her hand in his, while his head sunk, and his lips were pressed upon the taper and trembling fingers which grew cold and powerless within his grasp.

What a volume was at that moment opened, for the first time, before the gaze and understanding of the half-affrighted and deep-throbbing heart of that gentle girl. The veil which had concealed its burning mysteries was torn away in an instant. The key to its secret places was in her hands, and she was bewildered with her own discoveries. Her cheeks alternated between the pale and crimson of doubt and hope. Her lips quivered convulsively, and an unbidden but not painful suffusion overspread the warm brilliance of her soft fair cheeks. She strove, ineffectually, to speak; her words came forth in broken murmurs; her voice had sunk into a sigh; she was dumb. The youth once more took her hand into his, as, speaking with a suppressed tone, and with a measured slowness which had something in it of extreme melancholy, he broke silence:—

"And have I no answer, Edith—and must I believe that for either of us there should be other loves than those of childhood—that new affections may usurp the place of old ones—that there may come a time, dear Edith, when I shall see an arm, not my own, about your waist; and the eyes that would look on no prospect if you were not a part of it, may be doomed to that fearfullest blight of beholding your lips smiling and pressed beneath the lips of another?"

"Never, oh never, Ralph! Speak no more, I beseech you, in such language. You do me wrong in this—I have no such wish, no such thought or purpose. I do not—I could not—think of another, Ralph. I will be yours, and yours only—if you really wish it."

"If I wish! Ah! dear Edith, you are mine, and I am yours! The world shall not pass between us."

She murmured—

"Yours, Ralph, yours only!"

He caught her in his passionate embrace, even as the words were murmured from her lips. Her head settled upon his shoulder; her light brown hair, loosened from the comb, fell over it in silky masses. Her eyes closed, his arms still encircled her, and the whole world was forgotten in a moment;—when the door opened, and a third party entered the room in the person of Colonel Colleton.

Here was a catastrophe!

[CHAPTER IV.]

A RUPTURE—THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE.

Colonel Colleton stood confounded at the spectacle before him. Filled with public affairs, or rather, with his own affairs in the public eye, he had grown totally heedless of ordinary events, household interests, and of the rapid growth and development of those passions in youth which ripen quite as fervently and soon in the shade as in the sun. These children—how should they have grown to such a stature! His daughter, at this moment, seemed taller than he had ever seen her before! and Ralph!—as the uncle's eyes were riveted upon the youth, he certainly grew more than ever erect and imposing of look and stature. The first glance which he gave to the scene, did not please the young man. There was something about the expression of the uncle's face, which seemed to the nephew to be as supercilious, as it certainly was angry. Proud, jealous of his sensibilities, the soul of the youth rose in arms, at the look which annoyed him. That Edith's father should ever disapprove of his passion for his cousin, never once entered the young man's brain. He had not, indeed, once thought upon the matter. He held it to be a thing of course that the father would welcome a union which promised to strengthen the family bond, and maintain the family name and blood in perpetuity. When, therefore, he beheld, in his uncle's face, such an expression of scorn mixed with indignation, he resented it with the fervor of his whole soul. He was bewildered, it is true, but he was also chafed, and it needed that he should turn his eyes to the sweet cause of his offence, before he could find himself relieved of the painful feelings which her father's look and manner had occasioned him.

Poor Edith had a keener sense of the nature of the case. Her instincts more readily supplied the means of knowledge. Besides, there were certain family matters, which the look of her father suddenly recalled—which had never been suffered to reach the ears of her cousin;—which indicated to her, however imperfectly, the possible cause of that severe and scornful expression of eye, in the uncle, which had so confounded the nephew. She looked, with timid pleading to her father's face, but dared not speak.

And still the latter stood at the entrance, silent, sternly scanning the young offenders, just beginning to be conscious of offence. A surprise of any kind is exceedingly paralyzing to young lovers, caught in a situation like that in which our luckless couple were found on this occasion. It is probable, that, but for this, Ralph Colleton would scarcely have borne so meekly the severe look which the father now bestowed upon his daughter.

Though not the person to trouble himself much at any time in relation to his child, Colonel Colleton had never once treated her unkindly. Though sometimes neglectful, he had never shown himself stern. The look which he now gave her was new to all her experience. The poor girl began to conceive much more seriously of her offence than ever;—it seemed to spread out unimaginably far, and to involve a thousand violations of divine and human law. She could only look pleadingly, without speech, to her father. His finger silently pointed her to withdraw.

"Oh, father!"—the exclamation was barely murmured.

"Go!" was the sole answer, with the finger still uplift.

In silence, she glided away; not, however, without stealing a fond and assuring glance at her lover.

Her departure was the signal for that issue between the two remaining parties for which each was preparing in his own fashion. Ralph had not beheld the dumb show, in which Edith was dismissed, without a rising impulse of choler. The manner of the thing had been particularly offensive to him. But the father of Edith, whatever his offence, had suddenly risen into new consideration in the young man's mind, from the moment that he fully comprehended his feelings for the daughter. He was accordingly, somewhat disposed to temporize, though there was still a lurking desire in his mind, to demand an explanation of those supercilious glances which had so offended him.

But the meditations of neither party consumed one twentieth part of the time that we have taken in hinting what they were. With the departure of Edith, and the closing of the door after her, Colonel Colleton, with all his storms, approached to the attack. The expression of scorn upon his face had given way to one of anger wholly. His glance seemed meant to penetrate the bosom of the youth with a mortal stab—it was hate, rather than anger, that he looked. Yet it was evident that he made an effort to subdue his wrath—its full utterance at least—but he could not chase the terrible cloud from his haughty brow.

The youth, getting chafed beneath his gaze, returned him look for look, and his brows grew dark and lowering also; and, for anger, they gave back defiance. This silent, but expressive dialogue, was the work of a single moment of time. The uncle broke the silence.

"What am I to understand from this, young man?"

"Young man, sir!—I feel it very difficult to understand you, uncle! In respect to Edith and myself, sir, I have but to say that we have discovered that we are something more than cousins to each other!"

"Indeed! And how long is it, I pray, since you have made this discovery?"

This was said with a dry tone, and hard, contemptuous manner. The youth strove honestly to keep down his blood.

"Within the hour, sir! Not that we have not always felt that we loved each other, uncle; only, that, up to this time, we had never been conscious of the true nature of our feelings."

The youth replied with the most provoking simplicity. The uncle was annoyed. He would rather that Ralph should have relieved him, by a conjecture of his own, from the necessity of hinting to him that such extreme sympathies, between the parties, were by no means a matter of course. But the nephew would not, or could not, see; and his surprise, at the uncle's course, was perpetually looking for explanation. It became necessary to speak plainly.

"And with what reason, Ralph Colleton, do you suppose that I will sanction an alliance between you and my daughter? Upon what, I pray you, do you ground your pretensions to the hand of Edith Colleton?"

Such was the haughty interrogation. Ralph was confounded.

"My pretensions, sir?—The hand of Edith!—Do I hear you right, uncle? Do you really mean what you say?"

"My words are as I have said them. They are sufficiently explicit. You need not misunderstand them. What, I ask, are your pretensions to the hand of my daughter, and how is it that you have so far forgotten yourself as thus to abuse my confidence, stealing into the affections of my child?"

"Uncle, I have abused no confidence, and will not submit to any charge that would dishonor me. What I have done has been done openly, before all eyes, and without resort to cunning or contrivance. I must do myself the justice to believe that you knew all this without the necessity of my speech, and even while your lips spoke the contrary."

