Having by his time reached the foot of Landray's Hill, Mr. Bartlett deftly released the brake, shook out his lines, and the stage made its rapid entry into Benson.
CHAPTER TWO
THE old stage road became the Main Street at Benson. Daily over its surface, beneath the thick shade of maples and oaks, creaked and rumbled the huge stages Northward and Southward bound. The drivers on these stages, a tanned and whiskered fraternity, were wont to get the most out of the short half mile that went to make up the distance between the covered bridge south of town and Levi Tucker's red brick tavern on the square. Much pure display was achieved in the way of galloping horses and cracking whips, as well as some extra speed.
The arrival of each stage was the cause of a lively, if temporary excitement. No merchant was so busy, but he found time to hurry to his door to note its passing. Dogs barked shrilly; hens, vocal with fright, driving their panic-stricken broods before them, would scurry across the cool bricks of the checkered, grass-grown pavement, to seek safety under some lilac hedge. Even the idlers on the courthouse steps, rose wearily, as men swayed by a strong but repellant sense of duty, and slouched silently across the square. They were chary of words; for much sitting on those steps had given them the wasted speech of men who are talked out.
Previous to this sudden awakening, Levi Tucker would anticipate by his frequent appearance before his tavern, the coming of the stage. He would stand looking off down the road, nervously snapping the lid of his massive silver watch. A wait of five minutes sent him to the barn to Jim, the stableman, for a theory that would explain this extraordinary occurrence. A delay of ten minutes sent him to the bar for a drink. When, finally he heard the distant rumble of wheels, he would return his watch to the fob pocket of his drab trousers, and call to Jim: “Here she comes!” as the stage, reeling awkwardly from side to side, thundered through the covered bridge and out into the dusty sunlight.
The teamsters, loading their freight wagons at the warehouses along the river front, followed these arrivals with the easy flow of impartial criticism. As men possessing profoundly subtle views on horse flesh, no little detail escaped them. They, too, were a part of the life of that great artery of pioneer existence; and the road and its happenings, were to each one of them, as something intimate and personal. A change of horses or a change of drivers, were matters that could not be lightly banished.
The stage road followed in its general direction, over hills and through valleys and across long reaches of level land, what had been an Indian trail at the waning of the eighteenth century, when Andrew Ballard, of Pennsylvania, the first ripple in a vast wave of emigration, pushing manfully out into the wilderness, built his cabin among the hazel-bushes and scrub-oak south of Benson, where he lived for perhaps a year, the only white man in all that region.
The next settler, a solitary Jersey man, penetrated some five miles further into the wilderness to the west of Benson, and set up a forge, from which he supplied the Indians with knives and hatchets.