But it wasn’t a terrible night, only a fairly chilly one in early June, with all the stars out, and Asterie’s worst offense was that she was “keeping company” with another!
The young man could not sleep all night and wondered if the girl was similarly afflicted, as the light continued to burn; or maybe she was only like many mountain people, and slept with a night-light, for no sound came from her tiny apartment. After that night his pleasures at Castlecloyd were ended. He loved the fair and fragile girl, whom he hated to see working so hard, so patient and so misunderstood. He dreaded the thought of her inevitable marriage to Garis, a rough, common fellow of no refinement. He could not think of courting her himself as his family had never in ten generations been declasse. There was nothing to do but to sigh in vain, and watch that light coming from beneath her door. And on nights when the wind howled, and the rain beat about the roof, or some particularly hard gust sent a few cold drops pattering through a crack in the shingles, on his face, he found consolation by reciting to himself the lament of Horace in his Ode X. But he did present her with her silhouette, which she blushingly accepted, and on several occasions when she sang at the organ, complimented her on her sweet contralto voice.
In the autumn when the red maples had cast the last of their leaves, and the pines and hemlocks looked the blacker in contrast, Stewardson’s particular work was done, and he prepared to return to Philadelphia. John Smoke, aged Seneca, professional hunter of the outfit, agreed to take him and one of his chums to Rattlesnake in a birchbark canoe. Seth Iredell Nelson, another hunter, would take two more of the young men in another canoe. Asterie was on the leaf-strewn bank to see them depart, dressed in her best pink denham frock, and cherry colored peach-basket straw bonnet. It made him resentful to watch Garis put his arm on her shoulder as the canoes shoved away, to the tune of old Smoke’s Seneca chant.
Billy Cloyd himself was not present; he excused himself as not feeling well, and Went upstairs shortly after breakfast. On the journey old Smoke confided to his passengers the cause of the landlord’s backward conduct. A black calf had been born the night before; whenever one appeared in the family it brought bad luck; that had been a belief with Cloyd’s people even in the remote days when they lived in the “old country.”
Then the aged Indian told the legend of how the redmen came to the American continent. They had been driven eastward by famines until they came to a great sea, across which they found a narrow strip of land, which they crossed. They came to a country teeming with game, and made themselves at home, wandering great distances to enjoy the chase and visit the natural wonders.
Later they decided to revisit their old home, but the sea had washed over the strip of land, and their canoes were not stout enough to breast the angry waves.
Stewardson listened to this and other old tales in a half-abstracted way; his thoughts were back with Asterie Cloyd; she with that wonderful, impossible-to-silhouette nose, her sweet voice, and quiet, restful manner. He did not marry any of the stately Junoesque beauties whom he knew, upon returning to Philadelphia, but became critical of the fair sex, and shunned their company whenever possible. About two years later the Civil War broke out, and being intimately acquainted with the Kane family, he hurried to Harrisburg, and the genial “Colonel Tom” gave him a commission in his 1st Rifle Regiment, soon to win deathless fame under the name of “Bucktails.”
One evening in camp Colonel Kane and Captain Stewardson were sitting before their tents, stroking their long fair beards, for it was the aim of every young soldier to be the most shaggily hirsute. The Colonel was telling of his memorable trip on rafts from McKean County to Harrisburg with his recruits and how he spent a night with a man named Garis, who had acted like a copperhead, and though an expert rifleman, declined to enlist. “Yet he had ample cause to be out of sorts” continued the Colonel. “He had lately buried his wife, who, from all accounts, was an exceptionally pretty girl, one of Billy Cloyd’s daughters.”
If he had watched Stewardson’s face carefully, he would have seen it growing paler, even in the camp fire’s ruddy glow, beneath that mighty beard.
“Cloyd, who before the girl’s marriage, had lost his wife,” continued Colonel Kane, "went up Bennett’s Branch, to take out spars, and started to clear a farm on the mountain top, and build an even more ambitious mansion. Garis told me that the old man had recently sold the whole property, including the timber, to William E. Dodge of New York, who intends naming it after the President, the ‘Lincoln Farm’, and using it for a private summer resort."