"You are bold, Ralph, and seem to have forgotten that you are yet but a mere boy. You forget your years and mine."

"No, sir—pardon me when I so speak—but it is you who have forgotten them. Was it well to speak as you have spoken?" proudly replied the youth.

"Ralph, you have forgotten much, or have yet to be taught many things. You may not have violated confidence, but—"

"I have not violated confidence!" was the abrupt and somewhat impetuous response, "and will not have it spoken of in that manner. It is not true that I have abused any trust, and the assertion which I make shall not therefore be understood as a mere possibility."

The uncle was something astounded by the almost fierce manner of his nephew; but the only other effect of this expression was simply, while it diminished his own testiness of manner in his speeches, to add something to the severity of their character. He knew the indomitable spirit of the youth, and his pride was enlisted in the desire for its overthrow.

"You are yet to learn, Ralph Colleton, I perceive, the difference and distance between yourself and my daughter. You are but a youth, yet—quite too young to think of such ties as those of marriage, and to make any lasting engagement of that nature; but, even were this not the case, I am entirely ignorant of those pretensions which should prompt your claim to the hand of Edith."

Had Colonel Colleton been a prudent and reflective man—had he, indeed, known much, if anything, of human nature—he would have withheld the latter part of this sentence. He must have seen that its effect would only be to irritate a spirit needing an emollient. The reply was instantaneous.

"My pretensions, Colonel Colleton? You have twice uttered that word in my ears, and with reference to this subject. Let me understand you. If you would teach me by this sentence the immeasurable individual superiority of Edith over myself in all things, whether of mind, or heart, or person, the lesson is gratuitous. I need no teacher to this end. I acknowledge its truth, and none on this point can more perfectly agree with you than myself. But if, looking beyond these particulars, you would have me recognize in myself an inferiority, marked and singular, in a fair comparison with other men—if, in short, you would convey an indignity; and—but you are my father's brother, sir!" and the blood mounted to his forehead, and his heart swelling, the youth turned proudly away, and rested his head upon the mantel.

"Not so, Ralph; you are hasty in your thought, not less than in its expression," said his uncle, soothingly, "I meant not what you think. But you must be aware, nephew, that my daughter, not less from the fortune which will be exclusively hers, and her individual accomplishments, than from the leading political station which her father fills, will be enabled to have a choice in the adoption of a suitor, which this childish passion might defeat."

"Mine is no childish passion, sir; though young, my mind is not apt to vary in its tendencies; and, unlike that of the mere politician, has little of inconsistency in its predilections with which to rebuke itself. But, I understand you. You have spoken of her fortune, and that reminds me that I had a father, not less worthy, I am sure—not less generous, I feel—but certainly far less prudent than hers. I understand you, sir, perfectly."

"If you mean, Ralph, by this sarcasm, that my considerations are those of wealth, you mistake me much. The man who seeks my daughter must not look for a sacrifice; she must win a husband who has a name, a high place—who has a standing in society. Your tutors, indeed, speak of you in fair terms; but the public voice is everything in our country. When you have got through your law studies, and made your first speech, we will talk once more upon this subject."

"And when I have obtained admission to the practice of the law, do you say that Edith shall be mine?"

"Nay, Ralph, you again mistake me. I only say, it will be then time enough to consider the matter."

"Uncle, this will not do for me. Either you sanction, or you do not. You mean something by that word pretensions which I am yet to understand; my name is Colleton, like your own, and—"

There was a stern resolve in the countenance of the colonel, which spoke of something of the same temper with his impetuous nephew, and the cool and haughty sentence which fell from his lips in reply, while arresting that of the youth, was galling to the proud spirit of the latter, whom it chafed nearly into madness.

"Why, true, Ralph, such is your name indeed; and your reference to this subject now, only reminds me of the too free use which my brother made of it when he bestowed it upon a woman so far beneath him and his family in all possible respects."

"There again, sir, there again! It is my mother's poverty that pains you. She brought my father no dowry. He had nothing of that choice prudence which seems to have been the guide of others, of our family in the bestowment of their affections. He did not calculate the value of his wife's income before he suffered himself to become enamored of her. I see it, sir—I am not ignorant."

"If I speak with you calmly, Ralph, it is because you are the indweller of my house, and because I have a pledge to my brother in your behalf."

"Speak freely, sir; let not this scruple trouble you any longer. It shall not trouble me; and I shall be careful to take early occasion to release you most effectually from all such pledges."

Colonel Colleton proceeded as if the last speech had not been uttered.

"Edith has a claim in society which shall not be sacrificed. Her father, Ralph, did not descend to the hovel of the miserable peasant, choosing a wife from the inferior grade, who, without education, and ignorant of all refinement, could only appear a blot upon the station to which she had been raised. Her mother, sir, was not a woman obscure and uneducated, for whom no parents could be found."

"What means all this, sir? Speak, relieve me at once, Colonel Colleton. What know you of my mother?"

"Nothing—but quite as much as your father ever knew. It is sufficient that he found her in a hovel, without a name, and with the silly romance of his character through life, he raised her to a position in society which she could not fill to his honor, and which, finally, working upon his pride and sensibility drove him into those extravagances which in the end produced his ruin. I grant that she loved him with a most perfect devotion, which he too warmly returned, but what of that?—she was still his destroyer."

Thus sternly did the colonel unveil to the eyes of Ralph Colleton a portion of the family picture which he had never been permitted to survey before.

Cold drops stood on the brow of the now nerveless and unhappy youth. He was pale, and his eyes were fixed for an instant; but, suddenly recovering himself, he rushed hastily from the apartment before his uncle could interpose to prevent him. He heard not or heeded not the words of entreaty which called him back; but, proceeding at once to his chamber, he carefully fastened the entrance, and, throwing himself upon his couch, found relief from the deep mental agony thus suddenly forced upon him, in a flood of tears.

For the first time in his life, deriving his feeling in this particular rather from the opinions of society than from any individual consciousness of debasement, he felt a sentiment of humiliation working in his breast. His mother he had little known, but his father's precepts and familiar conversation had impressed upon him, from his childhood, a feeling for her of the deepest and most unqualified regard. This feeling was not lessened, though rebuked, by the development so unnecessarily and so wantonly conveyed. It taught a new feeling of distrust for his uncle, whose harsh manner and ungenerous insinuations in the progress of the preceding half-hour, had lost him not a little of the youth's esteem. He felt that the motive of his informer was not less unkind than was the information painful and oppressive; and his mind, now more than ever excited and active from this thought, went on discussing, from point to point, all existing relations, until a stern resolve to leave, that very night, the dwelling of one whose hospitality had been made a matter of special reference, was the only and settled conclusion to which his pride could possibly come.

The servant reminded him of the supper-hour, but the summons was utterly disregarded. The colonel himself condescended to notify the stubborn youth of the same important fact, but with almost as little effect. Without opening his door, he signified his indisposition to join in the usual repast, and thus closed the conference.

"I meet him at the table no more—not at his table, at least," was the muttered speech of Ralph, as he heard the receding footsteps of his uncle.

