g instead of
walking. Three times I came upon bends of the same broad rivulet. Taking
off my shoes and stockings and rolling up my trousers above my knees, I
tried the first passage. Flakes of broken ice were eddying against the
banks, and before gaining the middle of the stream my feet and ankles
ached with the cold, the sharp pain increasing at every step until I
threw my blanket on the opposite bank and springing upon it wrapped my
feet in its dry folds. Rising a little knoll soon after making the third
ford, I came suddenly upon the familiar stopping-place of my former
journey. It was scarcely more than nine o'clock, and the little
hardships of the journey from Caesar's Head seemed but a cheap outlay for
the joy of the meeting with friends so interested in the varied fortunes
of myself and my late companions. Together we rejoiced at the escape of
Sill and Lamson, and made merry over the vicissitudes of my checkered
career. Here I first learned of the safe arrival in Tennessee of Knapp,
Man Heady, and old Tom Handcock.

After a day's rest I climbed the mountains to the Headen cabin, now
presided over by the heroine of the heifer-bell, in the absence of her
fugitive husband. Saddling her horse, she took me the next evening to
join a lad who was about starting for Shooting Creek. Young Green was
awaiting my arrival, and after a brief delay we were off on a journey of
something like sixty miles; the journey, however, was pushed to a
successful termination by the help of information gleaned by the way. It
was at the close of the last night's march, which had been long and
uneventful, except that we had surmounted no fewer than three
snow-capped ridges, that my blacksmith's shoes, soaked to a pulp by the
wet snow, gave out altogether. On the top of the last ridge I found
myself panting in the yellow light of the rising sun, the sad wrecks of
my two shoes dangling from my hands, a wilderness of beauty spread out
before me, and a sparkling field of frosty forms beneath my tingling
feet. Stretching far into the west toward the open country of East
Tennessee was the limitless wilderness of mountains, drawn like mighty
furrows across the toilsome way, the pale blue of the uttermost ridges
fading into an imperceptible union with the sky. A log house was in
sight down in the valley, a perpendicular column of smoke rising from
its single chimney. Toward this we picked our way, I in my stocking
feet, and my boy guide confidently p