y of Old Fort Loudon

CHAPTER I

Along the buffalo paths, from one salt-lick to another, a group of
pioneers took a vagrant way through the dense cane-brakes. Never a wheel
had then entered the deep forests of this western wilderness; the
frontiersman and the packhorse were comrades. Dark, gloomy, with long,
level summit-lines, a grim outlier of the mountain range, since known as
the Cumberland, stretched from northeast to southwest, seeming as they
approached to interpose an insurmountable barrier to further progress,
until suddenly, as in the miracle of a dream, the craggy wooded heights
showed a gap, cloven to the heart of the steeps, opening out their path
as through some splendid gateway, and promising deliverance, a new life,
and a new and beautiful land. For beyond the darkling cliffs on either
hand an illuminated vista stretched in every lengthening perspective,
with softly nestling sheltered valleys, and parallel lines of distant
azure mountains, and many a mile of level woodland high on an elevated
plateau, all bedight in the lingering flare of the yellow, and deep red,
and sere brown of late autumn, and all suffused with an opaline haze and
the rich, sweet languors of sunset-tide on an Indian-summer day.

As that enchanted perspective opened to the view, a sudden joyous
exclamation rang out on the still air. The next moment a woman, walking
beside one of the packhorses, clapped both hands over her lips, and
turning looked with apprehensive eyes at the two men who followed her.
The one in advance cast at her a glance of keen reproach, and then the
whole party paused and with tense attention bent every faculty to
listen.

Silence could hardly have been more profound. The regular respiration of
the two horses suggested sound. But the wind did not stir; the growths
of the limitless cane-brakes in the valley showed no slight quiver in
the delicately poised fibers of their brown feathery crests; the haze,
all shot through with glimmers of gold in its gauzy gray folds, rested
on the mute woods; the suave sky hung above the purple western heights
without a breath. No suggestion of motion in all the landscape, save the
sudden melting away of a flake of vermilion cloud in a faintly green
expanse of the crystal heavens.

The elder man dropped his hand, that had been raised to impose silence,
and lifted his eyes from the ground. "I cannot be rid of the idea that
we are followed," he said. "But I hear nothing