He had determined, though without any distinct object in view, upon leaving the house and returning to Tennessee, where he had hitherto resided. His excited spirits would suffer no delay, and that very night was the period chosen for his departure. Few preparations were necessary. With a fine horse of his own, the gift of his father, he knew that the course lay open. The long route he had more than once travelled before; and he had no fears, though he well knew the desolate character of the journey, in pursuing it alone. Apart from this, he loved adventure for its own sake. The first lesson which his father had taught him, even in boyhood, was that braving of trial which alone can bring about the most perfect manliness. With a stout heart, and with limbs not less so, the difficulties before him had no thought in his mind; there was buoyancy enough in the excitement of his spirit, at that moment, to give even a pleasurable aspect to the obstacles that rose before him.

At an early hour he commenced the work of preparation: he had little trouble in this respect. He studiously selected from his wardrobe such portions of it as had been the gift of his uncle, all of which he carefully excluded from among the contents of the little portmanteau which readily comprised the residue. His travelling-dress was quickly adjusted; and not omitting a fine pair of pistols and a dirk, which, at that period, were held in the south and southwest legitimate companions, he found few other cares for arrangement. One token alone of Edith—a small miniature linked with his own, taken a few seasons before, when both were children, by a strolling artist—suspended by a chain of the richest gold, was carefully hung about his neck. It grew in value, to his mind, at a moment when he was about to separate, perhaps for ever, from its sweet original.

At midnight, when all was silent—his portmanteau under his arm—booted, spurred, and ready for travel—Ralph descended to the lower story, in which slept the chief servant of the house. Cæsar was a favorite with the youth, and he had no difficulty in making himself understood. The worthy black was thunderstruck with his determination.

"Ky! Mass Ralph, how you talk! what for you go dis time o'night? What for you go 'tall?"

The youth satisfied him, in a manner as evasive and brief as possible, and urged him in the preparation of his steed for the journey. But the worthy negro absolutely refused to sanction the proceeding unless he were permitted to go along with him. He used not a few strong arguments for this purpose.

"And what we all for do here, when you leff? 'speck ebbery ting be dull, wuss nor ditch-water. No more fun—no more shuffle-foot. Old maussa no like de fiddle, and nebber hab party and jollication like udder people. Don't tink I can stay here, Mass Ra'ph, after you gone; 'spose, you no 'jection, I go 'long wid you? You leff me, I take to de swamp, sure as a gun."

"No, Cæsar, you are not mine; you belong to your young mistress. You must stay and wait upon her."

"Ha!" was the quick response of the black, with a significant smirk upon his lip, and with a cunning emphasis; "enty I see; wha' for I hab eye ef I no see wid em? I 'speck young misses hab no 'jection for go too—eh, Mass Ra'ph! all you hab for do is for ax em!"

The eye of the youth danced with a playful light, as if a new thought, and not a disagreeable one, had suddenly broken in upon his brain; but the expression lasted but for an instant He overruled all the hopes and wishes of the sturdy black, who, at length, with a manner the most desponding, proceeded to the performance of the required duty. A few moments sufficed, and with a single look to the window of his mistress, which spoke unseen volumes of love, leaving an explanatory letter for the perusal of father and daughter, though addressed only to the latter—he gave the rough hand of his sable friend a cordial pressure, and was soon hidden from sight by the thickly-spreading foliage of the long avenue. The reader has been already apprized that the youth, whose escape in a preceding chapter we have already narrated, and Ralph Colleton, are one and the same person.

He had set forth, as we have seen, under the excitation of feelings strictly natural; but which, subtracting from the strong common sense belonging to his character, had led him prematurely into an adventure, having no distinct purposes, and promising largely of difficulty. What were his thoughts of the future, what his designs, we are not prepared to say. His character was of a firm and independent kind; and the probability is, that, looking to the profession of the law, in the study of which noble science his mind had been for some time occupied, he had contemplated its future practice in those portions of Tennessee in which his father had been known, and where he himself had passed some very pleasant years of his own life. With economy, a moderate talent, and habits of industry, he was well aware that, in those regions, the means of life are with little difficulty attainable by those who are worthy and will adventure. Let us now return to the wayfarer, whom we have left in that wildest region of the then little-settled state of Georgia—doubly wild as forming the debatable land between the savage and the civilized—partaking of the ferocity of the one and the skill, cunning, and cupidity of the other.

[CHAPTER V.]

MARK FORRESTER—THE GOLD VILLAGE.

There were moments when Ralph Colleton, as he lay bruised and wounded upon the sward, in those wild woods, and beneath the cool canopy of heaven, was conscious of his situation, of its exposure and its perils—moments, when he strove to recover himself—to shake off the stupor which seemed to fetter his limbs as effectually as it paralyzed his thoughts;—and the renewed exercise of his 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 which came to his aid, arising from the loss of blood, 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 a 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 pleasures to be found 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 assign the preference to the former.

As the new-comer approached the spot where Ralph Colleton lay, 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 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 to discern the body of the traveller, lying, as it did, almost in his 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 assertion of that authority 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 supposing the stupor 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. He soon returned, bringing 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, or more honorable spirit, lived not; and in spite of an erring and 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 graces of form, yet at the same time far from symmetrical deficiency. There was, also, not a little of ease and agility, together with a rude gracefulness in his action, the result equally of the well-combined organization of his animal man and of the hardy habits of his woodland 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. His features were frank and fearless—moderately intelligent, and well marked—the tout ensemble showing an active vitality, strong, and usually just feelings, and a good-natured freedom of character, which enlisted confidence, and seemed likely to acknowledge few restraints of a merely conventional kind. 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 ever consort with the jaundiced or distempered spirit. His garb indicated, in part, and was well adapted to the pursuits of the hunter and the labors 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 his love of woman. The dress of the woodman was composed of a coarse gray stuff, of a make sufficiently outré, but which, fitting him snugly, served to set off his robust and well-made person to the utmost advantage. A fox-skin cap, of domestic manufacture, the tail of which, studiously preserved, obviated any necessity for a foreign tassel, rested slightly upon his head, giving a unique finish to his appearance, which a fashionable hat would never have supplied. Such was the personage, who, so fortunately for Ralph, plied his craft in that lonely 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 village, or town—for such it was in the acceptation of the time and country—may well deserve some little description; not for its 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 logs; 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 conventional progress in an orderly and methodical society; but, regarding individual convenience as the only object 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 odor from the flower. Those considerations were at all times the most important to the settler when the place of his abode was to be determined upon; and, with these advantages at large, the company of squatters, of whom Mark Forrester, made one, by no means the least important among them, had regularly, for the purposes of gold-digging, colonized the little precinct into which we have now ventured to penetrate.

Before we advance farther in our narrative, it may be quite as well to say, that the adventurers of which this wild congregation was made up were impelled to their present common centre by motives and influences as various as the differing features of their several countenances. They came, not only from 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 or labor 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 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 everywhere 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 contradictory impulses, in the formation of a common caste, and 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 neighbors, being in their own contemplation, truly, a dernier resort.

