CHAPTER I
A certain wild chasm, cut deep into the very heart of a spur of the Great Smoky Mountains, is spanned by a network, which seen from above is the heavy interlacing timbers of a railroad bridge thrown across the narrow space from one great cliff to the other, but seen from the depths of the gorge below it seems merely a fantastic gossamer web fretting the blue sky.
It often trembles with other sounds than the reverberating mountain thunder and beneath other weight than the heavy fall of the mountain rain. Trains flash across it at all hours of the night and day; in the darkness the broad glare of the headlight and the flying column of pursuing sparks have all the scenic effect of some strange uncanny meteor, with the added emphasis of a thunderous roar and a sulphurous smell; in the sunshine there skims over it at intervals a cloud of white vapor and a swift black shadow.
“Sence they hev done sot up that thar bridge I hain’t seen a bar nor a deer in five mile down this hyar gorge. An’ the fish don’t rise nuther like they uster do. That thar racket skeers ’em.”
And the young hunter, leaning upon his rifle, his hands idly clasped over its muzzle, gazed with disapproving eyes after the flying harbinger of civilization as it sped across the airy structure and plunged into the deep forest that crowned the heights.
Civilization offered no recompense to the few inhabitants of the gorge for the exodus of deer and bear and fish. It passed swiftly far above them, seeming to traverse the very sky. They had no share in the world; the freighted trains brought them nothing—not even a newspaper wafted down upon the wind; the wires flashed no word to them. The picturesque situation of the two or three little log-houses scattered at long intervals down the ravine; the crystal clear flow of a narrow, deep stream—merely a silver thread as seen from the bridge above; the grand proportions of the towering cliffs, were calculated to cultivate the grace of imagination in the brakemen, leaning from their respective platforms; to suggest a variation in the Pullman conductor’s jaunty formula, “’Twould hurt our feelings pretty badly to fall over there, I fancy,” and to remind the out-looking passenger of the utter loneliness of the vast wilds penetrated by the railroad. But they left no speculations behind them. The terrible sense of the inconceivable width of the world was spared the simple-minded denizens of the woods. The clanging, crashing trains came like the mountain storms, no one knew whence, and went no one knew whither. The universe lay between the rocky walls of the ravine. Even this narrow stage had its drama.
In the depths of the chasm spanned by the bridge there stood in the shadow of one of the great cliffs a forlorn little log hut, so precariously perched on the ledgy slope that it might have seemed the nest of some strange bird rather than a human habitation. The huge natural column of the crag rose sheer and straight two hundred feet above it, but the descent from the door, though sharp and steep, was along a narrow path leading in zigzag windings amid great bowlders and knolls of scraggy earth, pushing their way out from among the stones that sought to bury them, and fragments of the cliff fallen long ago and covered with soft moss. The path appeared barely passable for man, but upon it could have been seen the imprint of a hoof, and beside the hut was a little shanty, from the rude window of which protruded a horse’s head, with so interested an expression of countenance that he looked as if he were assisting at the conversation going on out-of-doors this mild March afternoon.
“Ye could find deer, an’ bar, an’ sech, easy enough ef ye would go arter ’em,” replied the young hunter’s mother, as she sat in the doorway knitting a yarn sock. “That thar still-house up yander ter the Ridge hev skeered off the deer an’ bar fur ye worse’n the railroad hev. Ye kin git that fur an’ no furder. Ye hev done got triflin’ an’ no ’count, an’ nuthin’ else in this worl’ ails ye,—nur the deer an’ bar, nuther,” she concluded, with true maternal candor.