On the evening of the third day, the parties carrying Cahoonshee arrived on the west bank of the Neversink River, (Port Clinton,) and about two miles from the Penepack (Huguenot) settlement.
Here the principal people of the Valley had assembled to pay their last respects to a man that all had loved, and the settlers above mentioned volunteered to accompany the party to Cahoonshee’s cabin on the Steneykill, and Amy was congratulated on her escape from the Indians and return home.
The next morning they marched to Peenpack, and from there, by way of the Cahoonshee trail, to the Steneykill, where they found the elder Quick ready to receive them.
As Cahoonshee was lifted from the litter and carried into his old home, his countenance brightened, and for a few moments he seemed to be living his life over again. Through the western window the declining sun could be seen. The leaves on the trees presented a golden hue, and proclaimed to the observer that the green and golden forest would soon be wrapped in the cold embrace of winter. All this was emblematical to Cahoonshee. As the leaf faded, died and returned to mother earth, so would he.
My friends, he said, this is the last sun that I shall see set. To-morrow, at this time, I shall have passed away. That orb that has so long furnished me light and heat will be seen by me no more.
Is this the last of man? or is there an existence beyond the grave? If not, why this distinction between men and animals? Do what I may, go where I will, I am always impressed by some influence—I know not what—that I am mortal. Yet this same certain something convinces me that I am immortal.
This is a path leading to the Great Spirit—a mirror of Deity. And to prove that, it is not necessary to explain how I came by this idea—whether I derived it from my forefathers, or whether the Great Spirit has engraved it on my mind, or whether I, myself have formed it from a chain of principles.
Of myself, I am fully persuaded that I have an idea of a being supremely great, and one, whose perfections and powers I am unable to understand. And I know that there must be somewhere without me an object answering to the idea within.
For, as I think and as I know that I am not the author of the faculty that thinks within me, I am obliged to conclude that a foreign cause has produced it. If this foreign cause is a being that derives its existence from another foreign cause, then I am necessarily obliged to proceed from one step to another, and in this way go on until I find a self existing being. That self existing being is the Indian’s Great Spirit—the white man’s God.