Part 1

[Frontispiece: SPINNING-WHEEL AND RIFLE. _See page 56._]

THE CIRCUIT RIDER

A Tale of the Heroic Age,

BY

EDWARD EGGLESTON,

_Author of "The Hoosier School-master" "The End of the World," etc._

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness."--_Isaiah._

"----Beginners of a better time, And glorying in their vows."--_Tennyson._

NEW YORK: J. B. FORD & COMPANY 1874.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by J. B. FORD & COMPANY, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, Washington, D. C.

TO MY COMRADES OF OTHER YEARS,

THE BRAVE AND SELF-SACRIFICING MEN WITH WHOM I HAD THE HONOR TO BE ASSOCIATED IN A FRONTIER MINISTRY,

THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I.--The Corn Shucking II.--The Frolic III.--Going to Meeting IV.--A Battle V.--A Crisis VI.--The Fall Hunt VII.--Treeing a Preacher VIII.--A Lesson in Syntax IX.--The Coming of the Circuit Rider X.--Patty in the Spring-House XI.--The Voice in the Wilderness XII.--Mr. Brady Prophesies XIII.--Two to One XIV.--Kike's Sermon XV.--Morton's Retreat XVI.--Short Shrift XVII.--Deliverance XVIII.--The Prodigal Returns XIX.--Patty XX.--The Conference at Hickory Ridge XXI.--Convalescence XXII.--The Decision XXIII.--Russell Bigelow's Sermon XXIV.--Drawing the Latch-String in XXV.--Ann Eliza XXVI.--Engagement XXVII.--The Camp-Meeting XXVIII.--Patty and her Patient XXIX.--Patty's Journey XXX.--The Schoolmaster and the Widow XXXI.--Kike XXXII.--Pinkey's Discovery XXXIII.--The Alabaster Box Broken XXXIV.--The Brother XXXV.--Plnkey and Ann Eliza XXXVI.--Getting the Answer

ILLUSTRATIONS.

1. Spinning-wheel and Rifle ... Frontispiece 2. Captain Lumsden 3. Mort Goodwin 4. Homely S'manthy 5. Patty and Jemima 6. Little Gabe's Discomfiture 7. In the Stable 8. Mort, Dolly and Kike 9. Good Bye! 10. The Altercation 11. The Irish Schoolmaster 12. Electioneering 13. Patty in her Chamber 14. Colonel Wheeler's Dooryard 15. Patty in the Spring-House 16. Job Goodwin 17. Two to One 18. Gambling 19. A Last Hope 20. The Choice 21. Going to Conference 22. Convalescence 23. The Connecticut Peddler 24. Ann Eliza 25. Facing a Mob 26. "Hair-hung and Breeze-shaken" 27. The School-Teacher of Hickory Ridge 28. The Reunion 29. The Brothers 30. An Accusing Memory 31. At the Spring-House Again

PREFACE.

Whatever is incredible in this story is true. The tale I have to tell will seem strange to those who know little of the social life of the West at the beginning of this century. These sharp contrasts of corn-shuckings and camp-meetings, of wild revels followed by wild revivals; these contacts of highwayman and preacher; this _mélange_ of picturesque simplicity, grotesque humor and savage ferocity, of abandoned wickedness and austere piety, can hardly seem real to those who know the country now. But the books of biography and reminiscence which preserve the memory of that time more than justify what is marvelous in these pages.

Living, in early boyhood, on the very ground where my grandfather--brave old Indian-fighter!--had defended his family in a block-house built in a wilderness by his own hands, I grew up familiar with this strange wild life. At the age when other children hear fables and fairy stories, my childish fancy was filled with traditions of battles with Indians and highwaymen. Instead of imaginary giant-killers, children then heard of real Indian-slayers; instead of Blue-Beards, we had Murrell and his robbers; instead of Little Red Riding Hood's wolf, we were regaled with the daring adventures of the generation before us, in conflict with wild beasts on the very road we traveled to school. In many households the old customs still held sway; the wool was carded, spun, dyed, woven, cut and made up in the house: the corn-shucking, wood-chopping, quilting, apple-peeling and country "hoe-down" had not yet fallen into disuse.

In a true picture of this life neither the Indian nor the hunter is the center-piece, but the circuit-rider. More than any one else, the early circuit preachers brought order out of this chaos. In no other class was the real heroic element so finely displayed. How do I remember the forms and weather-beaten visages of the old preachers, whose constitutions had conquered starvation and exposure--who had survived swamps, alligators, Indians, highway robbers and bilious fevers! How was my boyish soul tickled with their anecdotes of rude experience--how was my imagination wrought upon by the recital of their hair-breadth escapes! How was my heart set afire by their contagious religious enthusiasm, so that at eighteen years of age I bestrode the saddle-bags myself and laid upon a feeble frame the heavy burden of emulating their toils! Surely I have a right to celebrate them, since they came so near being the death of me.

