For Woman's Love

by Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

"Old Scythia!" exclaimed Corona, interrupting the narrative.

"Yes, dear; the old seeress of Raven Roost, as they used to call her. Of course, I never, even as a boy, believed in the supernatural powers of divination ascribed to her, but I must credit her with wonderful intuitions. She had divined the very crisis that had come, and in that hour of my agony and humiliation she exercised a strange power over me," said Rothsay; and then he took up the thread of his narrative again.

He told her that on leaving the State capital he had taken neither railway carriage nor river steamboat, but had tramped, with old Scythia by his side, all the way from the Cumberland Mountains to the Southwestern frontier.

The journey had taken them all the summer, for they traveled very slowly—sometimes walking no more than ten miles a day, sometimes sleeping on pallets made of leaves under the trees of the forest, sometimes reaching a pioneer's log hut, where they could get a hot supper and a night's lodging. Sometimes stopping over Sunday in some settlement where there was no church, and where Rule, though not an ordained minister, would on Christian principles hold a service and preach a sermon.

So they journeyed over the mountains, and through the valleys and forests, until at length, in the end of October, they arrived at the poorest, loneliest, and most forlorn of all the pioneer settlements they had seen.

This was La Terrepeur, on the borders of the Indian Reserve. It was a settlement of about twenty log huts, in a small valley shut in by densely wooded hills, and watered by a narrow brook. It was too near the country of the Comanches for safety, and too far from the nearest fort for protection. There was neither church nor school house within a hundred miles.

The travelers were hospitably received by the pioneers, and here, as the autumn was far advanced, and travel difficult, they determined to halt for the winter, at least, and in the spring to go farther south in search of Scythia's tribe, the Nez Percees, who had been moved away from their former hunting grounds.

They were feasted and lodged by the hutters that night. The next morning the men turned out in a body, felled trees and cleared a spot on the slope of a wooded hill, sawed logs and built two huts, one for Rothsay, and one for old Scythia. They were finished before night. And then the settlers had a house-warming, which was a breakdown dance to the music of the one fiddle in the settlement, and a supper of such eatables and drinkables as the place could afford.

But there was no furniture in these two primitive dwellings. So once more these wayfarers had each to sleep on a bed of leaves.

On the second day the man who owned the only mule and cart, and was the only expressman and carrier to the settlement, offered to go to the nearest post trader's station—a distance of fifty miles—and purchase anything that the strangers might need, if said strangers had the money to buy.