"Didn't I tell ye?" inquired Jamie, again twisting himself to look in Miselle's white face, with a broad smile of delight at her evident terror.
"Be done, you bold bairn! Isn't he a sturdy, stirring lad, Ma'am?" said the proud mother, as Jamie, addressing himself again to his work, shouted to the black nags, and put them along the bit of level road in the valley at a pace precluding all further conversation.
Another precipitous ascent, where the road had been mended by felling a large tree across it, over whose trunk the horses were obliged to pull the heavy wagon, and then an equally precipitous descent, gave a view of the Alleghany River and Oil Creek, with Oil City at their confluence, and a background of bluffs and mountains cutting sharp against the clear blue sky.
This view Miselle contemplated with one eye; but the other remained rigidly fixed upon the road before her.
Even Jamie paused, and finally suggested,—
"Reckon, men, you'd best get out and walk alongside. The women can stay in; and if she's going over, you can shore up."
Under these cheerful auspices the descent was accomplished, and, by some miracle, without accident.
At the foot of the bluff commences the slough in which Oil City is set; and as it deepened, the horses gradually sank from view, until only their backs were visible, floundering through a sea of oily mud of a peculiarly tenacious character. Miselle has the warning of Munchausen before her eyes; but, in all sadness, she avers that in the principal street of Oil City, and at the door of the principal hotel, the mud was on that day above the hubs of the wagon-wheels.
Having refreshed themselves in body and mind at the Petroleum House, where a lady in a soiled print dress and much jewelry kindly played at them upon a gorgeous piano, the party went forth to view the city.
The same mingling of urgent civilization and unsubdued Nature observable in Corry characterizes Oil City to a greater extent. On one side of the street, crowded with oil-wagons, the freight of each worth thousands of dollars, stand long rows of dwellings, shops, and warehouses, all built within two years, and on the other impinges a bluff still covered with its forest growth of shrubs and wood-plants,—while upon the frowning front of a cliff that has for centuries faced nothing meaner than the Alleghany, with its mountain background, some Vandal has daubed the advertisement of a quack nostrum.