The country all about Charleston was primitively wild and picturesque, rocky, hilly, and leading to solitary life and dreams of sylvani and forest fairies. There were fountained hills, and dreamy darkling woods, and old Indian graves, and a dancing stream, across which lay a petrified tree, and everywhere a little travelled land. I explored it with Goshorn, riding far and wide into remote mountain recesses, to get the signatures in attestation of men who could rarely write, but on the other hand could “shoot their mark” with a rifle to perfection, and who would assuredly have placed such signature on me had I not been a holy messenger of Ile, and an angel of coming moneyed times.
One day we stopped at a farm-house in a wild, lonely place. There was only an old woman there—one of the stern, resolute, hard-muscled frontier women, the daughters of mothers who had fought “Injuns”—and a calf. And thereby hung a tale, which the three men with me fully authenticated.
The whole country thereabouts had been for four years so worried, harried, raided, raked, plundered, and foraged by Federals and Confederates—one day the former, the next the latter; blue and grey, or sky and sea—that the old lady had nothing left to live on. Hens, cows, horses, corn, all had gone save one calf, the Benjamin and idol of her heart.
One night she heard a piteous baaing, and, seizing a broom, rushed to the now henless hen-house, in which she kept the calf, to find in it a full-grown panther attacking her pet. By this time the old lady had grown desperate, and seizing the broom, she proceeded to “lam” the wild beast with the handle, and with all her heart; and the fiend of ferocity, appalled at her attack, fled. I saw the calf with the marks of the panther’s claws, not yet quite healed; I saw the broom; and, lastly, I saw the old woman, the mother in Ishmael; whose face was a perfect guarantee of the truth of the story. One of us suggested that the old lady should have
the calf’s hide tanned and wear it as a trophy, like an Indian, which would have been a strange reversal of Shakespeare’s application of it, or to
“Hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs.”
Then there came the great spring freshet in Elk River, which rose unusually high, fifty feet above its summer level. It had come to within an inch or two of my floor, and yet I went to bed and to sleep. By a miracle it rose no more, for I had a distinct conviction it would not, which greatly amazed everybody. But many were drowned all about us. The next day a man who professed bone-setting and doctoring, albeit not diplomaed, asked me to go with him and act as interpreter to a German patient who had a broken thigh. While felling a tree far away in the forest, it thundered down on him, and kept him down for two or three days till he was discovered. To get to him we went in a small canoe, and paddled ourselves with shingles or wooden tiles, used to cover roofs. On the way I saw a man on a roof fiddling; only a bit of the roof was above water. He was waiting for deliverance. Many and strange indeed were all the scenes and incidents of that inundation, and marvellous the legends which were told of other freshets in the days of yore.
I never could learn to play cards. Destiny forbade it, and always stepped in promptly to stop all such proceedings. One night Sandford and friends sat down to teach me poker, when bang, bang, went a revolver outside, and a bullet buried itself in the door close by me. A riotous, evil-minded darkey, who attended to my washing, had got into a fight, and was forthwith conveyed to the Bull-pen, or military prison. I was afraid lest I might lose my shirts, and so “visited him” next day and found him in irons, but reading a newspaper at his ease. From him I learned the address of “the coloured lady” who had my underclothing.
The Bull-pen was a picturesque place—a large log enclosure, full of strange inmates, such as wild guerillas in
moccasins, grey-back Confederates and blue-coat Federals guilty of many a murder, arson, and much horse-stealing, desolate deserters, often deserving pity—the débris of a four years’ war, the crumbs of the great loaf fallen to the dirt.