The Englishman felt strangely at ease in the cabin, watching the slender, reed-like girl prepare the meal, and enjoyed the dinner with his humble entertainers.
Shortly after the repast another bearded backwoodsman appeared at the door. The lamp black maker had an appointment to go with him to some distant parts of the Shade Mountains to examine bear pens, and asked to be excused. He would not be back until the next day; it was nothing unusual for him to leave his friend alone for a week at a time on similar excursions.
The Viscount was in no hurry to go, as never had a woman appealed to him as did the lamp black maker’s young assistant. Perhaps it was the unconventional character of their first meeting that shocked his love into being; at any rate he was severely smitten; probably John Rolfe was no more so, on his first glimpse of the humane Pocohontas.
After the two hunters had gone, the young woman sat down on the other courting block, on the opposite of the inglenook, and The Viscount decided to ask her to tell him the story of her life. She colored a trifle, saying that no one had ever been interested in her life’s history before, therefore, she might not repeat it very well.
She had been born at sea, of parents coming from the northern part of Ireland. They had settled first in the Cumberland Valley, then, when she was about a dozen years old, decided to migrate to Kentucky. They had not gotten much further than the covered bridge across the Little Juniata, when they were ambushed by robbers, and all the adult members of the party, her parents and an uncle, were slain. The children were carried off, being apportioned among the highwaymen. She fell to the lot of the leader of the band, Conrad Jacobs, who took more than a fatherly interest in her.
He was a middle-aged married man, but he openly said that when the girl was big enough, he would chase his wife away and install her in her place. But she was kindly treated by the strange people, even more so than at home, for her mother had been very severe and unreasonable.
When she was fifteen she saw signs that the outlaw was going to put his plan into effect–to drive his wife out into the forest, like an old horse–and probably would have done so, but for Simon Supersaxo, the lamp black man, who came to the highwayman’s shanty frequently on his hunting trips.
The robber became jealous of the young Nimrod and threatened to shoot him if he came near the premises again. A threat was as good as a promise with such people, so Supersaxo was ready to kill or be killed on sight.
He met the highwayman one evening in front of McCormick’s Tavern, and drawing the bead, shot him dead. He was not arrested, but feted by all the innkeepers for ridding the mountains of a dangerous deterrent to travel, while she, her name was Deborah Conner, went to help keep house for him, along with the outlaw’s widow, but in reality to help make lamp black.
That was four years before. Since old Mother Jacobs had died and Deborah, now nineteen years of age, was being importuned by Supersaxo to marry him.