lore and the dexterity of the savage.
Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured
north in thousands to escape the conscription; lived during summer on
fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter,
when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there
died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and
easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of
all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the
most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a
strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business,
or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a
criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and
drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of these somnolent,
grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of
mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina,
Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or
Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are
indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all
backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor
Whites or Low-downers.

I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in many
points, not unsimilar to the people usually so called. Rufe himself
combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers
of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the
exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken
Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed
much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe
was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe
with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was
to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had
turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so
much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the
morning--rarel