Near this old home on the Pigeon Roost Fork was the Roost itself, that marvellous mecca of the wild pigeons, where countless billions of gray wings darkened the great woods on the sunniest midday; and where unnumbered trillions of the weightless, feathered little bodies crushed the great limbs of the mightiest giants of the forest. And this wondrous sight, too, old lady Gordon had seen many times, long before Audubon saw it to describe it for the wonderment of the whole world.
She had not much to tell of the bridegroom with whom she came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; she spoke mainly of journeying on horseback over the Wilderness Road, and of passing the place called "Harpe's Head," which had then been very recently named for a most hideous tragedy. It was a story full of grewsome romance, this tale of the unheralded coming of two monsters among a simple, honest, scattered, yet neighborly, woods-people. The two were brothers, or claimed to be, but there was no outward likeness between them. One was small, and not in any way calculated to attract attention; while the other was far above the ordinary stature of men, and so ferocious of aspect that the very sight of him chilled the beholder with fear. Neither of the men ever wore any head covering, and both had wild, manelike, red hair, and complexions of "a livid redness"—whatever that may have been—such as left a lasting impression of horror upon all who encountered them. They were soon known throughout the length of Wilderness Road as Big Harpe and Little Harpe. They lived close to the road, and almost immediately after their coming travellers began to disappear, never to be heard of again, or to be found long afterward to have been murdered. A very pall of terror spread gradually over the whole Pennyroyal Region; arson, robbery, and atrocities unspeakable followed murder after murder, and yet the few, far-apart people of the terror-stricken country could only tremble in helpless fear, till the murder of a woman led to the tracing of the long, wide, deep track of blood and crime to the door of the Harpes.
"When they murdered a woman, the whole country rose up as one man. And it was just the same then that it is now when the same thing happens," old lady Gordon said grimly. "The best men in the Pennyroyal Region—as good and as God-fearing men as could be found in the world—hunted the Harpes like wild beasts. They beat the whole wilderness for the monsters, until they found them at last. Little Harpe managed to escape; it was not known how, and he was never seen or heard of again. But it was Big Harpe who had been the leader; he was the one that the men wanted most, and they now had him fast like a wild animal in a trap. Yet not one of his captors touched him; not one of them spoke to him; they all merely sat still with their eyes on him, and waited for the woman's husband to come."
"History repeats itself—especially in Kentucky," Lynn said.
Old lady Gordon smiled her most sardonic smile. "The skull of Big Harpe's head stayed on the end of a pole by the side of the Wilderness Road through a good many years. The place where it was put up is still called 'Harpe's Head'—I presume it always will be."
All this was before old lady Gordon came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; but another band of robbers and assassins still terrorized that part of the Pennyroyal Region. The cavern in which the band made its den was on the other side of the Ohio River, but it was Kentucky that suffered most from its ravages. Many a richly laden flatboat was never heard of after it was known to have stopped at the entrance to Cave-in-Rock, as the place was called in the beginning of the last century, and as it is called at the present time. Many a gold-laden boatman, who had unknowingly passed down the river without stopping at the Cave-in-Rock, was beguiled into entering it on his way homeward—only to vanish forever off the face of the earth. The cavern would seem to have offered powerful temptations to the unwary traveller. The cave itself was then as it is now a most curious and interesting survival of prehistoric times. It is a single chamber in the solid rock, opening at the river's brink, two hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, its sides rising by regular stages after the manner of the seats in an amphitheatre. Its walls are covered with strange carvings cut deep in the stone; there are representations of several animals unknown to science, and there are also inscribed characters which have led those learned in such matters to believe the cavern to have been the council house of some ancient race. But nothing was known of these things while Cave-in-Rock remained the hiding-place of robbers and assassins. The terrified country round about Oldfield knew the place only by vague hearsay as a drinking, gambling resort, wherein boatmen and all unwary travellers going up or down the Ohio were lured to destruction. No one who entered the awful mystery of the cavern ever came out to tell what he had seen or what had befallen him. It seemed—so old lady Gordon said—as if the hand of the law would never be able to lay hold upon actual proof of the crimes committed at Cave-in-Rock, but when the band was ultimately run to earth, an upper and secret chamber was found to be filled with the bones of human beings.
The grandmother and the grandson sat silent for a space after she grew weary of story-telling. They were thinking in widely different ways of the wild, true tales of these terrific passion storms which had swept Kentucky throughout her existence. Was another fair portion of the good green earth ever so deep-dyed in the blood of both the innocent and the guilty?
"And yet through all we have always been a most religious people," the young man said musingly.
"Very!" responded the old lady, who was growing hungry. "None more so. We've about all the different religions that anybody else ever had, and we've started one or two of our own."