I must at this time concern myself with her story of All Saints’ Day, 2018. Very early in the morning she finds herself in her leading theatre which is on the site of the Old Fancy Bazar on the South side of the Square; by her side is the aged Rabbi Terence Ezekiel muttering enthusiastically to himself over strange and magnificent doings. With him are the inner company of enthusiasts for her film enterprise. And the body of the theatre is filled up with its regular patrons, in a most unusual frame of mind.
There is thrown upon the screen the production of the studios for that month, the story of Hunter Kelly, the founder of Springfield, whose regular solemn festival is July eleventh, but who is celebrated in a thousand ways; all year. Unexpected things are happening in the operator’s box. And it is a new kind of a projecting machine, utterly beyond the current devices. But let us consider the story of Hunter Kelly, as it rolls by on the screen, the early part of which, to the year 1920, has been long known to me.
Hunter Kelly was an Irish Catholic boy reared in a Pittsburgh orphan asylum. In the very first years of the nation he met, and became an ardent disciple of, John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and differed from him seriously on only two points, the Catholic Church, and hunting. Kelly’s dearest devotion was re-reading St. Augustine’s “City of God,” which he carried always in his hunter’s pouch, by his powder horn. And Johnny Appleseed’s dearest devotion was in reading and re-reading Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell,” which he carried in his seed-sack. And Hunter Kelly would shoot deer, over whom Johnny Appleseed would weep. So these two were separated when Kelly’s lust for hunting was on him like the passion of mighty Nimrod. Then he would live through an almost vegetarian period, travelling and planting with John Chapman—Johnny Appleseed, and listening to his great monologues.
They began together, exploring the primeval forests near Pittsburgh. Each season they marched further west, returning in the fall to the cider mills of Western Pennsylvania, to beg and sort apple seeds for next spring’s excursion beyond where any other white men fought or explored. Kelly and John Chapman parted at last where is now Fort Wayne in Northern Indiana. They said “goodbye” in great love and devotion, Kelly swearing on St. Augustine’s “City of God” to plant in honor of Johnny Appleseed, a city like an apple tree, with its highest boughs in Heaven, and to begin by sowing there a special breed of apple seeds the saint gave him with his old leather seed-sack for a token.
Kelly joined a group of settlers going further west of the same name, but no kin. He entered what was then known as the “Sangamaw” Country with them and lived in their cabin a while. In this region he planted the world’s first orchards of Apple Amaranth trees, from the old leather sack.
The first settlers were the Kellys, Matheneys and Elliots. The young sower of mysteries lived alternately in their great log houses, and sat, at the end of his great wolf-hunts, by their open fireplaces. The chief of the local wolf-pack was the Devil, and refused to be slain. At last he took on his true form and came alone to Kelly when he stood meditating among the first sprouts of the famous Apple Amaranth Orchard, and there gave the young fellow words of admiration for his valor. For the Devil is often a true sport.
There Kelly made a compact to submit himself to torture for many years if the pioneer city of his vow to Johnny Appleseed might be built here. He and the Devil swore the compact on St. Augustine’s “City of God.”
The Devil pledged himself that if the young hunter’s soul would submit itself to long suffering, the place could be evolved in time. Old Satan laughed, and said his little subordinate devils would then be guided to build better than they knew. The Devil did not carry Hunter Kelly to Hell, but devised a special torment. He buried the mystic a few hundred feet below the orchard. In the hunter’s living skull and heart were entangled the roots of the first Apple-Amaranth Trees, and from them all others of this region come.
The Devil has a great respect for his contracts. Every year, for a century he dug up the mystic on Hallowe’en night, and showed him the city, and every time Kelly said: “Take me back to my torture. The City is not yet started.” At last, when the lads returned from the war with Germany, and the girls returned from Red Cross work, and the like, in the summer of 1919, and the city began to take on glory both visible and invisible, Hunter Kelly said to the Devil: “I will now trust my town to go on. At last they are eating of the Apple Amaranth, which they thought was poison. They are even transplanting it.”
Thereupon Hunter Kelly drove the Devil away with the great pickaxe and spade, the same which had often dug the hunter from the ground.