United States or Monaco ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
She was a fine horsewoman, and fearless, and she loved excitement of this sort. Tom promised to take care of her, so she was permitted to join our party. Lucky Tom! As the little clock on the settler's mantelpiece struck twelve, we saddled our horses and set off for the corn-brake.
I had made up my mind to proceed by myself some way to the northward until I could reach a settler's hut, from whom I could learn whether the Kentuckians had gone on or turned back again, when I caught sight of them in the distance, making apparently for the very spot where they had rested the previous night.
As I glided swiftly down the dark current I peered into the dense woods, hoping to be cheered by the sight of a settler's cabin; but in all that day's search not a clearing could be found, nor could I discern rising from the treetops of the solitary forest a little cloud of smoke issuing from the chimney of civilized man.
How soon, perhaps, may this profound and holy tranquillity be disturbed by the blows of some daring settler's axe, to make room for the wants of men! I saw no dangerous animals save a few dark green snakes, from five to seven feet long; a dead ounce, that had been stripped of its skin; and a lizard, three feet in length, which ran timidly across our path.
Early next morning the settler's boat came up, and took us a mile down the river, where we found a larger one to convey us to Fort Vancouver. The crew were a Maltese sailor and a man who had been in the United States army. Each had his private opinions as to her management.
From behind him still were heard the shouts and shrieks that were mingled with the reports of the guns and the whoops of the excited Indians. Somehow, in spite of his peril, the beat of the young settler's heart seemed to be almost normal. He watched a little field mouse that fearlessly peered up at him from the ground.
The track of to-day had the same features as the track of yesterday. There was the swamp, the bush, and the perpetual chorus of frogs, the rank unseemly growth, the unwholesome steaming earth. Here and there, and frequently too, we encountered a solitary broken-down waggon, full of some new settler's goods.
He therefore decided that the interests of his little household demanded that he should move still farther back into the almost pathless wilderness, where the land was not yet taken up, and where he could get a settler's title to four hundred acres, simply by rearing a cabin and planting some corn. He had one old horse, and a couple of colts, each two years old.
To reach it from Denboro one left the Bayport road at "Beriah Holt's place," followed Beriah's cow path to the pasture, plunged into the oak and birch grove at the southern edge of that pasture, emerged on a grass-grown and bush-encumbered track which had once been the way to some early settler's home, and had been forsaken for years, and followed that track, in all its windings, until he saw the gleam of water between the upper fringe of brush and the lower limbs of the trees.
But he said that my reasoning did not fit; that I was not a greaser, but a settled inhabitant of the place, and entitled to all a settler's rights; that the bed of the river would have been his grave but for the risk of my life, and therefore whatever I found in the bed of the river belonged to me, and me only.
Word Of The Day