In Beaver Cove and Elsewhere

by Miss Matt Crim

Mrs. Cole shook her head with a deep sigh, and instinctively reached for her pipe, but she could only sit and hold it in her hand, unfilled, unlighted, while Silury went away to the lot with the flaring torch and an old saddle thrown on her arm.

Kit was a shabby beast, thin, wiry, and with only one good eye, but he had served the Coles faithfully. He greeted the young girl with a gentle whinny, and she leaned her head against him with another burst of tears. But she quickly wiped them away, and led Kit out to the road. It did not take her long to put bridle and saddle on him, then she ran in, took down her father's rifle from the rack over the front door, and in a few minutes had started on her solitary ride down the mountains. The hound would have followed her, but she ordered him back. "Go back, Bolivar, an' take care o' them that's left behind," and he slunk unwillingly to the doorstep again.

It was a night to live in the child's memory all her life, for with all her fearlessness and hard training she had never before been called upon to traverse the mountain passes alone after darkness had fallen upon them. Solitude and gloom surrounded her. The valley seemed but a formless gulf of darkness, the multitudinous mountains, black sentinels, towering to the stars. Far away in some remote fastness of the mountains a dog barked, and she could hear the prolonged blast of a hunting horn. A star shot downward from the zenith, leaving a trail of fire across the sky, and was lost behind the far-reaching western ranges. A sense of isolation oppressed her. She seemed the only living human creature in all the vast, silent world. On the saddle in front of her she held the trusty rifle, and that gave her a sense of security from beasts of prey. Her father had taught her how to use the gun, and practice had given her an almost unerring aim. But my young readers will acknowledge that it was a trying situation for even a mountain girl, to ride alone through ravines and over declivities, often only a bridle path to guide her. It required a brave heart and a steady nerve.

Buckhorn Springs are on the public highway leading from a market town in North Georgia to Murphy, North Carolina, and traditions of the wonderful medicinal qualities of the water come down, even from the remote days when the Indian set up the poles of his wigwam near the springs, and slaked his thirst in their cool, healing streams, flowing out from under Buckhorn Mountain. The Indian and his wigwam are mere traditions now themselves, and the white man and his covered market wagon have taken their places. It has been the favorite camping-ground of the mountaineers coming from or going to market since the first white settlers boldly penetrated the wilderness beyond. Campers were there the night the revenue officers were to pass with Amaziah Cole, Peleg White, and young Davis. They were on the roadside, their white covered wagon drawn out under the sparse timber, their sleek red oxen lying unyoked near it. A camp-fire of brushwood and pine-knots blazed up in the open space between the timber and the road, throwing strange eerie shadows against the mountain-side, and in the tree-tops above.

A lean, brown-faced wagoner sat on an inverted feed-box whittling a stick, and a woman occupied a rude camp-stool nearer the fire, the light bringing out the stripes in her brown and yellow homespun skirts, and the melancholy lines in her sharp-featured face. A brown woolen veil was tied around her head, and she rubbed snuff with subdued enjoyment. Silury did not go down to the public road. On the mountain-side, above the springs, a ledge of gray rocks jutted out. Dismounting at a level spot in the pathway, Silury tied Kit's bridle to an overhanging bough, then with the gun grasped in her hands, she crept through the underbrush to the rocks. She trembled with excitement, for a daring thought had come to her—a scheme whereby she might deliver her father from his captors. She crouched down behind the rocks, and waited, praying that she might be calm, that her eye might be true, her hand steady when the time came.

Evidently the campers had heard of the raid, and were intending to sit up until the officers passed with the prisoners, for several times, during that lagging hour of suspense Silury spent behind the boulders, the man walked out into the road to listen for sounds of travel.

"I 'low they are comin' at last," he said, closing his knife with a sharp click, and his wife put up her snuff-box and joined him on the roadside.

Silury's heart gave a great thump, thump, against her side. She started into a more erect position, bringing the barrel of her rifle to a level with the rock. The tramping sound of horses' feet could be distinctly heard on the road, and presently the cavalcade rode up, the prisoners in the middle. The officers were feeling comparatively secure. No rescue had ever been attempted at Buckhorn Springs. Friends of prisoners had sometimes ambushed in the wilder country above, but this raid had been unmolested. They had been riding hard, and so they halted for a few minutes at the springs, and some of them dismounted for a drink.

Silury saw her father astride a powerful mule, his hands tied together, but his lower limbs free. He looked haggard and unkempt, his long, black hair falling to his shoulders, his beard tangled. He bore the marks of his sojourn in Jimson's Brake, and of his resistance to arrest.

"Poor pa!"