And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western jungles who
had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and axe--now sat silent
in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled, scarred, fierce, silent,
scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement. Flitting gaily past them,
on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied by trains of pack-horses from
over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse and boat down the Ohio--hurried the
wives of the officers, daintily choosing satins and ribands for a coming
ball. All this and more he noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep
vibrations of history swept through him, arousing him as the marshalling
storm cloud, the rush of winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle
the sense of the high, the mighty, the sublime.
As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped and girt
for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life in those
days, and running was part of the regular training of the young--bounded up
to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was very swift. But he named
another day, impatient of the many interruptions that had already delayed
him, and with long, rapid strides he had soon passed beyond the last fields
and ranges of the town. Then he slackened his pace. Before him, a living
wall, rose the edge of the wilderness. Noting the position of the sun and
searching for a point of least resistance, he plunged in.
Soon he had to make his way through a thicket of cane some twelve feet high;
then through a jungle of wild rye, buffalo grass and briars; beyond which he
struck a narrow deertrace and followed that in its westward winding through
thinner undergrowth under the dark trees.
He was unarmed. He did not even wear a knife. But the thought rose in his
mind of how rapidly the forest also was changing its character. The Indians
were gone. Two years had passed since they had for the last time flecked the
tender green with tender blood. And the deadly wild creatures--the native
people of earth and tree--they likewise had fled from the slaughter and
starvation of their kind. A little while back and a maddened buffalo or a
wounded elk might have trodden him down and gored him to death in that
thicket and no one have ever learned his fate--as happened to many a
solitary hunter. He could not feel sure that hiding in the leaves of the
branches against which his hat sometimes brushed there did not lie the
panther, the hungrier for the fawns that had been driven from the near
coverts. A swift lowering of its head, a tense noiseless spring, its fangs
buried in his neck,--with no knife the contest would not have gone well with
him. But of deadly big game he saw no sign that day. Once from a distant
brake he was surprised to hear the gobble of the wild turkey; and more
surprised still--and delighted--when the trail led to a twilight gloom and
coolness, and at the green margin of a little spring he saw a stag drinking.
It turned its terrified eyes upon him for an instant and then bounded away
like a gray shadow.