ut a
chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and
home--with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine,
among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time
after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the
simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows _liked_ me. One said to
me one day, "You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all
like you. What's the reason?" I explained it that he had only met with
Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must
be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the _liking_ which I
have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk.

Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length,
and stocking it with provisions. "Money won't be of much use," he said;
"what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired
two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented
themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men
took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally
superstitious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent,
anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something _utterly_
unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or
that scrap of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a
miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I
liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a
young _raven_. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to
a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a
familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all
my life.

During my return down the river, it was in a freshet, and we went
headlong. This is to the very last degree dangerous, unless the boatmen
know every rock and point, for the dugout canoe goes over at a touch, and
there is no life to be saved in the rapids. Now we were flying like a
swallow, and could not stop. There was one narrow shoot, or pass, just
in the middle of the river, where there was exactly room to an inch for a
canoe to pass, but to do this it was necessary to have moonlight enough
to see the King Rock, which rose in the stream close by the passage, and
at the critical instant to "fend off" with the hand and prevent the canoe
from driving full on the rock. A terrible storm was c