When the pilgrims reached the Karoondinha, they were met by the local agents and surveyors of the Proprietors, who escorted them to their new estates, which were bounded on the south by the Christunn, now renamed “Middle Creek,” and on the north by the craggy heights of the culminating pinnacle of Jack’s Mountain, the famed “High Top,” climbed by the Pennsylvania Alpine Club, August 24, 1919.
A large gray fox, or Colishay, having led Mintges‘ dogs away from the camp, caused this “Father in Israel” to be absent during the critical moments when the line between his property and that of Marshall was being confirmed by the Proprietary surveyors. When he returned, exultingly swinging the fox’s pelt above his head and looking all the world like a lower Fifth Avenue fur jobber, the day was almost spent and the surveyors were gathering up their instruments.
Marshall, who was a kindly and just man, tried to explain to his friend, before the sun went down, just where the line was blazed. It seemed fair enough at the time to Mintges. Later on, when alone one day, he walked over the line, comparing it with the warrant, and it did not seem to satisfy him as much. He believed that the surveyors had deviated a rod or two all along, to his disadvantage. Doubtless if such was the case, it had been due to their haste to get through, for they had a daily grind of similar cases, but Marshall, he thought, should have compelled them to follow the parchment drafts, and not uncertain instruments.
Nevertheless, he decided to say nothing to his friend; they had always been good intimates, why should their relations be jeopardized for a paltry rod or two. Mintges confided the mistake to his wife, and later on to his children. It was unfortunate, but where there[there] were so few neighbors it was hardly worth a fight.
As Mintges grew older the matter began to prey on his mind, to obsess him. It worried him until his head ached, and he could not drive it away. Marshall and his heirs were profiting at his expense; it should not be allowed to rest that way.
The surveyors had placed a great stone at the upper corner of the line, at the slope of the mountain, and there Jacob Mintges repaired one moonlight night, armed with a crowbar, and reset the stone two rods on the alleged domain of Jacob Marshall. Mintges was an old man at the time, rabbinical in appearance, and he chuckled and “washed his hands” as he stood and viewed the fruits of his labor. A wrong had been quietly righted; why hadn’t he done it twenty years ago?
It so happened that Jacob Marshall went out for chestnuts a week or so after Mintges’ performance, and saw the altered position of the stone. Instead of hastening to his friend’s house and asking him for a frank explanation, he, not being conscious of any wrong-doing, moved the stone back to its original position, to rebuke the presumptuous Mintges. Then he stood admiring his work, while he[he] stroked his long black beard.
A few weeks later Mintges and his sons went to the mountain to brush out a road on which to haul logs with their oxteams in the winter-time. One of the boys, named Lazarus, called his father’s attention to the stone’s position. It made the old man “see red,” and he would not rest until, with the aid of his sons, it was again set where he felt it should rightfully be.
All this produced a coolness, almost a feud, between the two families, which kept up until Jacob Mintges died at the age of eighty years. Jacob Marshall, friend of his youth and companion of his “trek” to the wilderness, did not attend the obsequies.
It was not many nights afterwards when reports were made on all sides that Mintges’ spook was abroad, walking about the fields and lanes adjacent to Jacob Marshall’s home, his arms holding aloft a great block of stone. Marshall saw the apparition several times, but shunned it as he had the living Mintges the last years of his life.