The reader can better conceive than we describe, the sorts of people, passions, and pursuits, herding thus confusedly together; and with these various objects. Others, indeed, came into the society, like the rude but honest woodman to whom we have already afforded an introduction, almost purely from a spirit of adventure, that, growing impatient of the confined boundaries of its birthplace, longs to tread new regions and enjoy new pleasures and employments. A spirit, we may add, the same, or not materially differing from 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 morale 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 grown together. Though ostensibly in the pursuit of the same interest and craft, they had anything 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 laborers 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 labors 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 the proprietor was too indolent to toil in the manner of his 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 courageous or strong. 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, in 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 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 infrequent 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 undishonored 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 auxiliary and attraction; and in this particular but few cities afford so abundantly the materials for a blaze as our country villages. Three or four 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 Forrester safely 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 courthouse, 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 courthouse and the jail, standing directly opposite each other, carried in their faces a family outline of sympathetic and sober gravity. There had been some effect at pretension in their construction, both being 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 their deficiency in 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 courthouse and jail, which we should not omit to notice. The former had the advantage of its neighbor, 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 into the settlement; an occurrence, at the time we write, of very 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 neighboring 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 places in the 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 neighbors in every substantial respect, the four fabrics were most uncharitably remote, and stood frowning gloomily at 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 from the twin lamps in front of the tavern, through whose wide and unsashed windows an additional lustre, as of many lights, gave warm 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 resounding from the anvil, and a full blast from the 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 clamors, and the din of many voices gathered upon the breeze in 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.

"There they are, in full blast," he muttered, "over a gallon of whiskey, and gulping it down as if 'twas nothing better than common water. But, what's the great fuss to-night? There's a crowd, I reckon, and they're a running their rigs on somebody."

Even Forrester was at a loss to account for their excess of hilarity to-night. Though fond of drink, and meeting often in a crowd, they were few of them of a class—using his own phrase—"to give so much tongue over their liquors." The old toper and vagabond is usually a silent drinker. His amusements, when in a circle, and with a bottle before him, are found in cards and dice. His cares, at such a period, are too considerate to suffer him to be noisy. Here, in Chestatee, Forrester well knew that a crowd implied little good-fellowship. The ties which brought the gold-seekers and squatters together were not of a sort to produce cheerfulness and merriment. Their very sports were savage, and implied a sort of fun which commonly gave pain to somebody. He wondered, accordingly, as he listened to yells of laughter, and discordant shouts of hilarity; and he grew curious about the occasion of uproar.

"They're poking fun at some poor devil, that don't quite see what they're after."

A nearer approach soon gave him a clue to the mystery; but all his farther speculations upon it were arrested, by a deep groan from the wounded man, and a writhing movement in the bottom of the wagon, as the wheel rolled over a little pile of stones in the road.

Forrester's humanity checked his curiosity. He stooped to the sufferer, composed his limbs upon the straw, and, as the vehicle, by this time, had approached the tavern, he ordered the wagoner to drive to the rear of the building, that the wounded man might lose, as much as possible, the sounds of clamor which steadily rose from the hall in front. When the wagon stopped, he procured proper help, and, with the tenderest care, assisted to bear our unconscious traveller from the vehicle, into the upper story of the house, where he gave him his own bed, left him in charge of an old negro, and hurried away in search of that most important person of the place, the village-doctor.

[CHAPTER VI.]

CODE AND PRACTICE OF THE REGULATORS.

Forrester was fleet of foot, and the village-doctor not far distant. He was soon procured, and, prompt of practice, the hurts of Ralph Colleton were found to be easily medicable. The wound was slight, the graze of a bullet only, cutting some smaller blood-vessels, and it was only from the loss of blood that insensibility had followed. The moderate skill of our country-surgeon was quite equal to the case, and soon enabled him to put the mind of Mark Forrester, who was honestly and humanely anxious, at perfect rest on the subject of his unknown charge. With the dressing of his wound, and the application of restoratives, the consciousness of the youth returned, and he was enabled to learn how he had been discovered, where he was, and to whom he was indebted for succor in the moment of his insensibility.

Ralph Colleton, of course, declared his gratitude in warm and proper terms; but, as enjoined by the physician, he was discouraged from all unnecessary speech. But he was not denied to listen, and Forrester was communicative, as became his frank face and honest impulses. The brief questions of Ralph obtained copious answers; and, for an hour, the woodman cheered the solitude of his chamber, by the narration of such matters as were most likely to interest his hearer, in respect to the new region where he was, perforce, kept a prisoner. Of Chestatee, and the people thereof, their employment, and the resources of the neighborhood, Forrester gave a pretty correct account; though he remained prudently silent in regard to the probable parties to that adventure in which his hearer had received his hurt.

From speaking of these subjects, the transition was natural to the cause of uproar going on below stairs. The sounds of the hubbub penetrated the chamber of the wounded man, and he expressed some curiosity in respect to it. This was enough for the woodman, who had partially informed himself, by a free conversation with the wagoner who drove the vehicle which brought Ralph to the tavern. He had caught up other details as he hurried to and fro, when he ran for the doctor. He was thus prepared to satisfy the youth's inquiry.

"Well, squire, did you ever see a live Yankee?"

The youth smiled, answering affirmatively.

"He's a pedler, you know, and that means a chap what can wheedle the eyes out of your head, the soul out of your body, the gould out of your pocket, and give you nothing but brass, and tin, and copper, in the place of 'em. Well, all the hubbub you hear is jest now about one of these same Yankee pedlers. The regilators have caught the varmint—one Jared Bunce, as he calls himself—and a more cunning, rascally, presumptious critter don't come out of all Connecticut. He's been a cheating and swindling all the old women round the country. He'll pay for it now, and no mistake. The regilators caught him about three hours ago, and they've brought him here for judgment and trial. They've got a jury setting on his vartues, and they'll hammer the soul out of him afore they let him git out from under the iron. I don't reckon they kin cure him, for what's bred in the bone, you know, won't come out of the flesh; but they'll so bedevil bone and flesh, that I reckon he'll be the last Yankee that ever comes to practice again in this Chestatee country. Maybe, he ain't deserving of much worse than they kin do. Maybe, he ain't a scamp of the biggest wethers. His rascality ain't to be measured. Why, he kin walk through a man's pockets, jest as the devil goes through a crack or a keyhole, and the money will naterally stick to him, jest as ef he was made of gum turpentine. His very face is a sort of kining [coining] machine. His look says dollars and cents; and its always your dollars and cents, and he kines them out of your hands into his'n, jest with a roll of his eye, and a mighty leetle turn of his finger. He cheats in everything, and cheats everybody. Thar's not an old woman in the country that don't say her prayers back'ards when she thinks of Jared Bunce. Thar's his tin-wares and his wood-wares—his coffeepots and kettles, all put together with saft sodder—that jest go to pieces, as ef they had nothing else to do. And he kin blarney you so—and he's so quick at a mortal lie—and he's got jest a good reason for everything—and he's so sharp at a 'scuse [excuse] that it's onpossible to say where he's gwine to have you, and what you're a gwine to lose, and how you'll get off at last, and in what way he'll cheat you another time. He's been at this business, in these diggings, now about three years. The regilators have swore a hundred times to square off with him; but he's always got off tell now; sometimes by new inventions—sometimes by bible oaths—and last year, by regilarly cutting dirt [flight]. He's hardly a chance to git cl'ar now, for the regilators are pretty much up to all his tricks, and he's mighty nigh to ride a rail for a colt, and get new scores ag'in old scores, laid on with the smartest hickories in natur'."

"And who are the regulators?" asked the youth, languidly.

