Jan. ii, 1902.3 
silver at the head of a regiment of green-coats. The 
Boss and his companion made their way to this tree, and 
looked back at the mill, and glanced at their compass 
and nodded. Then the Boss led the way at a swinging, 
measured stride, running by compass; he was pacing. 
The top of the bluff extended for a mile or two in a 
wooded table land. Suddenly the Boss halted and looked 
around about him. "Ought to be 'bout here, I guess." he 
said. "Stand here, Jake, while I take a circle." Then 
he began to walk around Jake in ever-widening circles. 
Half an hour later he hallooed. Jake moved forward in 
almost a direct line, perhaps two hundred yards, and 
there stood the Boss with a dead crow in his hand. He 
pointed to its head; the upper half had been carried away. 
"A mightv good shot," said the Boss, "and a mightv bad 
one." 
A few yards further on they found an empty brass shell 
shining among the dead leaves. The Boss looked up and 
pointed, "That's where this black fellow sat— on that 
dead branch — and here's where the man stood who shot 
him — and the poor devil down in the boarding house." 
E. H. Hotchkiss. 
A Walk Down South.— XI. 
It was raining when I came down the road past a 
side hill lime kiln over the brink into Cumberland, Md. 
Beyond the city I could see a bluff dimly, though it was 
not far away. The city is upward of three miles long and 
only a few rods wide. The stone pavements, the close-set 
building and other "citified" things made me feel uncom- 
fortable. I did not feel any better when the head waiter 
of the hotel sneaked over "to the head clerk to see if I 
was to be served with a meal there. But I wj* "squared" 
by the clerk, and ate a hearty supper in spit? of the fact 
that I was ill dressed. I had come in wet to the skin, and 
had to change the bicycle suit for long trousers, which, 
with a flannel shirt, did not conform well to existing con- 
ditions thereabouts. 
Cumberland is on the dividing line between the North 
and the South. I presume that it has the characteristics 
of both sections. Leastwise, I saw considerable that was 
novel to me, and heard more. For the first time I heard 
the pure Southern dialect. It was exceedingly sweet and 
musical to my ears. The rising inflection was very pro- 
nounced — far more so than in central and southern Penn- 
sylvania. The snatches of conversation that I overheard 
when a Northern and a Southern commercial traveler ex- 
changed experiences were most interesting. The mere 
tones of the voices were something of a revelation to me. 
I had glimpses of a new type of man at Cumberland, 
too. I have seen men who suggested a shotgun, others 
like old flintlock rifles, one or two that seemed like a 
Gatling gun. I now saw a man who seemed to be a knife 
personified. His eyes were deep set and black, his com- 
plexion dark, his hair black, his movements alert, grace- 
ful as the wind. He was sheathed in the gentlest be- 
havior and most cultivated manner I have ever seen, and 
yet I could not think of comparing him to anything but a 
lean blade with a black glitter along the edge. Perhaps I 
have described a stage villain, but I didn't mean to. The 
men of this type have none of the brute in them. In- 
deed, their appearances come nearer to suggesting sensi- 
tive honor and courageous dash than any other sort, to 
my mind. Sixty miles further south, at Moorefield, W. 
Va., I saw one of these knife-like men speak to a light- 
haired, no-account of the same age — say twenty-eight or 
so. The no-account fairly shivered, and though I did 
not hear what was said, the tone of voice on one side was 
keen, on the other a whine. One good quality the knife- 
like ones seemed to lack conspicuously, that was the 
endurance. 
O. C. McKay, of Cedarville, Va., was at the hotel in 
Cumberland, and he told me about the country toward 
which I was headed. I wanted to go south along the 
western side of the Alleghanies. He said that there 
were twenty-two inches of snow in Pocahontas county, 
W. Va., through which I could not wade. He said, how- 
ever, that along the east side of the ridge I might get 
through. Then he laid my route for me up the South 
Branch and south fork of the South Branch of the 
Potomac River through the county seats of Hampshire, 
Hardy. Grant and Pendleton counties, West Virginia. He 
warned me that while the eastern slope was several de- 
grees warmer than the western, I would climb up all the 
way to Highland county, Virginia, and, of course, go 
into a colder climate every perpendicular yard I ascended. 
It helped me much. 
