I’ve wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story moves.

True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course; and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged.  But here similitude is at an end.  You’ve hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed here and there at distant intervals by the settler’s ax.

Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know.  Plunged in its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature’s mystery upon you; the mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the centuries.  In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles, became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way.  But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the alien-born.

I was not alien-born.  From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes.  Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me.  Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came.  There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if with sinister intent.

I pushed on faster, drawing the sword to keep me better company, though inwardly I scoffed and jeered at this new twittering of the nerves.  What threat was there for me in silent shadows in the wood?  The dogs I had to fear were bred in British kennels, and there was never any lack of clamor when they were beating up a cover.

Yet this persistent shadow clung upon my footsteps until from casting furtive glances sidewise I came to holding it craftily in the tail of my eye.  ’Twas surely moving as I moved, and surely drawing nearer.  I picked a time and place, measured my distance, and darting suddenly aside, sent home a thrust which should have pinned the phantom to a tree.

“Ugh!  What for Captain Long-knife want kill the tree?”

The voice came from behind, and when I wheeled again my shadow was become incarnated in flesh and blood; a stalwart Indian, naked to the belt, standing so near he could have pricked me with his scalping knife.

It was God’s mercy that by some swift intuition I knew him for the friendly Catawba.  It is an ill thing to take a frighted man unawares.

“Uncanoola?” said I.

He nodded.  “Where ’bouts Captain Long-knife going?”

I told him briefly; whereat he shook his head.

“No find Captain Jennif’ this way; find him that way,” pointing back along the path.