Horse-Shoe Robinson A Tale of the Tory Ascendency

Excerpt

In the winter of eighteen hundred and eighteen-nineteen, I had occasion to visit the western section of South Carolina. The public conveyances had taken me to Augusta, in Georgia. There I purchased a horse, a most trusty companion, with whom I had many pleasant experiences: a sorrel, yet retained by me in admiring memory. A valise strapped behind my saddle, with a great coat spread upon that, furnished all that I required of personal accommodation. My blood beat temperately with the pulse of youth and health. I breathed the most delicious air in the world. My travel tended to the region of the most beautiful scenery. The weather of early January was as balmy as October; a light warm haze mellowed the atmosphere, and cast the softest and richest hues over the landscape. I retraced my steps from Augusta to Edgefield, which I had passed in the stage coach. From Edgefield I went to Abbeville, and thence to Pendleton. I was now in the old district of Ninety Six, just at the foot of the mountains. My course was still westward. I journeyed alone, or rather, I ought to say, in good company, for my horse and I had established a confidential friendship, and we amused ourselves with a great deal of pleasant conversation—in our way. Besides, my fancy was busy, and made the wayside quite populous—with people of its own: there were but few of any other kind.

In the course of my journey I met an incident, which I have preserved in my journal. The reader of the tale which occupies this volume has some interest in it.

"Upon a day," as the old ballads have it, one of the best days of this exquisite climate, my road threaded the defiles of some of the grandest mountains of the country. Huge ramparts of rock toppled over my path, and little streams leaped, in beautiful cascades, from ledge to ledge, and brawled along the channels, which often supplied the only footway for my horse, and, gliding through tangled screens of rhododendron, laurel, arbor vitæ, and other evergreens, plunged into rivers, whose waters exceed anything I had ever conceived of limpid purity. It may be poetical to talk of liquid crystal, but no crystal has the absolute perfection of the transparency of these streams. The more distant mountain sides, where the opening valley offered them to my view, were fortified with stupendous walls, or banks of solid and unbroken rock, rising in successive benches one above another, with masses of dark pine between; the highest forming a crest to the mountain, cutting the sky in sharp profile, with images of castellated towers, battlements, and buttresses, around whose summits the inhabiting buzzard, with broad extended wings, floated and rocked in air and swept in majestic circles.

The few inhabitants of this region were principally the tenants of the bounty lands, which the State of South Carolina had conferred upon the soldiers of the Revolution; and their settlements, made upon the rich bottoms of the river valleys, were separated from each other by large tracts of forest.

I had much perplexity in some portions of this day's journey in finding my way through the almost pathless forest which lay between two of these settlements. That of which I was in quest was situated upon the Seneca, a tributary of the Savanna river, here called Tooloolee. It was near sundown, when I emerged from the wilderness upon a wagon road, very uncertain of my whereabout, and entertaining some rather anxious misgivings as to my portion for the night.

I had seen no one for the last five or six hours, and upon falling into the road I did not know whether I was to take the right or the left hand—a very material problem for my solution just then.

During this suspense, a lad, apparently not above ten years of age, mounted bare back on a fine horse, suddenly emerged from the wood about fifty paces ahead of me, and galloped along the road in the same direction that I had myself resolved to take. I quickened my speed to overtake him, but from the rapidity of his movement, I found myself, at the end of a mile, not as near him as I was at the beginning. Some open country in front, however, showed me that I was approaching a settlement. Almost at the moment of making this discovery, I observed that the lad was lying on the ground by the road-side. I hastened to him, dismounted, and found him sadly in want of assistance. His horse had run off with him, thrown him, and dislocated, as it afterwards appeared, his shoulder-joint....