"Het's a pretty jubeous look around," an old darky said 
•the other day — so I thought, when I came out of Cum- 
berland on Monday morning, Nov. 24. The day was 
blustering, and gray clouds swept overhead. Under the 
pack it was not very cold, but to stop and rest for long 
meant a shiver if I sat down. Eighty rods from the ' 
trolley car that took me to South Cumberland was the 
Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which reaches only to Cum- 
berland, however. I wanted a ride on a canal boat, so I 
went up half a mile to an open lock.'but the first boatman 
wouldn't take me down, so I started on the towpath, hav- 
ing lost a couple of hours. I met a boy peddler a mile 
below the bridge coming up. He had gone down more 
than two hours before, but was on his way back to take to 
the public road. He had been ordered off the towpath 
four or five miles below, and as a result lost several hours 
and covered a dozen useless miles. His voice broke 
when he told about it. His pack was heavier 
than mine, and he was twenty pounds lighter than I at 
least. He said "they wouldn't let him cross at the 
locks," nor follow the path further for fear of* his scaring 
the mules. He kept on back, and I kept on ahead, for I 
wanted to see the kind of a man who would make a 
boy walk twelve miles heavy laden for nothing. 
Two miles below I saw a man lying beside the towpath. 
His legs and arms were drawn up, his head curled into 
the grass and a double-barreled shotgun was beside him 
on the ground. I thought it was a tragedy, and rolled 
him over to see where the shot entered, but saw no blood. 
I threw open the gun then and found that it was not 
loaded. To make sure, I took a smell of the fellow's 
breath. I left him then. I got dinner at a farmhouse 
out in the field toward the Potomac. A farmer owned a 
mile or so of the Potomac bottom there. Two daughters 
and a son have divided the land, and Farmer Crites, a 
mountaineer from Highland county, Va., married one of 
the girls, put up a house on his wife's portion and is 
adding wealth to the capital. • He talked West Virginia 
mountaineer English, to which I listened for the first time. 
T carried a "right smaht load." The weather was bad. 
"Yes. indeed. This yere land is good, it's so." 
Down the towpath a way a canal boat was tied to 
the bank. 
"How ah yo'?" said the captain. "Takin' a leetle 
wahlk? Huh! Well, seh, hit's right smaht of a ways 
down to Green Spring. You'll find cleveh peepel that- 
away; yass, seh. One time me an' two otheh fellehs went 
up theh Shenandoah Valley buyin' mewls. We stopped 
at an old fahmer's house, an' asked could we all stay 
fur theh night. He said as he wasn't prepehed to ac- 
commodate travelahs. Well, we said we would sleep on 
theh flooh. We hed ouh blankets. No, sah, he said he 
was afraid of bugs. That made we all pretty mad, and 
one of ouh pahty was a man who didn't cyah for anything 
at all. He said, 'We haven't any moh bugs than you 
hev, and we ah goin' to stay yere whetheh you want 
us to or not.' The old fahmer went into the house and 
come out again to say he'd be ready to keep us in a little. 
I saw some boys going across the fields on horseback 
pretty fast, but didn' think nothing of it. Pretty soon 
'bout fifteen or twenty fahmers come along the road, all 
ahmed with Winchestahs and shotguns. Hit looked 
kinda jubeous, hit's so. But I knowed one of the pahties 
theh, and we fixed it up all right. Then that yere fahmer 
tried to sell we uns a team of old mewls, hit's so." 
It was eight miles from the bridge to the first lock 
(No. 75). I sat down on the porch of the tender's house 
beside the path, using my pack for a seat. The wind 
was blowing colder, and flakes of snow came out of the 
north in stinging fashion from time to time. In five min- 
utes I was getting ready to shiver. Then a woman came 
out of the house. She jumped when I spoke, but pointed 
across the lock to the tender's shanty, where her husband 
could be found. I found the tender not the ugly man I 
had expected from the peddler's story. The peddler had 
not come so far down as that. Undoubtedly some merci- 
less joker had turned him back. 
The tender was Stephen Harper. He said I could stay 
at his house as long as I liked. So I put my pack indoors 
and then sat down to enjoy the hot, soft-coal stove fire. 
Supper that night consisted of beans, ham, bread and 
peach, cherry or cream butter, and oatmeal and milk for 
dessert. It was delicious and ample. 
After supper I went out to watch a canal boat go 
through the lock. The wind was stone cold, with a charge 
of sleet now and then. The boat ran into the lock, steered 
by a gaunt woman, around whose head was wrapped a 
woolen shawl. Her cotton skirt flapped like a flag in 
the wind. She held the tiller with one hand and put the 
other into the flames from a soft-coal brazier — a six-quart 
iron flower pot on three legs. The flare from this fire 
cast shadows in all directions, while sparks flew for yards 
down wind in a dusky cloud of smoke. Out of the galley 
window amidships stuck a sunbonneted head for a mo- 
ment, lighted by a dim lamp and the red heat of a stove. 
