“You don’t say?  May I never!  An’ the colonel never telled me nothin’ nohow ‘bout any one uv you bein’ crazy.  Howdee?  How do you like these parts?  Right smart town we’ve got yere, hain’t it?  I’ll take keer uv you.  There hain’t no man on Elk River kin take keer uv you better nor Tim Price, ary time.  I hain’t much up to moon men, though.  Thar’s one feller up my way thet gits kinder skeery at the full uv the moon; but I hain’t never tended him.  I reckon I kin l’arn the job,—­ez the ole boy said when his marm set him to mindin’ fleas off the cat.”

Tim Price was the hunter, boatman, fisherman, yarn-spinner, and character of his region, and Colonel Bangem’s faithful ally in all his sports:  the latter had therefore sent him to meet his friends on their arrival at Charleston, and he at once proceeded to take command of the whole party as a matter of course.

“I footed it over the mountains, and sent my boat the river way.  Hit oughter be yere now:  so we’ll pack you men’s tricks to the boats an’ p’int ’em up-stream.  It ’ill be sundown afore we git thar.”

The party started from the hotel, the procession followed to see them off, and they were soon down the Kanawha and into the mouth of Elk at the point of the town.  Log rafts, huge barges, miles of railroad-ties, laid-up steamers, peddling-boats, with their highly-colored storehouses, fishermen’s scows, floating homely cabins alive with bare-legged children and idlers of the water-side, push-boats loaded to the edge of the narrow gunwales with merchandise for delivery to stores and dwellers far up the river, boats loaded with hoop-poles, grist, chickens, and the “home-plunder” of some mover to civilization, coming down the river from the mountain-clearing, and samples of every conceivable kind of the river’s outpour, were tied to the banks or lazily floating on the currentless back-water from the Kanawha.

An old steamboat-captain once said of Elk that “it was the all-firedest river God ever made,—­fer it rises at both ends and runs both ways to wunst.”  This is true, and is caused by the Kanawha, when rising, pouring its water into the mouth of Elk and reversing its current for many miles, while at the same time rain falls in the mountains, increasing the latter river’s depth and velocity.  Flour-mills, iron-foundries, saw-mills, woollen-mills, and barrel-factories extend their long wooden slides down to the river’s edge, to gather material for their consumption.  A railroad spans it with an iron trussed bridge, and the demands of wagon and foot-travel are met by an airy one suspended by cables from tower-like abutments on either side, both bridges swung high in the air, out of reach of flood and of the smoke-stacks of passing steam-craft.