Not being very successful in raising an interest in the dangers of his ford, although he could not forego indulging a malicious pleasure in trying to make the strangers uncomfortable, he finally turned his attention to a trade.  “This hoss of mine,” he said, “is just the kind of brute-beast you want for this country.  Your hosses is too heavy.  How’ll you swap for that one o’ yourn?” The reiterated assertion that the horses were not ours, that they were hired, made little impression on him.  All the way to Burnsville he kept referring to the subject of a trade.  The instinct of “swap” was strong in him.  When we met a yoke of steers, he turned round and bantered the owner for a trade.  Our saddles took his fancy.  They were of the army pattern, and he allowed that one of them would just suit him.  He rode a small flat English pad, across which was flung the United States mail pouch, apparently empty.  He dwelt upon the fact that his saddle was new and ours were old, and the advantages that would accrue to us from the exchange.  He did n’t care if they had been through the war, as they had, for he fancied an army saddle.  The Friend answered for himself that the saddle he rode belonged to a distinguished Union general, and had a bullet in it that was put there by a careless Confederate in the first battle of Bull Run, and the owner would not part with it for money.  But the mail-rider said he did n’t mind that.  He would n’t mind swapping his new saddle for my old one and the rubber coat and leggings.  Long before we reached the ford we thought we would like to swap the guide, even at the, risk of drowning.  The ford was passed, in due time, with no inconvenience save that of wet feet, for the stream was breast high to the horses; but being broad and swift and full of sunken rocks and slippery stones, and the crossing tortuous, it is not a ford to be commended.  There is a curious delusion that a rider has in crossing a swift broad stream.  It is that he is rapidly drifting up-stream, while in fact the tendency of the horse is to go with the current.

The road in the afternoon was not unpicturesque, owing to the streams and the ever noble forests, but the prospect was always very limited.  Agriculturally, the country was mostly undeveloped.  The travelers endeavored to get from the rider an estimate of the price of land.  Not much sold, he said.  “There was one sale of a big piece last year; the owner enthorited Big Tom Wilson to sell it, but I d’know what he got for it.”

All the way along, the habitations were small log cabins, with one room, chinked with mud, and these were far between; and only occasionally thereby a similar log structure, unchinked, laid up like a cob house, that served for a stable.  Not much cultivation, except now and then a little patch of poor corn on a steep hillside, occasionally a few apple-trees, and a peach-tree without fruit.  Here and there was a house that had been half finished and then abandoned, or a shanty in which a couple of young married people were just beginning life.  Generally the cabins (confirming the accuracy of the census of 1880) swarmed with children, and nearly all the women were thin and sickly.