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A PAGAN OF THE ALLEGHANIES.

CHAPTER I.

IN THE HUNTING-GROUNDS OF THE IROQUOIS.

Along the walls of the Alleghanies that stand to the west had crept winds of the south with the kisses of spring in them. Faintest of tender greens and uncertain reds of the new leaves were creeping out along that part of the mountain that rests in little broken waves, as the gown of a woman lies in folds about the feet ere the beginning of those long lines of grace that reach upward to curve of throat or hooded head.

Only to the feet had crept this youngest lover of the seasons-so young in days, but so wise in the lore of winning. Up to those hooded heights he dare not leap, they had been so lately dashed by autumn's tears that weaken, beaten and ravished by the cruel passions of winter, and stripped bare with the life-blood of the forest driven in terror to the heart.

Standing so, facing ever the sunset and the past-a monument of the desolate-it was a wise, far-seeing wooer, who began with tender caresses of sympathy, who covered the bare feet and the cold limbs until they thrilled under the warm greens and gave back whispers that drew him to the summit, which, once gained, he mounted in gay triumph, and rolling aloft his standard of victory-the pink flush of the laurel-he blew backward a careless kiss of farewell, with

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no care for the well-faring, and leaving his conquest for the hot kisses of the summer sun, turned to the north, where yet stood others in fetters of ice for which he alone carried the key.

Why is spring ever given the personality of woman, when the boy Cupid has time out of mind ruled love? They are the same always, not to be separated. With love, is not spring ever in the heart? And if a doubt remains of the sex, only watch the tender kissing open of the buds that are first and sweetest; and with the first thrill of the blood that brings blushes this epicure of love tires like any other masculine thing, and never a backward glance of regret toward the forsaken bosom of the forest-never that. For always with spring is the sense triumphant that all the hot passion of summer days will never still in any breast the longings for the tender glimmer of dews that followed the frosts, and that heart-gladdening music of the birds before the nests were built. But to the victor what matter those memories? It is the winning, not the wearing, that is sweetest there. And how can one see a goddess in all that? Surely it is a young god, not a chubby blind child, but a youth with the thrills of compelling life in his veins, and the caressing mouth that trembles, and the eyes that plead, and that elusive smile that is not quite mockery, and yet

You see it is not safe to dare even write or speak of him, he bewitches one so, and comes uncalled for into the pages that were to hold only a chronicle of the highlands of those Laurel Hills for the thick green of the immortals crowns those heights looming up changelessly above the western level lands and the settlements, and its name has clung to the mountains as its roots have clung, until the Hills of the Laurels are those to the west; and from them one can see on either side the course of those two turbulent, passionate rivers of Indian naming that cut their way through the

highlands, and give at their meeting a harbor in the hills that is unrivaled.

There must have been much deemed unrivaled or to be desired along this barrier that has been fought for by several nations and many factions, and is yet so untamed and untamable; for the forests have still the freeness of the wilderness in them, as wild, if not so vast, as when the Ligonier Valley was the hunting-ground of the Indian confederacy; as wild as when Nemacolin, the Delaware, pushed through its jungles, leaving the trail for the English soldiers, the trail that for a century was called Nemacolin's Path; the one over which the man Washington rode to his first defeat and his last. It was over this debatable range that he fought for the cross of St. George, and the enemy's standard bore the Bourbon lilies.

From a nook of that western wall he fired the first gun of a war that erased New France from the New World. And the people walk over the soil of ambush and battle, and look down on the serenity of the settlements, and care nothing for the red cross that once stood there-a shield for the arms of an octopus; and scarcely notice that the nodding blue of the emblem of France persistently grows in nooks where the waters creep.

Yes, much history has been written by tomahawk and sword, in despair and exultation, here in the wild corner of Penn's province, that Half-King, the Iroquois, debated Penn's right to; the untamable corner that long ago the Old Dominion coveted and intrigued for; the wild dells where the clanking chains of runaway slaves have broken through the rustle of leaves-stray human things willing to share the life of bear and deer for the thing that so few people who possess ever value-the trifle of freedom. All those phases of life have been throbbed through on the bosom of the Ligonier and the battlements of the Laurels; but that is of the past. Corn grows in patches through the hunting-grounds; the plow turns up arrow-heads in the new soil, and the oxen tread them under in the next furrow; the interlopers haul their lumber and grain along the shadowy old roads through the timber-land, with never a thought of the moccasined feet that trod them first-no one cares; no one remembers.

And instead of Iroquois councils under the lodge of Tanacharison, the Half-King, there may be seen any Saturday at "The Roads" a sprinkling of voters gathered from the farms or the log-camps, and there may be heard desultory dickerings over the merits of the different steeds of different grades hitched to the posts by the store porch. And another familiar topic of conversation is the wandering hog and his several and distinct marks, for this selfsupporting rooter, furnishing the maximum of stock wealth in the mountains, is not to be despised; and the question after the chestnuts and acorns fall is: Four and a half cents on the hoof in the market-places, or that possible extra half-cent that gives as result the desired nickel.

The women come also to "The Roads," with their splintbaskets filled with eggs, or pats of butter in cabbage-leaves, often from the near farms; and these, voluble, well acquainted, and self-assured, are looked on as quite worldly, because of their proximity to this metropolis of the hills. And then there are others more seldom seen, the women folk from the "wooden" country in the interior; quieter in speech, and not so ready with good-natured badinage over their trade for small groceries. From their great shadowy, curtained bonnets eyes look out shyly, yet curiously, on those strange store-room assemblages. At times it is hard to tell whether the face curtained so jealously from scrutiny is old or young; but the hands are almost always brown and hard from the weather, the ax, and the plow, and the

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