I had a glimpse of tin cups, and caught the odor of 
coffee. Meantime the stern gate closed and the boat 
began to settle in the lock. Two boys, the oldest not 
seventeen, stood waiting, bent by the cold and blowing on 
mittenless hawk-talon fingers. In five minutes the 
swing gates opened. "Hike! Hike!" yelled the boys, and 
the three invisible mules down the path, hitched tandem, 
hauled the rope taut and the boat moved slowly on, guided 
by the black, gaunt witch at the tiller, who swayed now to 
port and now to starboard, enveloped in smoke, sparks 
and flame. For a few moments instinct said she was in 
h. r element. I entered the watch shanty. 
" A woman astern !" snorted the old tender. "It's 
a nice night for a woman to be out there." 
He had been a boatman for twenty years, and he knew 
that the figure I saw was a woman shivering in the bitter 
wind. 
We sat in the shanty for a while, waiting till some 
oysters in their shells laid around the rim of the stove 
cooked. They opened in a few minutes, and then we 
snatched them one by one from the rail and ate them as 
they sizzled. I'd never eaten roasted oysters before. My 
supper had been a large one, but I ate a couple dozen of 
fine large Chesapeake Bay oysters and regretted that I 
could not eat more. The shellfish are brought up on the 
canal boats in tubs of salt water. They were unexpected 
and exceedingly good. 
"There used to be lots of ducks killed along the canal," 
Harper said, "but they aren't so plenty as they were once. 
Years ago a deer was run into the canal by dogs down 
below here. It was just ahead of my boat, and I shot at 
it with a navy revolver, but couldn't get it. After a while 
it found a place to climb out and started up the moun- 
tain, and then a man there shot it with a rifle. Nearly 
all the boats have a gun or two on board." 
In a cage bird in the dining room was a handsome fellow 
— a Kentucky cardinal, I think it was. Right after New 
Year's it begins to whistle, and after a while when the 
migrants arrive, rescuers of the same species come to the 
cage and "fight" the prisoner. Of a canary in the same 
house I heard a similar touching story. Every spring 
thistle birds bring straw and twigs to the cage with which 
the captive builds a nest. 
On the following morning I boarded on* of Captain J. 
G. Lynn's nine prop-and-cross-tie boats bound for ' Old 
Town, Md. Old Town is one of the places where Brad- 
dock's army stopped to camp when on its way to defeat 
near Pittsburg (Fort Duquesne). Across the river is 
Green Spring, reached from Old Town by a rope ferry or 
a rowboat, according to the load. 
Captain Lynn belonged to the Confederate army, and 
his company took Crook and Kelly out of Maryland. He 
ranged all through the Alleghanies from the Potomac 
southward, and knows the region all through. He fought 
over many of the ridges, hunted men and was hunted 
where a great deal of game has been killed since then. He 
approved of my route. 
Riding on this canal boat was a novelty. Several years 
ago I rode fourteen miles up the Honesdale, Pennsyl- 
vania. Canal, but that was a different region. The Dela- 
ware River was rugged and beautiful ; save for Indian 
traditions that portion of the stream which I saw, was 
tame in history. On the Potomac every hill, every val- 
ley, and many of the houses stood for a legend— on one 
a hunter had heard a lost runaway darky's prayer for a 
guide, from another scouts had spied on opposing armies : 
old earth works might still be seen. The region seemed 
to glide by— trees, cornfields, rock ledges, hills, valleys 
and mountains all slipped past. There was no tremor 
of a steam engine, nor creaking of blocks. Neither were 
there waves or noisy winds. It was traveling of the sort 
that makes one listen for the clock and strain to catch the 
sound of a creaking tiller. I was tempted to go on to the 
Chesapeake Bay. But at Old Town I crossed the Potomac 
in a rowboat, and after a dinner went to the railroad 
station. 
I went to the railroad station because L felt the need of 
haste. A snowstorm might delay me for days if it came 
at the wrong time. While I w^ed for a train to take me 
to Romney, eighteen miles up the South Branch, I saw 
three hunters cross the railroad track behind some little 
painted shanties. They fired at and killed three rabbits 
the dogs routed in a few minutes there. Then they came 
to the store. On their backs were three or four rabbits 
apiece. I was told, however, that Romney was nearer 
the game country, and that one could get hotel accom- 
modations at "reasonable" rates — say a dollar a day. 
