AxTG. 26, ]899.j 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
16S 
Pioneer Days*— XIIL 
Hufebardtoa, 
Warnkk's and Francis' regiments were now drawn up 
in line of battle across the road and adjoining fields, tak- 
ing advantage of every sheltering tree and log heap that 
offered. Hale's regiment drew off and gave no help. 
Heralded by the shriek of fifes and the sharp rattle of 
brass drums that shook the woods with quick reverbera- 
tion, Frazier's troops came marching down the road in 
gallant array, and deployed in line opposite the Amer- 
icans. The latter at once opened fire, evei-y gun leveled 
with that deadly precision of, aim wdiich was the constant 
complaint of the English. Their fire was returned with 
le s effect, for the aimless bullets hurtled over the heads 
of the Americans, and there were ghastly gaps in the 
line w^here scarlet coats and white cross-belts were such 
fair targets. 
"See if that red rooster drops when I fire!" said 
Torrey to Josiah, and aimed at a .British major who stood 
upon a great stump reconnoitering the position of the 
Americans. At the report of the rifle the brave officer 
Eeh headlong from his perch. "Lord, forgive me! That's 
tew much like murder !" Torrey cried, in swift contrition 
for the deed. "I .shall ketch it tu pay for thatl" 
"Thej? come here tu kill us, an' if we git the fust 
chance it is aour good luck," josiah said. ""You haint 
done no more 'n your duty." 
Torrey shook his head. "I shall ketch it afore the 
fight's over. You'll see. An' what's goin' tu be become 
o* my poor women an' childern's more 'n I know. Josier 
Hill, you promise me if you git aout o' this alive you'll 
go up tu that haouse an' git "em away an' safe inside aour 
lines. Will ye?" 
"Nonsense! You'll come aout o' this all right," said 
Josiah, trj'ing to make light of the other's forebodings. 
But Torrey shook his head sadly, "No, I'm sure on't 
as T be I see you, an' you must promise me tu ta' keer on 
'em. Promise !" 
"Yes, yes, I promise — ^if you don't come aout all 
right." 
"Thank ye, an' gi' me your hand on't," said Torrey, 
stretching forth his hand as they left their corner to 
move forward. 
The forest shuddered with sharp echoes, the spiteful 
crack of rifles, the sullen roar of volleyed musketry, the 
shrieks and groans of wounded men. 
The British line w^avered, then broke under the galling 
fire, and fell back until it received the support of Reidesel's 
advancing Brunswickers. Still the Americans pushed 
gallantly onward until victory seemed almost attained, 
when their Col. Francis, though sorely wounded, yet 
leading his regiment into the thickest of the fight, fell, 
pierced by a mortal wound. 
At that a sudden panic swept the Americans into con- 
fusion and retreat. In vain Warner commanded, en- 
treated, led on, and then realizing the hopelessness of 
it all, he sank down upon a log and poured out a storm 
' of curses after the scurrying rout. Quickly recovering 
ii s self-control he called loudly to his men to rally at 
Castleton, and himself vanished in the maze of the 
woods. St. Clair, only six miles away, heard the battle 
raging, yet moved not to the rescue of his brave 
subordinate. 
It was everyone for himself now, and Jo,siah, availing 
himself of every sheltering tree trunk, had scarcely 
noticed the absence of his comrade, when he almost 
stumbled over him lying among the rank ferns in the 
hollow of a cradle knoll. The blood was streaming from 
a wound in the breast, his life quickly going with it. 
"You see!" he gasped, as Josiah dropped beside him. 
Remember — ta' keer — of — Hanner — an' — an' — the chil- 
dern. Good-by," and his spirit passed. 
Josiah knelt a moment beside the dead man, then com- 
posed the stiffening limbs, laid the hat over the motion- 
less face, and stole away to more secure hiding until the 
flirsh of pursuit and pillage was over. Then keeping the 
cover of woods, fences and inequalities of the ground, he 
made toward Torrey's house, approaching it cautiously 
from the rear. 
There was no sign of life to be seen about it, and it 
was only when he drew quite near that he ' heard the 
sound of suppressed weeping. Looking in at the door a 
sad sight met his eyes. The dead body of a woman lay 
upon the floor, the disheveled head lying in a pool of blood 
that oozed from a scalp wound and cleft skull, the savage 
sign of Indian slaughter. Beside it, crouched in an atti- 
tude of grief and despair, was a girl of eighteen, silent 
and tearless, her soft, dark eyes denied the relief of 
tears, while she suppressed the piteous lamentations of 
four younger brothers and sisters. 