It is not possible to write of this heroic race of men without enthusiasm. But nothing has been further from my mind than the glorifying of a sect. If I were capable of sectarian pride, I should not come upon the platform of Christian union* to display it. There are those, indeed, whose sectarian pride will be offended that I have frankly shown the rude as well as the heroic side of early Methodism. I beg they will remember the solemn obligations of a novelist to tell the truth. Lawyers and even ministers are permitted to speak entirely on one side. But no man is worthy to be called a novelist who does not endeavor with his whole soul to produce the higher form of history, by writing truly of men as they are, and dispassionately of those forms of life that come within his scope.

* "The Circuit Rider" originally appeared as a serial in _The Christian Union_.

Much as I have laughed at every sort of grotesquerie, I could not treat the early religious life of the West otherwise than with the most cordial sympathy and admiration. And yet this is not a "religious novel," one in which all the bad people are as bad as they can be, and all the good people a little better than they can be. I have not even asked myself what may be the "moral." The story of any true life is wholesome, if only the writer will tell it simply, keeping impertinent preachment of his own out of the way.

Doubtless I shall hopelessly damage myself with some good people by confessing in the start that, from the first chapter to the last, this is a love-story. But it is not my fault. It is God who made love so universal that no picture of human life can be complete where love is left out.

E. E.

BROOKLYN, _March_, 1874.

"NEC PROPTER VITAM, VIVENDI PERDERE CAUSAS."

THE CIRCUIT RIDER

A TALE OF THE HEROIC AGE.

_CHAPTER I._

THE CORN-SHUCKING.

Subtraction is the hardest "ciphering" in the book. Fifty or sixty years off the date at the head of your letter is easy enough to the "organ of number," but a severe strain on the imagination. It is hard to go back to the good old days your grandmother talks about--that golden age when people were not roasted alive in a sleeping coach, but gently tipped over a toppling cliff by a drunken stage-driver.

Grand old times were those in which boys politely took off their hats to preacher or schoolmaster, solacing their fresh young hearts afterward by making mouths at the back of his great-coat. Blessed days! in which parsons wore stiff, white stocks, and walked with starched dignity, and yet were not too good to drink peach-brandy and cherry-bounce with folks; when Congressmen were so honorable that they scorned bribes, and were only kept from killing one another by the exertions of the sergeant-at-arms. It was in those old times of the beginning of the reign of Madison, that the people of the Hissawachee settlement, in Southern Ohio, prepared to attend "the corn-shuckin' down at Cap'n Lumsden's."

There is a peculiar freshness about the entertainment that opens the gayeties of the season. The shucking at Lumsden's had the advantage of being set off by a dim back-ground of other shuckings, and quiltings, and wood-choppings, and apple-peelings that were to follow, to say nothing of the frolics pure and simple--parties alloyed with no utilitarian purposes.

Lumsden's corn lay ready for husking, in a whitey-brown ridge five or six feet high. The Captain was not insensible to considerations of economy. He knew quite well that it would be cheaper in the long run to have it husked by his own farm hands; the expense of an entertainment in whiskey and other needful provisions, and the wasteful handling of the corn, not to mention the obligation to send a hand to other huskings, more than counter-balanced the gratuitous labor. But who can resist the public sentiment that requires a man to be a gentleman according to the standard of his neighbors? Captain Lumsden had the reputation of doing many things which were oppressive, and unjust, but to have "shucked" his own corn would have been to forfeit his respectability entirely. It would have placed him on the Pariah level of the contemptible Connecticut Yankee who had bought a place farther up the creek, and who dared to husk his own corn, practise certain forbidden economies, and even take pay for such trifles as butter, and eggs, and the surplus veal of a calf which he had killed. The propriety of "ducking" this Yankee had been a matter of serious debate. A man "as tight as the bark on a beech tree," and a Yankee besides, was next door to a horse-thief.

So there was a corn-shucking at Cap'n Lumsden's. The "women-folks" turned the festive occasion into farther use by stretching a quilt on the frames, and having the ladies of the party spend the afternoon in quilting and gossiping--the younger women blushing inwardly, and sometimes outwardly, with hope and fear, as the names of certain young men were mentioned. Who could tell what disclosures the evening frolic might produce? For, though "circumstances alter cases," they have no power to change human nature; and the natural history of the delightful creature which we call a young woman was essentially the same in the Hissawachee Bottom, sixty odd years ago, that it is on Murray or Beacon Street Hill in these modern times. Difference enough of manner and costume--linsey-woolsey, with a rare calico now and then for Sundays; the dropping of "kercheys" by polite young girls--but these things are only outward. The dainty girl that turns away from my story with disgust, because "the people are so rough," little suspects how entirely of the cuticle is her refinement--how, after all, there is a touch of nature that makes Polly Ann and Sary Jane cousins-german to Jennie, and Hattie, and Blanche, and Mabel.

