“As the night wore on, we looked from the open door of the hall, across the swirling waters of the Mississippi. The stars were dim with haze, and the air was still and soft and damp; it seemed hard to breathe it down deep in the lungs, and the boatmen looked for rain. It was eleven hours of the night, when wild sounds were heard without, and all the frolic ceased. The reports of many guns and the war-cries of Indians were soon recognized, and they grew louder and came nearer. The people were saying to each other, ‘The war-party is returning from the Chickasaw lands.’ It was not long before there came into the room many white men and as many as twenty Chickasaws, daubed with paint and covered with mud. They had been in pursuit of some of Little Warrior’s braves, who had hidden in the swamps after the murder of the white families along their trail. The chief, Big Tree, held up for all to see the head of one of the Creeks, a sight, Señores, that chilled my blood, for I knew it to be the head of White Corn, whose house was built on the Coosa River, and whose hospitality was always to be counted upon.
“As I looked upon the wild rejoicing over the death of the misguided brave, the old Spanish timepiece rang the midnight hour, so softly and so sweetly, so like the benediction of an angel choir, that in an instant all was still. Then the floor seemed to rise and sway beneath our feet, the building rocked like a ship at sea, and as the torches and the candles fell one by one to the floor, the cries of terror and despair were like the shrieking of the bottomless pit. Before all could reach the street, a dozen were trampled under foot.
“We were sick and faint with the swaying of the ground; the crash of the falling roofs of the cabins was mingled with the roar of the water, swelling in great wrathful waves about the banks. We held our breath as the earth rose suddenly under a cabin across the way, higher and higher, until with a leaping out of gas-like flame we saw what seemed an open grave, deep and wide and long, into which the fated house fell out of sight. There was no longer a crying aloud. Dumb with despair, the hopeless people awaited the coming of the tardy sun. The earth still rocked and trembled and yawned, and huge waves swept at times among the cabins lower down. It was like the Day of Judgment, and what we should see when day had come, no man could think.
“It is a long story, Señores, longer than you have time to hear. When at last there was light once more, we looked across wide lakes where forests of pine and oak had stood the night before. In many a place the tops of the tallest trees were scarcely seen above the waves. Where the bayous had been wide and deep, there was new, strange land, without tree or plant, fresh from the bowels of the earth. The lake upon whose shores we sit to-night had swallowed the hills and valleys of an ancient hunting-ground; the blackened trunks that have stood these many years will remain a hundred more to tell the story of the earthquake that lasted for weeks and months, and changed the face of the region about us; it destroyed the town of New Madrid, now but half rebuilt in a safer spot, and it swept the wilderness with all the destructive force of a hurricane. From this there came the story of Tecumseh’s wrathful threat, to stamp upon the ground and destroy the cabins of the Tookabatcha town.”
The Padre ceased, for suddenly the cabin seemed to swing like a drifting ship. They all started to their feet, the children ran to their mother’s arms, and then the swaying stopped. It was one of the strange quakes that have never entirely ceased in the hundred years since the time of the Padre’s story. As late as 1907 a rather disquieting shock took place in the region of Samburg, but it did nothing notable in the way of damage. There is no doubt that the “harricane” so often mentioned by Davy was the work of an earthquake.
[XII.]
HUNTING BEARS
Hauling a net in Reelfoot Lake—A ton of shovel-nosed cats and alligator gars—Davy rubs his eyes at the sight, and resolves to keep out of the water—He kills fifteen bears in two weeks—He goes home, but soon feels obliged to have another hunt—With his son, he kills three bears the first day—The bear hunt in the cane—Takes a hungry man and family into partnership in the hunt—How the “varments” spend the long winters—He trees a bear near Reelfoot Lake—“Mixing it up” with the dogs—Salting the meat.