"My girl," said Josiah, gently, making his presence 
known. She looked up with a startled, hunted look. "Is 
it your mother?" he asked. 
"Yes, yes," she answered. 
"And you are Tom Torrey's family?" 
"Y"es. The Indians killed mother this morning. I hid 
the children under the washtubs in the cellar and myself 
behind the chmibley. They tried to burn the house, an' I 
put it aout. They killed the cow an' pig, an' took every- 
thing." 
The body- of the murdered mother was placed in a 
hastily prepared grave, a rude burial lacking in all form 
of service, but not in solemnity. 
Josiah now lost no time in leading away his sorrowful 
charge by the most secret ways that tended toward the 
shifting frontier where comparative safety was to be 
found. 
The Indians had plundered and destroyed everything 
in the house, except a little meal and a few pounds of 
sah pork, which had escaped their notice. These Josiah 
put in his knapsack, and when, at nightfall, he made c^mp 
for the homeless orphans in a dense thicket of ever- 
greens, where he ventured to kindle a small fire, he set 
lorth the scant rations. He mixed the meal with water 
in. a vessel of birch bark, and saw Ruby Torrey spread it 
with housewifely care — though she protested it would be 
good for nothing without salt — on a johnn3'cake board 
which he hewed out with his ranger's tomahawk. 
"When d'ye s'pose we'll see father?" she asked, look- 
ing up at him from her task and not a little confused to 
find his sharp, gray eyes fixed steadily upon her. 
''See your father?" he repeated, starting as jf from a 
dream. "I do' know — I can't tell ye." 
"Is there anything the matter with him?" she asked 
^vith a searching look, and a white palor upon her face.. 
' You'd better tell me true." 
"You've be'n a brave gal. Ruby, an' you must keep oti 
bein' one," said he, struggling to swallow a choking lump 
in his throat. "Oh, my poor gal! Your father was 
killed in the fight to-day! I promised him the last word 
he beared, I'd ta' keer on ye — you and your brothers an' 
sisters an your mother — we didn't know 'baout her — but 
he's with her now. I'll keep my promise faithful. Ruby." 
She bowed her face upon her knees in grief too great for 
tears, until she felt a rough hand laid gently upon her 
head, when she wept silently. She drew the children to 
her and soothed their sobbing, but Josiah checked it 
more effectually with the adraonitioji, "You mustn't make 
no n'ise or them praowdin' divils '11 ketch us," and pres- 
ently got them engaged with the johnnycake and frizzled 
pork, and then to sleep on fragrant beds of hemlock. 
"I guess I'll resk a flash more of fire," he said, and 
carefully mended the flickering blaze. "The Injins won't 
be a-shootin' 'raound much afore the crack o' day." 
He bent his ear to catch a faint tremulous wail borne 
from far away on a waft of night breeze — a sound too 
elusive for the girl's less trained sense. The shrug — that 
was his silent recognition of it — was almost a shudder, for 
he knew it was the rallying cry of the wolves, gathering 
to the battlefield. 
"You must eat a mou'ful," he said, proffering a morsel 
of johnnycake and a slice of pork, carefully frizzled over 
the coals. "Yes, you got tu," he urged. "You'll want all 
the strength you can muster tu-morrer." 
She took the food, wondering to find herself yielding 
such ready obedience to him. He assigned to her a bed 
of twigs beside the sleeping children, and covered her 
with his blanket, saying: "Naow sleep saound, for I got 
tu wake you afore "the young uns an' talk over things." 
The last she saw between lids that weariness closed in 
spite of the pain of grief was the silent, motionless form 
of her protector sitting- in the fading firelight in intent 
abstraction, with his rifle across his knees. 
Rowland E. Robinson. 
Nicaraguan Experiences*— III. 
Snakes and Things. 
If snakes can be happy anywhere on earth it would seem 
to be in the woods of Nicaragua. Summer lasts all the 
3'ear round, no time need be wasted in hibernation, and 
opportunities to get walked upon, and then to bite some- 
body, are only limited by the sparsity of the human popu- 
lation. Vines, bushes, limbs, leaves and briars not only 
hide the ground from view, but they make a regular ocean 
of foliage in which the snake may be as easily overhead 
as underfoot, and equally invisible. It results that a 
stranger in the woods is apt to populate them with about a 
thousand imaginary snakes, and all venomous, for every 
real one. And to keep out of the way of so many is a 
task to make one nervous and imhappy, until he makes 
up his mind to stand his chances of snakes as he does of 
lightning, simply by trusting to luck— for nothing else can 
save him. When he has taught his nerves to do that, as 
soldiers teach their nerves to stand chances in battle, he 
can get a great deal of comfort in reflecting how very 
few people actually get bitten. The statistics of the small 
numl3ers bitten, as compared with the great number of 
snakes, and the chances per snake to bite somebody, would 
amply support a theory that the snakes have some sort of 
game law restrictions upon the privilege of biting people. 
