Had the architecture of the fort been different, had it been stone instead of logs, I could easily have imagined myself back in some mediæval castle of Europe, and not here in the mountains of Kentucky.
The fort looked very peaceful. Smoke rose from three or four chimneys, and, drifting, finally united, floating off into the clouds. This was the lazy coil which I had seen, and which perhaps had saved my life.
We climbed some stone steps, and when I reached the top I found a little old-fashioned brass field-piece confronting me. But there was no rust on its muzzle, which looked at me with the semblance of a threat.
"One would think from your preparations, colonel, that we were in a state of war," I said, jestingly.
"Have you any weapons on you?" he asked, frowning again, and not answering my jest.
"No," I replied; "I had nothing but the rifle, and you have that."
"I will keep it for the present," he said, curtly.
We paused before a heavy door of oak. While the colonel knocked, I looked up at the overhanging edges of the second floor and saw that they were pierced for sharpshooters. But before I had time to look long, the door was opened by a man in a suit of Confederate gray, like his fellow at the drawbridge. He saluted the colonel in military fashion as the others had done, and we entered a wide hall which seemed to run the entire width of the house. Many of the old houses in Kentucky are built in this fashion. The hall was decorated, I might almost say armed, with weapons,—rifles, pistols, bayonets, swords, many of them of the most modern type. Tanned skins of bear, deer, and wolf were on the floor. Had it not been for the late style of the weapons, I could have maintained the fiction that it was a castle of the Middle Ages and this the baronial hall.
He led me up a flight of steps, and opened the door of a small room on the second floor. The room contained nothing but a small table, a camp-bed, a three-legged stool, and two or three other articles of furniture equally plain. There was but a single window, and it was cross-barred heavily with iron. It looked more like a cell than a chamber. Nor did it belie its looks.