Without presuming to doubt the veracity of tradition in these matters, an incident from the writer's boyhood in New England may be instanced. The house of an unpopular gentleman was assailed—not in the ostentatious manner just described, yet in a way that gave him a good deal of trouble. Dead cats appeared mysteriously in his neighborhood; weird noises arose under his windows; he tried to pick up letters from his doorstep that became mere chalk-marks at his touch, so that he took up only splinters under his nails. One night, as a seance was about beginning in his yard, he emerged from a clump of bushes, flew in the direction of the disturbance, laid violent hands on the writer's collar, and bumped his nose on a paving-stone. Then the manifestations were discontinued, for several nights, for repairs.
STORIED SPRINGS
Like the Greeks, the red men endowed the woods and waters with tutelary sprites, and many of the springs that are now resorted to as fountains of healing were known long before the settlement of Europeans here, the gains from drinking of them being ascribed to the beneficence of spirit guardians. The earliest comers to these shores—or, rather, the earliest of those who entertained such beliefs—fancied that the fabled fountain of eternal youth would be found among the other blessings of the land. To the Spaniards Florida was a land of promise and mystery. Somewhere in its interior was fabled to stand a golden city ruled by a king whose robes sparkled with precious dust, and this city was named for the adventurer—El Dorado, or the Place of the Gilded One. Here, they said, would be found the elixir of life. The beautiful Silver Spring, near the head of the Ocklawaha, with its sandy bottom plainly visible at the depth of eighty feet, was thought to be the source of the life-giving waters, but, though Ponce de Leon heard of this, he never succeeded in fighting his way to it through the jungle.
In Georgia, in the reputed land of Chicora, were a sacred stream that made all young again who bathed there, and a spring so delectable that a band of red men, chancing on it in a journey, could not leave it, and are there forever.
In the island of "Bimini," one of the Lucayos (Bahamas), was another such a fountain.
Between the Flint and Ocmulgee Rivers the Creeks declared was a spring of life, on an island in a marsh, defended from approach by almost impenetrable labyrinths,—a heaven where the women were fairer than any other on earth.
The romantic and superstitious Spaniards believed these legends, and spent years and treasure in searching for these springs. And, surely, if the new and striking scenes of this Western world caused Columbus to "boast that he had found the seat of paradise, it will not appear strange that Ponce de Leon should dream of discovering the fountain of youth."
The Yuma Apaches had been warned by one of their oracles never to enter a certain canon in Castle Dome range, Arizona, but a company of them forgot this caution while in chase of deer, and found themselves between walls of pink and white fluorite with a spring bubbling at the head of the ravine. Tired and heated, they fell on their faces to drink, when they found that the crumbling quartz that formed the basin of the spring was filled with golden nuggets. Eagerly gathering up this precious substance, for they knew what treasure of beads, knives, arrows, and blankets the Mexicans would exchange for it, they attempted to make their way out of the canon; but a cloudburst came, and on the swiftly rising tide all were swept away but one, who survived to tell the story. White men have frequently but vainly tried to find that spring.
In Southwestern Kansas, on a hill a quarter-mile from Solomon River, is the Sacred Water, pooled in a basin thirty feet across. When many stand about the brink it slowly rises. Here two Panis stopped on their return from a buffalo hunt, and one of them unwittingly stepped on a turtle a yard long. Instantly he felt his feet glued to the monster's back, for, try as he might, he could not disengage himself, and the creature lumbered away to the pool, where it sank with him. There the turtle god remains, and beads, arrows, ear-rings, and pipes that are dropped in, it swallows greedily. The Indians use the water to mix their paint with, but never for drinking.
The mail rider, crossing the hot desert of Arizona, through the cacti and over holes where scorpions hide, makes for Devil's Well, under El Diablo—a dark pool surrounded with gaunt rocks. Here, coming when the night is on, he lies down, and the wind swishing in the sage—brush puts him to sleep. At dawn he wakens with the frightened whinny of his horse in his ears and, all awake, looks about him. A stranger, wrapped in a tattered blanket, is huddled in a recess of the stones, arrived there, like himself, at night, perhaps. Poising his rifle on his knee, the rider challenges him, but never a sign the other makes. Then, striding over to him, he pulls away the blanket and sees a shrivelled corpse with a face that he knows—his brother. Hardly is this meeting made when a hail of arrows falls around. His horse is gone. The Apaches, who know no gentleness and have no mercy, have manned every gap and sheltering rock. With his rifle he picks them off, as they rise in sight with arrows at the string, and sends them tumbling into the dust; but, when his last bullet has sped into a red man's heart, they rise in a body and with knives and hatchets hew him to death. And that is why the Devil's Well still tastes of blood.