Stage-coach and Tavern Days

by Alice Morse Earle

Cutter’s Tavern
Sign-board.

He was, in one sense, a thoroughly satisfactory apparition, being suitably clad in full trappings of war, buckskin and turkey feathers, bear’s teeth and paint; he was none of those miserable half-breed travesties of Indians who sometimes still sneaked round to the tavern kitchen, clad in vile clothes of civilization, so greasy and worn and dirty that a blanket would have been as stately in comparison as a Roman toga; Indians devoid of bravery, dignity, and even of cunning, whose laziness, high cheek-bones, and hair coarse as a horse’s tail, and their unvarying love of rum, were the only proofs of Indian blood; whose skin, even, had turned from copper tawny to dingy yellow.

To Mrs. Jencks, reposing in state among her abundant goose feathers on the high bedstead, came one night the spectre in her dreams, pulled off her nightcap, seized her by her long hair, dragged her downstairs and out of doors, pointed fiercely to the roots of the great cedar at the gate, muttering all the while in broken English of avenging an insult to his race. As Mrs. Jencks awoke wholly uninjured, she merely laughed at her vision, saying that all the talk she had heard had made her dream it. But when she had dreamt it three times, three nights running, and the ghost kept speaking of an act of insult to him, that it must be avenged, removed, etc., and kept ever pointing to the base of the cedar tree, Ben Jencks insisted on digging for what he felt sure was hidden treasure. He and his menials dug deep and dug wide, and nearly killed the splendid old cedar, but found nothing. The next time the ghost appeared he dragged the astral body of Mrs. Jencks down to the other cedar tree on the right-hand side of the gateway. Ben Jencks dug again with the same result. Neither he nor the ghost was daunted, and a fine apple tree in the garden next the orchard was the next victim. It was a Sapson apple tree, the variety which all the children loved, and it ceased bearing for several years. As it wilted and pined after the rough spading at its roots, Mrs. Jencks doggedly vowed never to repeat any of the ghost’s lies again.

Clock with
Painting of
Pahquoique House.

We must not be too contemptuous of this unprincipled Indian spirit. He simply belonged to a class of ghosts of whom Andrew Lang says complainingly that they have a passion for pointing out places and saying treasures or skeletons are buried within; whereas it always proves that nothing of the sort is ever found. There are liars among the living as well as of the dead, and Mrs. Jencks’s Indian never said it was a treasure—he only hinted darkly at the buried thing being associated with some degradation or insult to the Indian race. The treasure was all in Ben Jencks’s brain—and the brains of his friends. Mrs. Jencks’s silence to her husband did not prevent her however from having several treasure-hunts alone by herself, after the Indian’s renewed visits and pointing finger, for he changed nothing in his programme save the spot he indicated. She spent an entire day pulling and poking among the attic rafters. She rolled out several empty cider barrels from a distant cellar corner, and even dug a hole there secretly. Her husband at last discovered her mysteriously poking a hole down a disused well, and promptly had the well cleaned out; but of course nothing was found save the usual well contents, and thus the years rolled on.

One morning Lucy Jencks whimpered that the Indian had pulled her out of bed in the night and pointed out to her where to hunt. Lucy was nearly eleven years old; a clever, sharp, active little Yankee, who helped to shell peas and string beans and scour pewter, and who could knit famously and spin pretty well. This brought her naturally in the company of her elders, and she proved the influence of the ghost talk she had heard by repeating the Indian’s words that “the derision of his ancient race, the degradation of his ancient customs, must be avenged.” Derision and degradation are too big words for a little girl to use untutored, or for an Indian ghost either; and in truth they were not the precise words he had spoken at first. But Parson Pillsbury had been present at the digging under the Sapson apple tree, a piously sceptical but secretly interested spectator, and he had thus explained the somewhat broken “Injun-talk” which Mrs. Jencks reported. It proves the tractability and intelligence of this ghost of a heathen that he ever after used the words of the Puritan minister.

The ghost pointed out to Lucy Jencks a very inaccessible spot to be searched. It was the farther end of a loft over a shed, and had to be entered by a short ladder from a leanto. This loft was packed solidly with the accumulated debris of three-quarters of a century, portions of farm tools, poor old furniture, boxes, barrels, every old stuff and piece that was too mean even for the main attic, in which were poor enough relics. It had never been searched or sorted out since Ben Jencks came to the tavern, and I doubt whether Mrs. Jencks would have listened to a ransacking then but for one circumstance, the Jencks family were going to leave the Black House Tavern—and they really ought to know exactly what was in it ere they sold it with its contents. They had not been driven from the family home by this Indian spirit of dreams, but by a more powerful spirit—that of emigration. Neighbors and friends in Rutland and Worcester were going to Ohio—that strange new territory, and they would go too. A single dead Indian, and such a liar, too, seemed of but little account when they thought of the infinite bands of very live Indians in their chosen home.