"Mr. X declared himself unable to answer this question, but generously offered to permit the agent to put down any number of acres he thought would represent a fair thing between a kind government and one of its unfortunate citizens. Intending to do his duty faithfully, the officer settled upon two thousand acres as having been trespassed upon; but to his astonishment the incomprehensible offender stoutly affirmed that he had logged fully five thousand acres, and at once settled the matter in full by paying twenty-five hundred dollars, taking a receipt for the same.
"When this enterprising business-man visited Jacksonville, his friends rallied him upon confessing judgment to government for three thousand acres of timber more than had been claimed by the agent. This true patriot winked as he replied:
"'It is true I hold a receipt from the government for the timber on five thousand acres at the very low rate of fifty cents an acre. As I have not yet cut logs from more than one-fifth of the tract, I intend to work off the timber on the other four thousand acres at my leisure, and no power can stop me now I have the government receipt to show it's paid for.'"
The sloop and the canoe had left Columbus a little before noon, and at six P. M. we passed Charles' Ferry, where the old St. Augustine and Tallahassee forest road crosses the river. At this lonely place an old man, now dead, owned a subterranean spring, which he called "Mediterranean passage." This spring is powerful enough to run a rickety, "up-and-down" saw-mill. The great height of the water allowed me to paddle into the mill with my canoe.
At half past seven o'clock a deserted log cabin at Barrington's Ferry offered us shelter for the night. The whole of the next day we rowed through the same immense forests, finding no more cultivated land than during our first day's voyage. We landed at a log cabin in a small clearing to purchase eggs of a poor woman, whose husband had shot her brother a few days before. As the wife's brother had visited the cabin with the intention of killing the husband, the woman seemed to think the murdered man had "got his desarts," and, as a coroner's jury had returned a verdict of "justifiable homicide," the affair was considered settled.
Below this cabin we came to Island No. 1, where rapids trouble boatmen in the summer months. Now we glided gently but swiftly over the deep current. The few inhabitants we met along the banks of the Suwanee seemed to carry with them an air of repose while awake. To rouse them from mid-day slumbers we would call loudly as we passed a cabin in the woods, and after considerable delay a man would appear at the door, rubbing his eyes as though the genial sunlight was oppressive to his vision. It was indeed a quiet, restful region, this great wilderness of the Suwanee.
We passed Mrs. Goodman's farm and log buildings on the left bank, just below Island No. 8, before noon, and about this time Major Purviance shot at a large wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), knocking it off a bank into the water. The gobbler got back to land, and led us a fruitless chase into the thicket of saw-palmetto. He knew his ground better than we, for, though wounded, he made good his escape. We stopped a few moments at Troy, which, though dignified in name, consists only of a store and some half dozen buildings.
A few miles below this place, on the left bank of the river, is an uninhabited elevation called Rolins' Bluff, from which a line running north 220 east, twenty-three miles and a half in length, will strike Live Oak. A charter to connect Live Oak with this region of the Suwanee by means of a railroad had just passed the Florida legislature, but had been killed by the veto of the governor. After sunset the boats were secured in safe positions in front of a deserted cabin, round which a luxuriant growth of bitter-orange trees showed what nature could do for this neglected grove. The night air was balmy, and tremulous with insect life, while the alligators in the swamps kept up their bellowings till morning.
After breakfast we descended to the mouth of the Santa Fe River, which was on the left bank of the Suwanee. The piny-woods people called it the Santaffy. The wilderness below the Santa Fe is rich in associations of the Seminole Indian war. Many relics have been found, and, among others, on the site of an old Indian town, entombed in a hollow tree, the skeletons of an Indian adult and child, decked with beads, were discovered. Fort Fanning is on the left bank, and Old Town Hammock on the right bank of the Suwanee.
During the Seminole war, the hammock and the neighboring fastnesses became the hiding-places of the persecuted Indians, and so wild and undisturbed is this region, even at this time, that the bear, lynx, and panther take refuge from man in its jungles.