After he was gone, Black Chief’s daughter fell into a peaceful slumber and did not wake, even when the roaring express train, with its blazing headlight slowed down at Steamburg for its solitary eastbound passenger.
IX
The Gorilla
If Sir Rider Haggard was a Pennsylvanian he would doubtless lay the scenes of his wonderful mystery stories in Snyder County. It is in that ruggedly picturesque mountainous county where romance has taken its last stand, where the old touches the new, and hosts, goblins and witches and memories of panthers, wolves and Indians linger in cycle after cycle of imaginative reminiscences. Every now and then, even in this dull, unsympathetic age, when the world, as Artist Shearer puts it, “is aesthetically dead”, Snyder County is thrilled by some new ghost, witch, panther or mystery story. The latest of these in the last days of 1920 and the first of 1921–the giant gorilla–has thrilled the entire Commonwealth by its unique horror.
The papers have told us how a gigantic man-ape escaped from a carnival train near Williamsport, and seeking the South, fled over the mountains to Snyder County, where it attacked a small boy, breaking his arm, held up automobiles, rifled smoke houses and the like, and then appeared in Snyder Township, Blair County, still further South, his nocturnal ramblings in that region proving an effective curfew for the young folks of a half-dozen rural communities.
This story sounds thrillingly interesting, but as gorillas live on fruit, and do not eat flesh, the animal in question would have starved or frozen to death at the outset of his career in the Alleghenies, and there the “X”, unknown quantity of the real story begins. The newspapers have only printed the most popular versions of the gorilla mystery, only a fraction of the romance and folk-lore that sprang up mushroom-like around the presence of such an alien monster in our highlands. Already enough has been whispered about to fill a good sized volume, most of it absolutely untrue, yet some of the tales, if they have not hit the real facts, have come dangerously close to it.
Let the readers judge for themselves. Probably one of the most widely circulated versions among the Snyder County mountaineers, the hardy dwellers in the fastnesses of the Shade, Jack’s and White Mountains, is the one about to be related. It is too personal to warrant promiscuous newspapers publication, and even now all names have been changed and localities altered, but to a Snyder County Mountaineer “all things are plain”. This is the “authoritative”, confidential Snyder County version, unabridged:
To begin with, all the mountain people know Hornbostl Pfatteicher, whose log cabin is situated near the heading of Lost Creek, on the borders of Snyder and Juniata Counties. He has never been much of a worker, living mostly by hunting and fishing, prospering greatly during the days when the State raised the bounty on foxes and wild cats to an outrageously extravagant figure–but no one cares; let the hunter’s license fund be plundered and the taxpayers be jammed.
He was also very noticeable during the Spring and Fall forest fires, which never failed to burn some art of his mountain bailiwick annually. He was opposed to Forester Bartschat, regarding him as too alert and intuitive, and made valiant efforts through his political bosses to have him transferred or removed. He was regular in his politics, could always have a hearing at Harrisburg, and though an ardent fisherman, saw no harm in the dynamiting or liming of streams, and upheld the right of “the interests” to pollute the waterways with vile filth from paper mills and tanneries. In other words he was, and probably is, typical of the professional mountaineer that the politicians, through the nefarious bounty laws, have maintained in the forests[forests], to the detriment of reforestation and wild life.
Hornbostl, about 1915, was in love with a comely mountain girl, Beulah Fuchspuhr, the belle of Lost Creek Valley, but he was away from home so much, and so indifferent, and so much in his cups when in the neighborhood that she found time to become enamored of a tie-jobber named Heinie Beery, and ran away with him to Pittsburg.
During the flu epidemic, about the time of the Armistice, she was seized with the dreaded malady, and passed away, aged twenty-eight years.