One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse.  His name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously called by the community “X,” and by Mivane “the unknown quantity,” for he was something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked much speculation.  He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,—­a type rare in this region,—­coming originally from the colony of the Salzburgers established in Georgia.

We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which imply a personal and unpleasant reflection.  Xerxes Alexander Anxley disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other.  He disapproved of secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste; for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather around the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the juniors, and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the elders, the oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew.  He even disapproved of the jovial horn—­and the settlement questioned his sincerity.

This man Anxley looked his ascetic character.  He had a hard pragmatic countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony come suddenly short and blunted.  His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable, seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their inattentiveness.  His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings, worn on a sturdy and powerful frame.  His mouth was shut hard and fast upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and his words were usually framed to doubt one’s state of grace and to contravene one’s tenets as to final salvation.  He rode much of the time with the reins loose on his horse’s neck, and perhaps no man in the saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of Cromwell’s troopers.  His theological disputations grated peculiarly upon Emsden’s mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that followed.

“If I hadn’t been so traveled that day,—­dragged through hell and skirting of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,—­I wouldn’t have lost my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce,” Emsden afterward declared.

For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the “old trading path,” as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head.  Just above him, on a rugged slope where no trees grew save a scraggy cedar here and there amidst the shelving ledges of rock outcropping through the soft verdant turf, he saw a stealthy, furtive shape; he was aware of a hasty cowed glance over the shoulder, and then a stretching of supple limbs in flight.  Before he himself hardly knew it the sharp crack of his rifle rang out,—­the aim was almost instinctive.