For, I am sure, they could soon exterminate the popu- 
lation, as we have done the buffalo and the wild pigeons, if 
they were "game hogs," and bit at every chance they 
could find. Of course, it is only a working theory, sug- 
gested for the comfort of the tenderfoot in the woods, by 
one of themselves, as its results seem to accord with ex- 
perience. A simple form of such a theory would be that 
the snakes allow an average of so many miles of travel in 
the woods for each bite. I feel sure that the allowance is 
at least a thousand miles. That is, a thousand men could 
go at least one mile, or one man a thousand miles, or ten 
men a hundred miles each for every bite. So if I take a 
scramble through the jungle for a quarter of a mile I run a 
chance of just one in four thousand of getting a bite. It 
is always a great thing to get numerical expressions for 
just exactly what we are doing. Figures, we know, can- 
not lie. When we say the multiplication table we are 
telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the 
truth. On all other occasions we are only approximating. 
In the matter of varieties of venomous snakes Nicaragua 
has at least two of the three which we have in the 
LTnited States, and four of her own besides, She has the 
rattlesnake, and the elaps, or coral snake, but I doubt if 
she has our copperhead or moccasin, which are practically 
the same snake, and I think interbreed. At least I have 
found no specimen of either in several good collections 
made in this vicinity. The books, however, say they 
are found in Mexico, and there is no reason apparent why 
they may not be here as well. 
The elaps here is very abundant. I have been curious 
to know if his disposition is as inoffensive as it is in the 
United States, where the country folk often consider him 
harmless, and select him to handle and to scare timid 
people with; though the fatal percentage of his bites is 
higher than the rattlesnake's. But the natives here all 
recognize him as deadly, and believe him as quick to bite 
as any other. 
Of the four native species, which are unknown in the 
United States, one is a dark backed and yellow-bellied sea 
snake, found only on the shore of the Pacific, called pela- 
mys in the books. His tail is flat, like an eel's, his nostrils 
are on top of his nose, and his fangs are permanently 
erect, like elaps. Of each of the other three native species 
there are several varieties, differing sometimes widely in 
color and markings, so as to make some eight or ten quite 
different looking snakes. Among these the natives dis- 
tribute, very much at random, three names — tamagas, ter- 
tiapello and toboba. Generally, however, tamagas is ap- 
plied to the species called in the books teleuraspis. Its 
salient features are the excessively broad head, near about 
three times the width of the neck, and the possession of 
mihiature horns over its eyebrows. Oile variety is 
uniform, bright yelldw, with a few fine black specks; one 
is atl olive gray with sonle faint White spots, atid a. iiarrow 
stripe down the back; and one is A pale green with white, 
black," yellow and brown irregulat sfjots specially adapted 
to conceal him from notice when up in the bushes. 
The tertiapello of natives I generally identify with the 
trigonocephalus of the books. The salient feature is the 
very sharp-pointed, high, angular ttose, and the top of 
the head covered with ordinary small scales, instead of 
the sort of plates that we see in our copperhead and 
moccasin. The scheme of color and marking is generally 
very suggestive of the copperhead, with reddish brovvn 
tints, and V-shaped marks, but there is great variety in 
this species, and greenish and olive and yellow all appear. 
This species in some of the books is called bothrops, and 
it includes the noted "fer de lance" of Martinque and 
Santa Lucia, said to be particularly aggressive. The 
third variety of the natives is toboba, but all the speci- 
mens shown me of that name turned out to be non- 
venomous snakes. The third variety of the books is 
lachesis, and I am sorry to say I have not yet found a 
specimen of him. He is the only snake in the world 
to whom tlae books will concede a horny end to the tail. 
He is akin to the rattlesnake, but not having enough bone 
on his tail for a rattle, he is said to have it in a "terminal 
spine well developed." I am still on the hunt for him, but 
I take it that he likes drier localities than the delta of the 
San Juan. And from the Pacific side, which is dry, the 
natives tell of having a "Toboba con unya," or toboba 
"with a claw." The book descriptions of their markings 
and coloring read much like those of the rattlesnake, and 
the crown scales are small, like tregonocephalus. 