"What! you from Georgy, and never to hear tell of the regilators? Why, that's the very place, I reckon, where the breed begun. The regilators are jest then, you see, our own people. We hain't got much law and justice in these pairts, and when the rascals git too sassy and plentiful, we all turn out, few or many, and make a business of cleaning out the stables. We turn justices, and sheriffs, and lawyers, and settle scores with the growing sinners. We jine, hand in hand, agin such a chap as Jared Bunce, and set in judgment upon his evil-doings. It's a regilar court, though we make it up ourselves, and app'ints our own judges and juries, and pass judgment 'cordin' to the case. Ef it's the first offence, or only a small one, we let's the fellow off with only a taste of the hickory. Ef it's a tough case, and an old sinner, we give him a belly-full. Ef the whole country's roused, then Judge Lynch puts on his black cap, and the rascal takes a hard ride on a rail, a duck in the pond, and a perfect seasoning of hickories, tell thar ain't much left of him, or, may be, they don't stop to curry him, but jest halters him at once to the nearest swinging limb."

"Sharp justice! and which of these punishments will they be likely to bestow upon the Yankee?"

"Well thar's no telling; but I reckon he runs a smart chance of grazing agin the whole on 'em. They've got a long account agin him. In one way or t'other, he's swindled everybody with his notions. Some bought his clocks, which only went while the rogue stayed, and when he went they stopt forever. Some bought ready-made clothes, which went to pieces at the very sight of soap and water. He sold a fusee to old Jerry Seaborn, and warranted the piece, and it bursted into flinders, the very first fire, and tore little Jerry's hand and arm—son of old Jerry—almost to pieces. He'll never have the right use of it agin. And that ain't all. Thar's no counting up his offences."

"Bad as the fellow is, do you think it possible that they will torture him as you describe, or hang him, without law, and a fair trial?"

"Why, Lord love you, ha'n't I told you that he'll have a fair trial, afore the regilators, and thar'll be any number of witnesses, and judges, and sheriffs, and executioners. But, ef you know'd Bunce, you'd know that a fair trial is the very last marcy that he'd aix of Providence. Don't you think now that he'll git anything worse than his righteous desarvings. He's a fellow that's got no more of a saving soul in him than my whip-handle, and ain't half so much to be counted on in a fight. He's jest now nothing but a cheat and a swindle from head to foot; hain't got anything but cheat in him—hain't got room for any principle—-not enough either to git drunk with a friend, or have it out, in a fair fight, with his enemy. I shouldn't myself wish to see the fellow's throat cut, but I ain't slow to say that I shall go for his tasting a few hickories, after that a dip in the horsepond, and then a permit to leave the country by the shortest cut, and without looking behind him, under penalty of having the saft places on his back covered with the petticoats of Lot's wife, that we hear of in the Scriptures."

Ralph Colleton was somewhat oppressed with apathy, and he knew how idle would be any attempt to lessen the hostility of the sturdy woodman, in respect to the wretched class of traders, such as were described in Jared Bunce, by whom the simple and dependent borderers in the South and West, were shockingly imposed upon. He made but a feeble effort accordingly, in this direction, but was somewhat more earnest in insisting upon the general propriety of forbearance, in a practice which militated against law and order, and that justice should he administered only by the proper hands. But to this, Mark Forrester had his ready answer; and, indeed, our young traveller was speaking according to the social standards of a wholly different region.

"There, again, 'squire, you are quite out. The laws, somehow or other, can't touch these fellows. They run through the country a wink faster than the sheriff, and laugh at all the processes you send after them. So, you see, there's no justice, no how, unless you catch a rogue like this, and wind up with him for all the gang—for they're all alike, all of the same family, and it comes to the same thing in the end."

The youth answered languidly. He began to tire, and nature craved repose, and the physician had urged it. Forrester readily perceived that the listener's interest was flagging—nay he half fancied that much that he had been saying, and in his best style, had fallen upon drowsy senses. Nobody likes to have his best things thrown away, and, as the reader will readily conceive, our friend Forrester had a sneaking consciousness that all the world's eloquence did not cease on the day when Demosthenes died. But he was not the person to be offended because the patient desired to sleep. Far from it. He was only reasonable enough to suppose that this was the properest thing that the wounded man could do. And so he told him; and adjusting carefully the pillows of the youth, and disposing the bedclothes comfortably, and promising to see him again before he slept, our woodman bade him good night, and descended to the great hall of the tavern, where Jared Bunce was held in durance.

The luckless pedler was, in truth, in a situation in which, for the first time in his life, he coveted nothing. The peril was one, also, from which, thus far, his mother-wit, which seldom failed before, could suggest no means of evasion or escape. His prospect was a dreary one; though with the wonderful capacity for endurance, and the surprising cheerfulness, common to the class to which he belonged, he beheld it without dismay though with many apprehensions.

Justice he did not expect, nor, indeed, as Forrester has already told us, did he desire it. He asked for nothing less than justice. He was dragged before judges, all of whom had complaints to prefer, and injuries to redress; and none of whom were over-scrupulous as to the nature or measure of that punishment which was to procure them the desired atonement. The company was not so numerous as noisy. It consisted of some twenty persons, villagers as well as small farmers in the neighborhood, all of whom, having partaken ad libitum of the whiskey distributed freely about the table, which, in part, they surrounded, had, in the Indian phrase, more tongues than brains, and were sufficiently aroused by their potations to enter readily into any mischief. Some were smoking with all the industrious perseverance of the Hollander; others shouted forth songs in honor of the bottle, and with all the fervor and ferment of Bacchanalian novitiates; and not a few, congregating about the immediate person of the pedler, assailed his ears with threats sufficiently pregnant with tangible illustration to make him understand and acknowledge, by repeated starts and wincings, the awkward and uncomfortable predicament in which he stood. At length, the various disputants for justice, finding it difficult, if not impossible, severally, to command that attention which they conceived they merited, resolved themselves into something like a committee of the whole, and proceeded to the settlement of their controversy, and the pedler's fate, in a manner more suited to the importance of the occasion. Having procured that attention which was admitted to be the great object, more by the strength of his lungs than his argument, one of the company, who was dignified by the title of colonel, spoke out for the rest.

"I say, boys—'tisn't of any use, I reckon, for everybody to speak about what everybody knows. One speaker's quite enough in this here matter before us. Here's none of us that sha'n't something to say agin this pedler, and the doings of the grand scoundrel in and about these parts, for a matter going on now about three years. Why, everybody knows him, big and little; and his reputation is so now, that the very boys take his name to frighten away the crows with. Now, one person can jist as well make a plain statement as another. I know, of my own score, there's not one of my neighbors for ten miles round, that can't tell all about the rotten prints he put off upon my old woman; and I know myself of all the tricks he's played at odd times, more than a dozen, upon 'Squire Nichols there, and Tom Wescott, and Bob Snipes, and twenty others; and everybody knows them just as well as I. Now, to make up the score, and square off with the pedler, without any frustration, I move you that Lawyer Pippin take the chair, and judge in this matter; for the day has come for settling off accounts, and I don't see why we shouldn't be the regulators for Bunce, seeing that everybody agrees that he's a rogue, and a pestilence, and desarves regilation."

