The Choir Invisible

And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western jungles who

had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and axe--now sat silent

in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled, scarred, fierce, silent,

scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement. Flitting gaily past them,

on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied by trains of pack-horses from

over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse and boat down the Ohio--hurried the

wives of the officers, daintily choosing satins and ribands for a coming

ball. All this and more he noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep

vibrations of history swept through him, arousing him as the marshalling

storm cloud, the rush of winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle

the sense of the high, the mighty, the sublime.

As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped and girt

for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life in those

days, and running was part of the regular training of the young--bounded up

to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was very swift. But he named

another day, impatient of the many interruptions that had already delayed

him, and with long, rapid strides he had soon passed beyond the last fields

and ranges of the town. Then he slackened his pace. Before him, a living

wall, rose the edge of the wilderness. Noting the position of the sun and

searching for a point of least resistance, he plunged in.

Soon he had to make his way through a thicket of cane some twelve feet high;

then through a jungle of wild rye, buffalo grass and briars; beyond which he

struck a narrow deertrace and followed that in its westward winding through

thinner undergrowth under the dark trees.

He was unarmed. He did not even wear a knife. But the thought rose in his

mind of how rapidly the forest also was changing its character. The Indians

were gone. Two years had passed since they had for the last time flecked the

tender green with tender blood. And the deadly wild creatures--the native

people of earth and tree--they likewise had fled from the slaughter and

starvation of their kind. A little while back and a maddened buffalo or a

wounded elk might have trodden him down and gored him to death in that

thicket and no one have ever learned his fate--as happened to many a

solitary hunter. He could not feel sure that hiding in the leaves of the

branches against which his hat sometimes brushed there did not lie the

panther, the hungrier for the fawns that had been driven from the near

coverts. A swift lowering of its head, a tense noiseless spring, its fangs

buried in his neck,--with no knife the contest would not have gone well with

him. But of deadly big game he saw no sign that day. Once from a distant

brake he was surprised to hear the gobble of the wild turkey; and more

surprised still--and delighted--when the trail led to a twilight gloom and

coolness, and at the green margin of a little spring he saw a stag drinking.

It turned its terrified eyes upon him for an instant and then bounded away

like a gray shadow.