There is one more snake for which I have hunted 
faithfully, but which I never expect to find, although he 
is the most dreaded of all, both by natives and American 
settlers here. He is called the blood snake, and was 
mentioned and described in your columns in a letter from 
Costa Rica about two years ago, by a very intelligent 
correspondent, who spoke of him as resembling a "swollen 
vein." The descriptions vary a good deal, but generally 
agree that he is a small snake, and is red or bluish red or 
red bellied. I have seen some half-dozen collections of 
snakes, each of which had one or more so-called blood 
snakes. But every one, upon examination, proved to be 
some small, harmless snake. If any such snake exists he 
has heretofore escaped the observation of any naturalist. 
That is so unlikely that I am satisfied none can exist. 
There is, however, 'no doubt at all that, not infrequently, 
the symptoms ascribed to the bite of the blood snake do 
follow the bite of some snake. But it must be one of the 
three kinds above named. The symptoms are that all 
the mucous surfaces of the body, external or internal, will 
bleed, and sometimes even the natural skin is said to ooze 
or sweat blood. Evidently, in such cases, the patient has a 
very large dose of a poison containing an unusual pro- 
portion of what Dr. Weir Mitchell called "venom 
globulin." The "pit vipers" are supposed to be richer in 
that ingredient than other snakes, and all the snakes I have 
mentioned belong to the pit vipers, except the elaps and 
pelamys. 
So there seems no need to conjure up a new snake 
to give a bite which will affect the blood in that way. 
But it would be very interesting to identify the snake and 
the circumstances under which it happens in an actual 
case. Physicians who have treated cases (which generally 
recovered, too) have described the cases to me, but they 
knew nothing about the snakes. Ail of these snakes, ex- 
cept the coral, seem to grow to great size, probably 7ft. or 
more, sometimes. I once saw the fangs of a monster 
rattlesnake in Florida, a fellow with near twenty rattles, 
and they were about ^in. long. I have the fangs of a 
tamagas lin. long, and I have heard of others very much 
larger. 
A medicine called curarina is put up in Cartagena, 
Colombia, and is largely used all through Central Amer- 
ica, and remarkable cures are ascribed to it. Its prepara- 
tion is, of course, a secret, but the Indian arrow poison 
from South America, called curari, is well known, and is 
derived from, plants which yield nux-vomica and strychnine. 
A plant of the same family, Strychnos colubrina, on the 
coast of Coromandel, has been in use for generations as an 
antidote for the bite of the cobra. And strychnine is now 
coming to be recognized as the physiological antidote for 
snake venom, as I recently wrote in your issue of July 8. 
Unfortunately, snakes are not the only things in the 
woods here which bite. Ticks and mosquitoes I need not 
mention, for we are not guiltless of them ourselves in 
certain localities of the United States, and they are not 
restrained either in their biting by any game laws in any 
country. But I have found here a new way to catch the 
little bits of ticks, almost too small to see with the naked 
eye. A little half- warm lump of shoemaker's wax picks 
up all it is rubbed over, even though they cannot be seen. 
Scorpions and tarantulas are also to be found, but there 
are man}^ more imaginary ones in the woods than real. 
The jigoe is verj'^ common in sandy localities, and must 
be amphibious, from the way in which he survives .over- 
flows. He is easily located and picked out when he finds a 
lodgment. But many deaths from lockjaw have been 
known to follow jigoe bites, and the natives are usually 
careful not to wash the place with water, believing that 
the germ of the lockjaw is in the water, and will find 
lodgment. They often apply a little kerosene to the 
spot. 
The most horrid of all the parasites is known as the mos- 
quito worm, the natives believing it to be deposited by 
some sort of a mosquito. It is really the grub of a variety 
of the cestris, a large, hairy fly, belonging to the same 
family as that which breeds the grubs found in the head 
of deer, and in rabbits and squirrels. _ The hot fly, which 
infests horses, is also of the same family. 
This fly must either watch to catch people asleep, or 
else his grub-laying is an entirely painless operation, for 
I have heard of many cases on the face and hands, and 
of one in the eyelid. The grub has to breathe and keeps 
the hole open behind him, and can be seen to move. He 
can be squeezed out without much trouble, if firi5t 
suffocated and killed. If squeezed while alive he is .able 
to hold on to some extent and may be torn apart. The 
usual treatment is to plaster wet tobacco over him, which 