This speech was highly applauded, and chimed in admirably with all prejudices, and the voice that called Lawyer Pippin to preside over the deliberations of the assembly was unanimous. The gentleman thus highly distinguished, was a dapper and rather portly little personage, with sharp twinkling eyes, a ruby and remarkable nose, a double chin, retreating forehead, and corpulent cheek. He wore green glasses of a dark, and a green coat of a light, complexion. The lawyer was the only member of the profession living in the village, had no competitor save when the sitting of the court brought in one or more from neighboring settlements, and, being thus circumstanced, without opposition, and the only representative of his craft, he was literally, to employ the slang phrase in that quarter, the "cock of the walk." He was, however, not so much regarded by the villagers a worthy as a clever man. It required not erudition to win the credit of profundity, and the lawyer knew how to make the most of his learning among those who had none. Like many other gentlemen of erudition, he was grave to a proverb when the occasion required it, and would not be seen to laugh out of the prescribed place, though "Nestor swore the jest was laughable." He relied greatly on saws and sayings—could quote you the paradoxes of Johnson and the infidelities of Hume without always understanding them, and mistook, as men of that kind and calibre are very apt to do, the capacity to repeat the grave absurdities of others as a proof of something in himself. His business was not large, however, and among the arts of his profession, and as a means for supplying the absence of more legitimate occasions for its employment, he was reputed as excessively expert in making the most of any difficulty among his neighbors. The egg of mischief and controversy was hardly laid, before the worthy lawyer, with maternal care, came clucking about it; he watched and warmed it without remission; and when fairly hatched, he took care that the whole brood should be brought safely into court, his voice, and words, and actions, fully attesting the deep interest in their fortunes which he had manifested from the beginning. Many a secret slander, ripening at length into open warfare, had been traced to his friendly influence, either ab ovo, or at least from the perilous period in such cases when the very existence of the embryo relies upon the friendly breath, the sustaining warmth, and the occasional stimulant. Lawyer Pippin, among his neighbors, was just the man for such achievements, and they gave him, with a degree of shrewdness common to them as a people, less qualified credit for the capacity which he at all times exhibited in bringing a case into, than in carrying it out of court. But this opinion in nowise affected the lawyer's own estimate of his pretensions. Next to being excessively mean, he was excessively vain, and so highly did he regard his own opinions, that he was never content until he heard himself busily employed in their utterance. An opportunity for a speech, such as the present, was not suffered to pass without due regard; but as we propose that he shall exhibit himself in the most happy manner at a later period in our narrative, we shall abridge, in few, the long string of queerly-associated words in the form of a speech, which, on assuming the chair thus assigned him, he poured forth upon the assembly. After a long prefatory, apologetic, and deprecatory exordium, in which his own demerits, as is usual with small speakers, were strenuously urged; and after he had exhausted most of the commonplaces about the purity of the ermine upon the robes of justice, and the golden scales, and the unshrinking balance, and the unsparing and certain sword, he went on thus:—

"And now, my friends, if I rightly understand the responsibility and obligations of the station thus kindly conferred upon me, I am required to arraign the pedler, Jared Bunce, before you, on behalf of the country, which country, as the clerk reads it, you undoubtedly are; and here let me remark, my friends, the excellent and nice distinction which this phrase makes between the man and the soil, between the noble intellect and the high soul, and the mere dirt and dust upon which we daily tread. This very phrase, my friends, is a fine embodiment of that democratic principle upon which the glorious constitution is erected. But, as I was saying, my friends, I am required to arraign before you this same pedler, Jared Bunce, on sundry charges of misdemeanor, and swindling, and fraud—in short, as I understand it, for endeavoring, without having the fear of God and good breeding in his eyes, to pass himself off upon the good people of this county as an honest man. Is this the charge, my friends?"

"Ay, ay, lawyer, that's the how, that's the very thing itself. Put it to the skunk, let him deny that if he can—let him deny that his name is Jared Bunce—that he hails from Connecticut—that he is a shark, and a pirate, and a pestilence. Let him deny that he is a cheat—that he goes about with his notions and other rogueries—that he doesn't manufacture maple-seeds, and hickory nutmegs, and ground coffee made out of rotten rye. Answer to that, Jared Bunce, you white-livered lizard."

Thus did one of his accusers take up the thread of the discourse as concluded in part by the chairman. Another and another followed with like speeches in the most rapid succession, until all was again confusion; and the voice of the lawyer, after a hundred ineffectual efforts at a hearing, degenerated into a fine squeak, and terminated at last in a violent fit of coughing, that fortunately succeeded in producing the degree of quiet around him to secure which his language had, singularly enough, entirely failed. For a moment the company ceased its clamor, out of respect to the chairman's cough; and, having cleared his throat with the contents of a tumbler of Monongahela which seemed to stand permanently full by his side, he recommenced the proceedings; the offender, in the meantime, standing mute and motionless, now almost stupified with terror, conscious of repeated offences, knowing perfectly the reckless spirit of those who judged him, and hopeless of escape from their hands, without, in the country phrase, the loss at least of "wing and tail feathers." The chairman with due gravity began:—

"Jared Bunce—is that your name?"

"Why, lawyer, I can't deny that I have gone by that name, and I guess it's the right name for me to go by, seeing that I was christened Jared, after old Uncle Jared Withers, that lives down at Dedham, in the state of Massachusetts. He did promise to do something for me, seeing I was named after him, but he ha'n't done nothing yet, no how. Then the name of Bunce, you see, lawyer, I got from my father, his name being Bunce, too, I guess."

"Well, Jared Bunce, answer to the point, and without circumlocution. You have heard some of the charges against you. Having taken them down in short-hand, I will repeat them."

The pedler approached a few steps, advanced one leg, raised a hand to his ear, and put on all the external signs of devout attention, as the chairman proceeded in the long and curious array.

"First, then, it is charged against you, Bunce, by young Dick Jenkins, that stands over in front of you there, that somewhere between the fifteenth and twenty-third of June—last June was a year—you came by night to his plantation, he living at that time in De Kalb county; that you stopped the night with him, without charge, and in the morning you traded a clock to his wife for fifteen dollars, and that you had not been gone two days, before the said clock began to go whiz, whiz, whiz, and commenced striking, whizzing all the while, and never stopped till it had struck clear thirty-one, and since that time it will neither whiz, nor strike, nor do nothing."

"Why, lawyer, I ain't the man to deny the truth of this transaction, you see; but, then, you must know, much depends upon the way you manage a clock. A clock is quite a delicate and ticklish article of manufacture, you see, and it ain't everybody that can make a clock, or can make it go when it don't want to; and if a man takes a hammer or a horsewhip, or any other unnatural weapon to it, as if it was a house or a horse, why I guess, it's not reasonable to expect it to keep in order, and it's no use in having a clock no how, if you don't treat it well. As for its striking thirty-one, that indeed is something remarkable, for I never heard one of mine strike more than twelve, and that's zactly the number they're regulated to strike. But, after all, lawyer, I don't see that Squire Jenkins has been much a loser by the trade, seeing that he paid me in bills of the Hogee-nogee bank, and that stopped payment about the time, and before I could get the bills changed. It's true, I didn't let on that I knowed anything about it, and got rid of the paper a little while before the thing went through the country."

"Now, look ye, you gingerbread-bodied Yankee—I'd like to know what you mean about taking whip and hammer to the clock. If you mean to say that I ever did such a thing, I'll lick you now, by the eternal scratch!"

"Order, order, Mr. Jenkins—order! The chair must be respected. You must come to order, Mr. Jenkins—" was the vociferous and urgent cry of the chairman, repeated by half a dozen voices; the pedler, in the meanwhile, half doubting the efficacy of the call, retreating with no little terror behind the chair of the dignified personage who presided.

"Well, you needn't make such a howling about it," said Jenkins, wrathfully, and looking around him with the sullen ferocity of a chafed bear. "I know jist as well how to keep order, I reckon, as any on you; but I don't see how it will be out of order to lick a Yankee, or who can hinder me, if I choose it."

