The blockhouse was of equal length and breadth, about forty feet square. On entering it we found nothing but the bare walls, with the exception of a wide chimney of sun-baked brick, and in one corner a large wooden slab partly imbedded in the ground.
"Don't tread upon that board," said the old man solemnly, as we approached the slab to examine it; "it is holy ground."
"How holy ground?"
"There lies under it as brave a fellow as ever handled axe or rifle. He it was built this blockhouse, and christened it the Bloody Blockhouse—and bloody it proved to be to him. But you shall hear more of it if you like. You shall hear how six American rifles were too many for ninety French and Spanish muskets."
Carleton and I shook our heads incredulously. The Yankee took us both by the arm, led us out of the blockhouse, and through the stockade to a grassy projection of the hillock.
"Ninety French and Spanish muskets," repeated he in a firm voice, and weighing on each word. "Opposed to them were Asa Nolins, with his three brothers, his brother-in-law, a cousin, and their wives. He fell like a brave American as he was, but not alone, for the dead bodies of thirty foes were lying round the blockhouse when he died. They are buried there," added he, pointing to a row of cotton-trees a short distance off, that in the pale moonlight might have been taken for the spectres of the departed; "under those cotton-trees they fell, and there they are buried."
The old squatter remained for a short space in his favourite attitude, his hands crossed on his rifle, and his chin resting on them. He seemed to be calling together the recollections of a time long gone by. We did not care to interrupt him. The stillness of the night, the light of the moon and stars, that gave the prairie lying before us the appearance of a silvery sea, the sombre forest on either side of the blockhouse, of which the edges only were lighted up by the moonbeams, the vague allusions our guide had made to some fearful scene of strife and slaughter that had been enacted in this now peaceful glade—all these circumstances combined, worked upon our imaginations, and we felt unwilling to break the stillness which added to the impressive beauty of the forest scene.
"Did you ever float down the Mississippi?" asked Nathan abruptly. As he spoke he sat down upon the bank, and made sign to us to sit beside him.
"Did you ever float down the Mississippi?"
"No; we came up it from New Orleans hither."