Almost imperceptibly the young man found himself in conversation with the little postmistress. Doubtless she was interested to meet an attractive stranger, one from such a distant city as Philadelphia. While they talked, the letter was gradually written, sealed, weighed and paid for–it was before the days of postage stamps, and the postmistress politely waited on her customers.
He had told her his name–Mifflin Sargeant–and she had given him hers–Caroline Hager–and that she was eighteen years of age. He had told her about his prospective trip into the wilds of Centre County, of the fierce beasts which he had heard still abounded there. The girl informed him that he would not have to go farther west to meet wild animals; that wolf hides by the dozen were brought to Stover’s each winter, where they were traded in; that old Stover, a justice of the peace, attested to the bounty warrants–in fact, the wolves howled from the hill across the road on cold nights when the dogs were particularly restless.
Her father was a wolf hunter, and would never allow her to go home alone; consequently, when he could not accompany her she remained over night in the dwelling which housed the post office. Panthers, too, were occasionally met with in the locality–in the original surveys this region was referred to as “Catland”–also huge red bears and the somewhat smaller black ones.
If he was going West, she continued in her pretty way, he must not fail to visit the great limestone cave near where the Brush Mountains ended. She had a sister married and living not far from it, from whom she had heard wonderful tales, though she had never been there herself. It was a cave so vast it had not as yet been fully explored; one could travel for miles in it in a boat; the Karoondinha, or John Penn’s Creek, had its source in it; Indians had formerly lived in the dry parts, and wild beasts. Then she lowered her voice to say that it was now haunted by the Indians’ spirits.
And so they talked until a very late hour, the crowd in the post office melting away, until Jared Hager, the girl’s father, in his wolfskin coat, appeared to escort her home, to the cabin beyond the waterfall near the trail to Dolly Hope’s Valley. She was to have a holiday until the next afternoon.
The wolf hunter was a courageous-looking man, much darker than his daughter, with a heavy black beard and bushy eyebrows; in fact, she was the only brown-haired, blue-eyed one in the entire family connection. He spoke pleasantly with the young stranger, and then they all said good night.
“Don’t forget to visit the great cavern,” Caroline called to the youth.
“I surely will,” he answered, “and stop here on my way east to tell you all about it.”
“That’s good; we want to see you again,” said the girl, as she disappeared into the gloomy shadows which the shaggy white pines cast across the road.
Young Stover was playing “Green Grows the Rushes” on his fiddle in the tap-room, and Sargeant sat there listening to him, dreaming and musing all the while, his consciousness singularly alert, until the closing hour came.