"Well, don't look at me, Dick Jenkins, with such a look, or I'll have a finger in that pie, old fellow. I'm no Yankee to be frightened by sich a lank-sided fellow as you; and, by dogs, if nobody else can keep you in order, I'm jist the man to try if I can't. So don't put on any shines, old boy, or I'll darken your peepers, if I don't come very nigh plucking them out altogether."

So spake another of the company, who, having been much delectified with the trial, had been particularly solicitous in his cries for order. Jenkins was not indisposed to the affray, and made an angry retort, which provoked another still more angry; but other parties interfering, the new difficulty was made to give place to that already in hand. The imputation upon Jenkins, that his ignorance of the claims of the clock to gentle treatment, alone, had induced it to speak thirty-one times, and at length refuse to speak at all, had touched his pride; and, sorely vexed, he retired upon a glass of whiskey to the farther corner of the room, and with his pipe, nursing the fumes of his wrath, he waited impatiently the signal for the wild mischief which he knew would come.

In the meanwhile, the examination of the culprit proceeded; but, as we can not hope to convey to the reader a description of the affair as it happened, to the life, we shall content ourselves with a brief summary. The chair went on rapidly enumerating the sundry misdeeds of the Yankee, demanding, and in most cases receiving, rapid and unhesitating replies—evasively and adroitly framed, for the offender well knew that a single unlucky word or phrase would bring down upon his shoulders a wilderness of blows.

"You are again charged, Bunce, with having sold to Colonel Blundell a coffee-pot and two tin cups, all of which went to pieces—the solder melting off at the very sight of the hot water."

"Well, lawyer, it stands to reason I can't answer for that. The tin wares I sell stand well enough in a northern climate: there may be some difference in yours that I can't account for; and I guess, pretty much, there is. Now, your people are a mighty hot-tempered people, and take a fight for breakfast, and make three meals a day out of it: now, we in the north have no stomach for such fare; so here, now, as far as I can see, your climate takes pretty much after the people, and if so, it's no wonder that solder can't stand it. Who knows, again, but you boil your water quite too hot? Now, I guess, there's jest as much harm in boiling water too hot, as in not boiling it hot enough. Who knows? All I can say is, that the lot of wares I bring to this market next season shall be calkilated on purpose to suit the climate."

The chairman seemed struck with this view of the case, and spoke with a gravity corresponding with the deep sagacity he conceived himself to have exhibited.

"There does seem to be something in this; and it stands to reason, what will do for a nation of pedlers won't do for us. Why, when I recollect that they are buried in snows half the year, and living on nothing else the other half, I wonder how they get the water to boil at all. Answer that, Bunce."

"Well, lawyer, I guess you must have travelled pretty considerable down east in your time and among my people, for you do seem to know all about the matter jest as well and something better than myself."

The lawyer, not a little flattered by the compliment so slyly and evasively put in, responded to the remark with a due regard to his own increase of importance.

"I am not ignorant of your country, pedler, and of the ways of its people; but it is not me that you are to satisfy. Answer to the gentlemen around, if it is not a difficult matter for you to get water to boil at all during the winter months."

"Why, to say the truth, lawyer, when coal is scarce and high in the market, heat is very hard to come. Now, I guess the ware I brought out last season was made under those circumstances; but I have a lot on hand now, which will be here in a day or two, which I should like to trade to the colonel, and I guess I may venture to say, all the hot water in the country won't melt the solder off."

"I tell you what, pedler, we are more likely to put you in hot water than try any more of your ware in that way. But where's your plunder?—let us see this fine lot of notions you speak of"—was the speech of the colonel already so much referred to, and whose coffee-pot bottom furnished so broad a foundation for the trial. He was a wild and roving person, to whom the tavern, and the racecourse, and the cockpit, from his very boyhood up, had been as the breath of life, and with whom the chance of mischief was never willingly foregone. But the pedler was wary, and knew his man. The lurking smile and sneer of the speaker had enough in them for the purposes of warning, and he replied evasively:—

"Well, colonel, you shall see them by next Tuesday or Wednesday. I should be glad to have a trade with you—the money's no object—and if you have furs, or skins, or anything that you like to get off your hands, there's no difficulty, that I can see, to a long bargain."

"But why not trade now, Bunce?—what's to hinder us now? I sha'n't be in the village after Monday."

"Well, then, colonel, that'll just suit me, for I did calkilate to call on you at the farm, on my way into the nation where I'm going looking out for furs."

"Yes, and live on the best for a week, under some pretence that your nag is sick, or you sick, or something in the way of a start—then go off, cheat, and laugh at me in the bargain. I reckon, old boy, you don't come over me in that way again; and I'm not half done with you yet about the kettles. That story of yours about the hot and cold may do for the pigeons, but you don't think the hawks will swallow it, do ye? Come—out with your notions!"

"Oh, to be sure, only give a body time, colonel," as, pulled by the collar, with some confusion and in great trepidation, responded the beleagured dealer in clocks and calicoes—"they shall all be here in a day or two at most. Seeing that one of my creatures was foundered, I had to leave the goods, and drive the other here without them."

The pedler had told the truth in part only. One of his horses had indeed struck lame, but he had made out to bring him to the village with all his wares; and this fact, as in those regions of question and inquiry was most likely to be the case, had already taken wind.

"Now, look ye, Bunce, do you take me for a blear-eyed mole, that never seed the light of a man's eyes?" inquired Blundell, closely approaching the beset tradesman, and taking him leisurely by the neck. "Do you want to take a summerset through that window, old fellow, that you try to stuff us with such tough stories? If you do, I rether reckon you can do it without much difficulty." Thus speaking, and turning to some of those around him, he gave directions which imparted to the limbs of the pedler a continuous and crazy motion, that made his teeth chatter.

"Hark ye, boys, jist step out, and bring in the cart of Jared Bunce, wheels and all, if so be that the body won't come off easily. We'll see for ourselves."

It was now the pedler's turn for speech; and, forgetting the precise predicament in which he personally stood, and only solicitous to save his chattels from the fate which he plainly saw awaited them, his expostulations and entreaties were rapid and energetic.

"Now, colonel—gentlemen—my good friends—to-morrow or the next day you shall see them all—I'll go with you to your plantation—"

"No, thank ye. I want none of your company—and, look ye, if you know when you're well off, don't undertake to call me your friend. I say, Mr. Chairman, if it's in order—I don't want to do anything disorderly—I move that Bunce's cart be moved here into this very room, that we may see for ourselves the sort of substance he brings here to put off upon us."

The chairman had long since seemingly given up all hope of exercising, in their true spirit, the duties of the station which he held. For a while, it is true, he battled with no little energy for the integrity of his dignity, with good lungs and a stout spirit; but, though fully a match in these respects for any one, or perhaps any two of his competitors, he found the task of contending with the dozen rather less easy, and, in a little while, his speeches, into which he had lugged many a choice ad captandum of undisputed effect on any other occasion, having been completely merged and mingled with those of the mass, he wisely forbore any further waste of matter, in the stump-oratory of the South usually so precious; and, drawing himself up proudly and profoundly in his high place, he remained dignifiedly sullen, until the special reference thus made by Colonel Blundell again opened the fountains of the oracle and set them flowing.

