twenty bushels in a single day).  While stooping over to fill his fan with unwinnowed grain, the buck, taking advantage of his position, came like a catapult against him, and sent him like a ball from a Paixhan gun, head foremost into the chaff.  Great was the astonishment, but greater the wrath of Pompey, and dire the vengeance that he denounced against his assailant.  Gathering himself up, and rubbing the part battered by the attack of his enemy, he retreated around the corner of the barn, and procuring a rock weighing some twenty pounds, returned to the presence of his foe, who was quietly eating the wheat that the negro had been cleaning, evidently regarding it as the legitimate spoils of victory.  Getting down on all fours, and managing to hold the stone against his head, Pompey challenged his enemy to combat.  The buck, nothing loth, drew back to a proper distance, and shutting both eyes, came like a battering ram against the stone on the other side of which was the negro’s head.  As might have been expected, the challenger went one way, and the challenged the other by the recoil, both knocked into insensibility by the concussion.  Pompey was taken up for dead, but his wool and the thickness of his scull saved him.  He gave the buck a wide berth after that.  He regarded him always with a sort of superstitious awe, never being able to comprehend how he butted him through that big stone.  Explain the matter to him ever so scientifically, demonstrate it on the clearest principles of mechanical philosophy, still Pompey would shake his head, and as he walked away, would mutter to himself, ‘de debbil helps dat ram, sure.  Dere’s no use in dis nigger’s tryin’ to come round him.  He’s a witch, dat ram is, and ain’t nuffin else.’”

CHAPTER XIV.

A DEER TRAPPED—­THE RESULT OF A COMBAT—­A QUESTION OF MENTAL PHILOSOPHY DISCUSSED.

We returned the next day to our camping ground.  On the “Lower Chain of Ponds,” we found our pioneer and his goods all safe, no visitors having passed that way in our absence.  Smith knocked over a deer on our passage down.  I have said that just above our camp was a dam.  It was made in this wise:  first, great logs were laid up, across the stream, in the same fashion as the side of a log house, to the height of about twelve feet, properly secured, and upon these, other and smaller logs were laid, side by side, transversely, and sloping up the stream at an angle of forty-five degrees, like one side of the roof of a house.  These long, slender logs, reached out over and beyond those that were laid up across the stream, the lower part covered with brush, and then with earth, so as to make a tight dam, the upper ends, even when the dam was full, extending several feet above the top water line.  These logs, or perhaps they had better be called large and long poles, for, when compared with the foundation timbers, they were nothing more, have, of course, above where they are covered with brush and earth, interstices, or crevices, between them.