No enemy,
But winter and rough weather.
The qualities of Guerin were fit correctives of Albert’s. The teacher was placid, but not mystical; cheerful, but not enthusiastic; scholarly, but not philosophic; kind, but not heroic. Without him, Albert might have been an ignorant zealot, or a fanatical soldier; he never could have been malign or weak. The changes of opinion which had turned so many French priests into infidels, had only made Guerin half a Protestant. He was too yielding and too timid to those of his early profession; nor did his circumstances demand it. But he acquired forbearance, and enlarged the circle of his survey. In turning over the volumes at Crowscrag, the mountain home of Albert, he learned to recognize some virtue even in a Huguenot, and to admire the argument, and taste the truth of writers such as Chamier, Plessis du Mornay, Claude, Sauria, and Bonnet. He and his pupil talked them over among the limestone rocks and caverns of the mountains. But Guerin had cravings which his mercurial ward could not understand. The abbé, as he loved to call him, as if penetrated by the mysterious “Zeit-Geist,” swelled with inward longings for communion with the spiritual. The sound of the great ocean came to him even in his solitude; while Albert felt that truth, if ever reached, was for men, for man. Both were religious in their thoughts; but Albert’s religion was less of form and dogma, and more of expansive affection and lofty aspirations. The kind-hearted priest often charged to the account of Protestantism certain traits in his young friend, which he could not understand, and wondered to see him dissatisfied with all the beauties and glories of his mountain-home.
Albert possessed a dog, which, as if to mock the attempts of the abbé at English consonants, was named Thwackthwart; an awful mouthful, and second only to the proverbial exercise for foreigners, of “thirty thousand thorns thrust through the thick of their thumbs.” The aforesaid Thwackthwart was of that color which you would not willingly denominate, lest you should find it was gray, when you had called it brown; a terrier of such a symmetric shape and attractive shagginess, that at length his ugliness acquired a sort of beauty. I am sure the reader has just such a dog in his mind’s eye, even if he has never had its teeth in the calf of his leg. He was exceedingly useful in a mountain-house, and accompanied Albert on every expedition. As there were no ladies at Crowscrag to be alarmed by such an event, it was not unusual, when the chase had been active, or the weather tempting, for Albert to absent himself several days at a time. However unwelcome this may have been to the abbé, he did not complain, but mildly took his seat at the little round table, and gave his orders to Sambo, the servant. Sambo was on the wane of years, but had once been an athletic man, with noticeable signs of Indian blood in his face, while he passed for an African. He was older than any of them, as a dweller in these wilds, and even remembered when buffalo were known to cross low parts of the Allegheny chain.
One night, early in May, Guerin was seated at the door of the lonely wooden mansion, which, from its situation under the eastern brow of a rocky mountain, was named Crowscrag. The weather was warm for the season, and a heavy cloud in the southwest was giving forth signs of an approaching thunder-gust. The muttering of the coming storm, and the angry flashes increased as night came on. At length when darkness had begun to prevail, each renewal of the lurid glare revealed wide tracts of the gray valleys, and disclosed yawning depths in the ragged hills, while the rain descended in torrents. Albert was still absent, and though both courageous and robust, was, in the estimation of his friend, exposed to manifold dangers. There was no house within many miles, except a temporary lodge on the opposite mountain, which had been used as a station in topographical surveys. This, though several miles distant, was so situated as to be visible by daylight; and Guerin often endeavored to catch a glimpse of it with his pocket-telescope, during intervals of the electric illumination. Midnight came, however, and yet no tidings of the wanderer. The good abbé paced the floor for hours, but at length yielded to weariness, and slept soundly. When he awoke to the clear shining of another day, he felt a pang at not seeing Albert; and he never saw him more.
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CHAPTER XII.
Vadit, fremit, refringit virgulta pede vago.
Catullus. Attys, v. 86.
The grandfathers of some who read this have told them how the settlements of their childhood were put in fear by the irruption of the Indians; an evil as little feared in our own day as the ravages of the minotaur or other mythic monsters. These onsets were frequently made into the secluded valleys of that rugged district through which the Kanawha finds its course to the Ohio, from the great spine of mountains which traverses Virginia and Carolina. Striking across from the Ohio to the Sciota, the Shawnees used to pursue a “trail” well-known to hunters, and passing in its route the town of Major-Jack, where Chilicothe now stands. Thither in more than one instance they carried away captive men, women and children. Although their usual practice was to slay and scalp all able-bodied men, yet the aboriginal caprice sometimes led them to make exceptions in favor of a fine fellow taken even in arms; as for example when the chief who was prowling was visited with some mysterious yearning to supply by adoption the loss of a darling son. These statements are necessary to explain the absence of Albert, who, to say truth, had fallen into the hands of a party of Shawnees, after being surprised in the mountain lodge to which he had retreated from the storm. I am not about to tell an Indian story; such may be better heard in any frontier inn; I will therefore return to my disconsolate abbé.