The Story of Old Fort Loudon

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long, level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to southwest, seeming as they approached to interpose an insurmountable barrier to further progress, until suddenly, as in the miracle of a dream, the craggy wooded heights showed a gap, cloven to the heart of the steeps, opening out their path as through some splendid gateway, and promising deliverance, a new life, and a new and beautiful land. For beyond the darkling cliffs on either hand an illuminated vista stretched in every lengthening perspective, with softly nestling sheltered valleys, and parallel lines of distant azure mountains, and many a mile of level woodland high on an elevated plateau, all bedight in the lingering flare of the yellow, and deep red, and sere brown of late autumn, and all suffused with an opaline haze and the rich, sweet languors of sunset-tide on an Indian-summer day.

As that enchanted perspective opened to the view, a sudden joyous exclamation rang out on the still air. The next moment a woman, walking beside one of the packhorses, clapped both hands over her lips, and turning looked with apprehensive eyes at the two men who followed her. The one in advance cast at her a glance of keen reproach, and then the whole party paused and with tense attention bent every faculty to listen.

Silence could hardly have been more profound. The regular respiration of the two horses suggested sound. But the wind did not stir; the growths of the limitless cane-brakes in the valley showed no slight quiver in the delicately poised fibers of their brown feathery crests; the haze, all shot through with glimmers of gold in its gauzy gray folds, rested on the mute woods; the suave sky hung above the purple western heights without a breath. No suggestion of motion in all the landscape, save the sudden melting away of a flake of vermilion cloud in a faintly green expanse of the crystal heavens.

The elder man dropped his hand, that had been raised to impose silence, and lifted his eyes from the ground. "I cannot be rid of the idea that we are followed," he said. "But I hear nothing."

Although the eldest of the group, he was still young,—twenty-five, perhaps. He was tall, strong, alert, with a narrow, long face; dark, slow eyes, that had a serious, steadfast expression; dark brown hair, braided in the queue often discarded by the hunters of this day. A certain staid, cautious sobriety of manner hardly assorted with the rough-and-ready import of his garb and the adventurous place and time. Both he and the younger man, who was in fact a mere boy not yet seventeen, but tall, muscular, sinewy,—stringy, one might say,—of build, were dressed alike in loose hunting-shirts of buckskin, heavily fringed, less for the sake of ornament than the handiness of a selection of thongs always ready to be detached for use; for the same reason the deerskin leggings, reaching to the thighs over the knee-breeches and long stockings of that day, were also furnished with these substantial fringes; shot-pouch and powder-horn were suspended from a leather belt, and on the other side a knife-hilt gleamed close to the body. Both wore coonskin caps, but that of the younger preserved the tail to hang down like a plume among his glossy brown tangles of curls, which, but for a bit of restraining ribbon, resisted all semblance to the gentility of a queue. The boy was like his brother in the clear complexion and the color of the dark eyes and hair, but the expression of his eyes was wild, alert, and although fired with the earnest ardor of first youth, they had certain roguish intimations, subdued now since they were still and seriously expectant, but which gave token how acceptably he could play that cherished rôle, to a secluded and isolated fireside, of family buffoon, and make gay mirth for the applause of the chimney-corner....