The lawyer, thus appealed to, in a long tirade, and in his happiest manner, delivered his opinion in the premises, and in favor of the measure. How, indeed, could he do otherwise, and continue that tenacious pursuit of his own interests which had always been the primary aim and object, as well of the profession as the person. He at once sagaciously beheld the embryo lawsuit and contingent controversy about to result from the proposition; and, in his mind, with a far and free vision, began to compute the costs and canvass the various terms and prolonged trials of county court litigation. He saw fee after fee thrust into his hands—he beheld the opposing parties desirous to conciliate, and extending to him sundry of those equivocal courtesies, which, though they take not the shape of money are money's worth, and the worthy chairman had no scruples as to the propriety of the measure. The profits and pay once adjusted to his satisfaction, his spirit took a broad sweep, and the province of human fame, circumscribed, it is true, within the ten mile circuit of his horizon, was at once open before him. He beheld the strife, and enjoyed the triumph over his fellow-laborers at the bar—he already heard the applauses of his neighbors at this or that fine speech or sentiment; and his form grew insensibly erect, and his eye glistened proudly, as he freely and fully assented to the measure which promised such an abundant harvest. Vainly did the despairing and dispirited pedler implore a different judgment; the huge box which capped the body of his travelling vehicle, torn from its axle, without any show of reverential respect for screw or fastening, was borne in a moment through the capacious entrance of the hall, and placed conspicuously upon the table.

"The key, Bunce, the key!" was the demand of a dozen.

The pedler hesitated for a second, and the pause was fatal. Before he could redeem his error, a blow from a hatchet settled the difficulty, by distributing the fine deal-box cover, lock and hinges, in fragments over the apartment. The revelation of wares and fabrics—a strange admixture, with propriety designated "notions"—brought all eyes immediately around, and rendered a new order, for common convenience, necessary in the arrangement of the company. The chairman, chair and man, were in a moment raised to a corresponding elevation upon the table, over the collection; and the controversy and clamor, from concentrating, as it did before, upon the person of the pedler, were now transferred to the commodities he brought for sale. Order having been at length obtained, Colonel Blundell undertook the assertion of his own and the wrongs of his fellow-sufferers, and kept uninterrupted possession of the floor.

"And now, Mr. Chairman, I will jist go a little into the particulars of the rogueries and rascalities of this same Yankee. Now, in the first place, he is a Yankee, and that's enough, itself, to bring him to punishment—but we'll let that pass, and go to his other transactions—for, as I reckon, it's quite punishment enough for that offence, to be jist what he is. He has traded rotten stuffs about the country, that went to pieces the first washing. He has traded calico prints, warranted for fast colors, that ran faster than he ever ran himself. He has sold us tin stuffs, that didn't stand hot water at all; and then thinks to get off, by saying they were not made for our climate. And let me ask, Mr. Chairman, if they wasn't made for our climate, why did he bring 'em here? let him come to the scratch, and answer that, neighbors—but he can't. Well, then, as you've all hearn, he has traded clocks to us at money's worth, that one day ran faster than a Virginny race-mare, and at the very next day, would strike lame, and wouldn't go at all, neither for beating nor coaxing—and besides all these doings, neighbors, if these an't quite enough to carry a skunk to the horsepond, he has committed his abominations without number, all through the country high and low—for hain't he lied and cheated, and then had the mean cowardice to keep out of the way of the regilators, who have been on the look-out for his tracks for the last half year? Now, if these things an't desarving of punishment, there's nobody fit to be hung—there's nobody that ought to be whipped. Hickories oughtn't to grow any longer, and the best thing the governor can do would be to have all the jails burnt down from one eend of the country to the other. The proof stands up agin Bunce, and there's no denying it; and it's no use, no how, to let this fellow come among us, year after year, to play the same old hand, take our money for his rascally goods, then go away and laugh at us. And the question before us is jist what I have said, and what shall we do with the critter? To show you that it's high time to do something in the matter, look at this calico print, that looks, to be sure, very well to the eye, except, as you see, here's a tree with red leaves and yellow flowers—a most ridiculous notion, indeed, for who ever seed a tree with sich colors here, in the very beginning of summer?"

Here the pedler, for the moment, more solicitous for the credit of the manufactures than for his own safety, ventured to suggest that the print was a mere fancy, a matter of taste—in fact, a notion, and not therefore to be judged by the standard which had been brought to decide upon its merits. He did not venture, however, to say what, perhaps, would have been the true horn of the difficulty, that the print was an autumn or winter illustration, for that might have subjected him to condign punishment for its unseasonableness. As it was, the defence set up was to the full as unlucky as any other might have been.

"I'll tell you what, Master Bunce, it won't do to take natur in vain. If you can show me a better painter than natur, from your pairts, I give up; but until that time, I say that any man who thinks to give the woods a different sort of face from what God give 'em, ought to be licked for his impudence if nothing else."

The pedler ventured again to expostulate; but the argument having been considered conclusive against him, he was made to hold his peace, while the prosecutor proceeded.

"Now then, Mr. Chairman, as I was saying—here is a sample of the kind of stuff he thinks to impose upon us. Look now at this here article, and I reckon it's jist as good as any of the rest, and say whether a little touch of Lynch's law, an't the very thing for the Yankee!"

Holding up the devoted calico to the gaze of the assembly, with a single effort of his strong and widely-distended arms, he rent it asunder with little difficulty, the sweep not terminating, until the stuff, which, by-the-way, resigned itself without struggle or resistance to its fate, had been most completely and evenly divided. The poor pedler in vain endeavored to stay a ravage that, once begun, became epidemical. He struggled and strove with tenacious hand, holding on to sundry of his choicest bales, and claiming protection from the chair, until warned of his imprudent zeal in behalf of goods so little deserving of the risk, by the sharp and sudden application of an unknown hand to his ears which sent him reeling against the table, and persuaded him into as great a degree of patience, as, under existing circumstances, he could be well expected to exhibit. Article after article underwent a like analysis of its strength and texture, and a warm emulation took place among the rioters, as to their several capacities in the work of destruction. The shining bottoms were torn from the tin-wares in order to prove that such a separation was possible, and it is doing but brief justice to the pedler to say, that, whatever, in fact, might have been the true character of his commodities, the very choicest of human fabrics could never have resisted the various tests of bone and sinew, tooth and nail, to which they were indiscriminately subjected. Immeasurable was the confusion that followed. All restraints were removed—all hindrances withdrawn, and the tide rushed onward with a most headlong tendency.

Apprehensive of pecuniary responsibilities in his own person, and having his neighbors wrought to the desired pitch—fearing, also, lest his station might somewhat involve himself in the meshes he was weaving around others, the sagacious chairman, upon the first show of violence, roared out his resignation, and descended from his place. But this movement did not impair the industry of the regulators. A voice was heard proposing a bonfire of the merchandise, and no second suggestion was necessary. All hands but those of the pedler and the attorney were employed in building the pyre in front of the tavern some thirty yards; and here, in choice confusion, lay flaming calicoes, illegitimate silks, worsted hose, wooden clocks and nutmegs, maple-wood seeds of all descriptions, plaid cloaks, scents, and spices, jumbled up in ludicrous variety. A dozen hands busied themselves in applying the torch to the devoted mass—howling over it, at every successive burst of flame that went up into the dark atmosphere, a savage yell of triumph that tallied well with the proceeding.

"Hurrah!"

The scene was one of indescribable confusion. The rioters danced about the blaze like so many frenzied demons. Strange, no one attempted to appropriate the property that must have been a temptation to all.