"Go ahead! don't wait for me! I will be with you directly!"
Through the thick woods of Mount Clinton they swept up, over a bridle-path so rough as to have made the most laborious if not the most dangerous walking—over great boulders of stone lying in the very path, and apparently impossible to get over or around—over patches of corduroy road utterly defying description, except to the men who isolated Fort Donelson and planted the Swamp Angels in the marshes of Charleston—over and through gutters and gulches of slippery stone and more slippery mud—but ever ascending at a painful acclivity. The horses breathed heavily; and their riders, in the thick and foggy air, did little better. They caught occasional glimpses through the trees, down the sudden slopes at the left, of the thick mist rolling below, but could see nothing else to remind them of the height they were attaining; and as the dense fog swept in their faces, and the trees dripped moisture on them when they swept beneath their branches, and the path grew more and more desolate and difficult, they grew silent, the whole cavalcade, apparently by common consent. There are aspects in which Nature looks and feels too solemn for the light word and the flippant jest; and the man who cannot be awed beyond his ordinary mood when standing under the edge of the sheet of Niagara, or beside the sea when it is lashed into resistless fury, or in gale and mist on the bleak, bare, desolate mountains of the North, should never insult the grand and the terrible by going into their presence!
And yet all persons, who have true reverence in their hearts, are not always awed beyond themselves, even in the most impressive of situations: as witness, to some degree, the incidents following.
They had surmounted the first acclivity, perhaps a mile from the Crawford, and were commencing a slight descent which made every rider look to the horse's feet and ride with a slight tremor,—when the stillness was suddenly broken in a manner which almost curdled the blood of the timid and needed a second reassurance for even the boldest.
"Pop-pop-pop-pa-hoo! Hoo-hoo-oo-oo!" came from the path below, with that hideous power and distinctness of lungs that have chilled so many hearts and whitened so many faces since the white man first intruded on the hunting-grounds of the American Indian. A shrill, dissonant, horrible yell, combining the blind ferocity of the beast with the deadlier rage of man, such as made the poor mother clasp her babe closer to the breast when it rang around the block-houses of Massachusetts and New York in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—such as less than three years ago proved that it was undying in the savage throat, by pealing over the mangled bodies and burned dwellings of the Minnesota massacres.
"Good heavens!—what is that?" cried half a dozen of the ladies in a breath.
"An Indian war-whoop, certainly!" said one of the gentlemen, his face white as wax at the sudden shock.
"It is war time, and they tell me that the rebels yell terribly!" said one of the ladies. "Can it be—" but then the absurdity of the idea struck her and she paused.
"Albert Pike was a New England man: perhaps he is here with his Arkansas savages!" said another, whether in jest or earnest no one could well discover.
It was surprising how in that one instant the cavalcade had shortened its length—the foremost stopping and the rearmost closing up. Man is a gregarious animal, especially when a little surprised or frightened!