Twilight came early and lasted long. The mountains 
cast shadows across the valleys long before it becomes 
dark. I rode through the gathering gloom up a valley, 
getting glimpses of the real South — the South that one 
sees in picture books. Log houses and brick mansions, 
wide fields in which corn stood shocked. Once I saw 
Topsy and a white girl standing side by side. 
It was almost dark when I entered a hotel at Romney. 
The first thing I saw was a muzzleloading Colt's revolver 
on the window sill — loaded. I thought I was getting into 
a "rough" country then. Raymond S. Spears. 
Camp-Fire Stories from Canadian 
Woods.-V> 
The Counterfeiter's Cave. 
{Continued from the issue of May 11, 1901.) 
When old John Meyers died, leaving as a legacy his 
history of the treasure cave, some few of those residing 
in the neighborhood where old John lived, after search- 
ing in vain and failing to find the cave, conceived the 
idea of not only manufacturing the silver but coining it 
as well. 
D uring their researches a veritable cave was discovered 
situated at the head of Long Lake and about four miles 
easterly from the foot of the Great Massinau. This cave 
was secretly known to only a few, was found by the 
merest accident, the entrance to it was naturally so well 
concealed that scores might pass within a few feet of 
its mouth without discovering it. Here some of the 
more daring spirits formed the plan and carried on the 
operations of counterfeiting silver money for several 
jears. 
The cave was supposed to contain considerable anti- 
mony, as specimens of this mineral were there afterward 
discovered; galena and silver existed in this and the ad- 
joining townships, though not discovered until recent 
years. The presence of these minerals was presumed to 
have been known to those daring "courriers du bois." 
Counterfeiting at that time was a hanging crirxe. 
Yearly or half yearly expeditions under the guise of 
hunting, fishing, or trapping were made to this cave 
to replenish their exhausted exchequer, the parties taking 
every precaution to conceal their intentions and disguise 
the object of their undertaking. 
For how many years this counterfeiting was carried 
on, how much money was coined, or who all were en- 
gaged in the transactions will never be known. 
Whether from exhausting the supply of antimony, or 
whether their coins were too easily detected, it seems the 
enterprise did not pay. Operations were abandoned, the 
entrance to the cave was closed up, the secret was buried, 
and probably would never have become known to the 
public but for a circumstance and an enterprise many 
years after which cost some of the parties dear. 
In the year 1865 two partners, "Oram and Howie," 
had established a paper manufactory on the river Trent 
and in the neighborhood where some of these parties 
lived. 
About this time the idea of counterfeiting was revived 
among a few of the old parties from the successful opera- 
tions of a gang in the western part of the Province and 
the neighboring States, with whom they had placed them- 
.- . ives in communication. 
Howie being a genial off-hand sort of a fellow, two of 
the parties approached him with a suggestion that if 
they could show him a silver mine which, with a little 
capital to develop it, would make them all rich, would 
he invest in it? Howie replied that he had not a great 
deal of capital, but if they showed him a good thing he 
would find funds to develop it. 
They took him to a lonely spot away in the northern 
part of the county, and, like Satan of old, who took 
another upon a high mountain to show him his pos- 
sessions (while the poor devil hadn't a foot of land of his 
own to give), they likewise had no mine to disclose. 
But they then and there acquainted him with their 
scheme for coining money. They assured Howie that 
they could turn out $500 to $1,000 per day, but they re- 
quired a little capital to complete the plant with new 
and improved machinery, and some business man to dis- 
tribute the money. They showed him some United States 
half dollar pieces, but they were badly made and of so 
brittle material as to be easily broken. They, however, 
showed some twenty-five cent pieces better made and of 
superior material. Howie concluded there was ' more 
money to be made by betraying the parties than by join- 
ing their enterprise. He accordingly communicated with 
the Government and a detective was sent to his assist- 
ance. Aided by this detective, whom he introdueed as a 
Mr. Stratton from New York, and one who was willing 
to enter into their plans, a scheme was laid to entrap the 
counterfeiters which was well planned and successfully 
carried out. Four of the parties — two Quackenbush 
brothers, Stickles and Potter — were sent to the peniten- 
tiary for various terms of years, there to ruminate over 
the uncertainty and slipperiness of things mundane, and 
