That I am about to record is of a mixed character—a drama in which there are scenes of pain as well as pleasure—both of real occurrence.
Whether interesting or no, they may be deemed improbable; though not by those who have studied the social characteristics of the Mississippi valley at the period to which they refer—before the "Far West" had commenced receding from the great river, and its settlements had refused to give shelter to those outcasts of society, who own no law but that of the lex talionis, and no lawyer but Lynch.
Unlike most travelers through Mississippian territory, I entered it from the south—by the mouth of its main river—making my first station in the city of New Orleans.
It was late in the spring when I arrived there. And soon after the red cross, beginning to show itself on the doors of the humbler dwellings that lay "swampward," warned me of the presence of that terrible epidemic, which there annually decimated the ranks of such strangers as were compelled to make their summer sojourn in the place.
Taking the hint, I bade a temporary adieu to New Orleans, intending to return to it after the first frost in the "fall."
Straying northward, here and there halting as chance or caprice directed, I was at length carried into the Ohio and up the Cumberland river to the capital of Tennessee.
By this time the forest foliage had become tinged with red, and the leaf was beginning to fall. My stay, therefore, in the "City of Rocks," though pleasant, was not prolonged; and I made preparations for leaving it: not by a steamboat, as I had come, but on horseback—a mode of traveling I much preferred, as, in fact, the only one by which such a country can be properly seen.
With a stout roadster between my thighs, and a valise buckled to the croup behind me, I took the Franklin "pike," leading southward from the city.
I contemplated a long ride—so long, that were I to state the distance, it might test the credulity of my reader; as it did that of a traveler, who shortly after overtook me.
I had made some three miles along the dusty pike, and was nearly opposite a large pile of building, standing to the right of the road, when the traveler in question came gliding alongside.