entered into his old stories with such zest.

"I hope I'll live to go with you, Zack," he would say, nodding his gray
head. "We'd hunt out Mrs. C ----, if we came within a hundred miles of
her. She could give you the history of every inch of ground from
Blennerhassets Island up to Fort Du Quesne,--that is, if she were so
minded. She had a sharp, suspicious eye of her own when she was a girl,
and age would not sweeten her temper. But there's no better authority
for old legends of that time,--none. She was a cousin of M'Culloch, who
made that leap from the mountain to escape the Indian arrows, you
remember? and was in the fort when Polly Scott went out to the
gate-house for powder, bringing it in her apron across the field, a
target for hundreds of the red devils. But I doubt if the old lady's
living yet; she was married when I was a stout young beau, dancing
Virginia reels out yonder: Shepler was her first husband."

The older my father grew, the more the idea haunted him of going with
"Zack" out to the banks of the Ohio, until, as second childhood crept on
him, it became a ruling whim. But crossing the Alleghany range was no
light task for even a young man in those days of wagons and
stage-coaches, and he never was gratified. When he was gone, I
reproached myself bitterly that it had not been accomplished: it seemed
so easy and natural a thing to do, now that it was too late. My old plan
grew, therefore, to have a morbid interest for me. I fancied that to go
over his old hunting-paths would bring my father back to me, and that,
wherever he might be now, he would choose to be so brought back.

About the time I was thirty, then, having no employment except an
opening which Fordyce offered me in New York, I chose, instead of
accepting it, to start alone on my voyage of discovery. One August
morning, the air full of a gentle languor, the heavy clouds of
bituminous smoke vanishing beyond the horizon in swells of intense
purple and orange, which I never had seen in our pale sky, I took a boat
at Pittsburg, and dropped lazily down the shining Ohio, through
thick-wooded hills, and dotting little islands that thrust themselves
out of the water to support only a clump of showery green willows, or an
old rock, may-be, draped with delicate trailing mosses. Chance favored
me.

"If you want the run of the Injun forts," said the Captain, as he stood
beside me on the Texas, "there's Abel Steadman aboard. He knows 'em
better than a