It was just dark--the rising full moon was blazing like a bonfire among the trees on Campbell's Hill, across the creek--when the shucking party gathered rapidly around the Captain's ridge of corn. The first comers waited for the others, and spent the time looking at the heap, and speculating as to how many bushels it would "shuck out." Captain Lumsden, an active, eager man, under the medium size, welcomed his neighbors cordially, but with certain reserves. That is to say, he spoke with hospitable warmth to each new comer, but brought his voice up at the last like a whip-cracker; there was a something in what Dr. Rush would call the "vanish" of his enunciation, which reminded the person addressed that Captain Lumsden, though he knew how to treat a man with politeness, as became an old Virginia gentleman, was not a man whose supremacy was to be questioned for a moment. He reached out his hand, with a "Howdy, Bill?" "Howdy, Jeems? how's your mother gittin', eh?" and "Hello, Bob, I thought you had the shakes--got out at last, did you?" Under this superficial familiarity a certain reserve of conscious superiority and flinty self-will never failed to make itself appreciated.

[Illustration: CAPTAIN LUMSDEN.]

Let us understand ourselves. When we speak of Captain Lumsden as an old Virginia gentleman, we speak from his own standpoint. In his native state his hereditary rank was low--his father was an "upstart," who, besides lacking any claims to "good blood," had made money by doubtful means. But such is the advantage of emigration that among outside barbarians the fact of having been born in "Ole Virginny" was credential enough. Was not the Old Dominion the mother of presidents, and of gentlemen? And so Captain Lumsden was accustomed to tap his pantaloons with his raw-hide riding-whip, while he alluded to his relationships to "the old families," the Carys, the Archers, the Lees, the Peytons, and the far-famed William and Evelyn Bird; and he was especially fond of mentioning his relationship to that family whose aristocratic surname is spelled "Enroughty," while it is mysteriously and inexplicably pronounced "Darby," and to the "Tolivars," whose name is spelled "Taliaferro." Nothing smacks more of hereditary nobility than a divorce betwixt spelling and pronouncing. In all the Captain's strutting talk there was this shade of truth, that he was related to the old families through his wife. For Captain Lumsden would have scorned a _prima facie_ lie. But, in his fertile mind, the truth was ever germinal--little acorns of fact grew to great oaks of fable.

How quickly a crowd gathers! While I have been introducing you to Lumsden, the Captain has been shaking hands in his way, giving a cordial grip, and then suddenly relaxing, and withdrawing his hand as if afraid of compromising dignity, and all the while calling out, "Ho, Tom! Howdy, Stevens? Hello, Johnson! is that you? Did come after all, eh?"

When once the company was about complete, the next step was to divide the heap. To do this, judges were selected, to wit: Mr. Butterfield, a slow-speaking man, who was believed to know a great deal because he said little, and looked at things carefully; and Jake Sniger, who also had a reputation for knowing a great deal, because he talked glibly, and was good at off-hand guessing. Butterfield looked at the corn, first on one side, and then on the end of the heap. Then he shook his head in uncertainty, and walked round to the other end of the pile, squinted one eye, took sight along the top of the ridge, measured its base, walked from one end to the other with long strides as if pacing the distance, and again took bearings with one eye shut, while the young lads stared at him with awe. Jake Sniger strode away from the corn and took a panoramic view of it, as one who scorned to examine anything minutely. He pointed to the left, and remarked to his admirers that he "'low'd they was a heap sight more corn in the left hand eend of the pile, but it was the long, yaller gourd-seed, and powerful easy to shuck, while t'other eend wuz the leetle, flint, hominy corn, and had a right smart sprinklin' of nubbins." He "'low'd whoever got aholt of them air nubbins would git sucked in. It was neck-and-neck twixt this ere and that air, and fer his own part, he thought the thing mout be nigh about even, and had orter be divided in the middle of the pile." Strange to say, Butterfield, after all his sighting, and pacing, and measuring, arrived at the same difficult and complex conclusion, which remarkable coincidence served to confirm the popular confidence in the infallibility of the two judges.

So the ridge of corn was measured, and divided exactly in the middle. A fence rail, leaning against either side, marked the boundary between the territories of the two parties. The next thing to be done was to select the captains. Lumsden, as a prudent man, desiring an election to the legislature, declined to appoint them, laughing his chuckling kind of laugh, and saying, "Choose for yourselves, boys, choose for yourselves."

Bill McConkey was on the ground, and there was no better husker. He wanted to be captain on one side, but somebody in the crowd objected that there was no one present who could "hold a taller dip to Bill's shuckin."

"Whar's Mort Goodwin?" demanded Bill; "he's the one they say kin lick me. I'd like to lay him out wunst."

"He ain't yer."

"That air's him a comin' through the cornstalks, I 'low," said Jake Sniger, as a tall, well-built young man came striding hurriedly through the stripped corn stalks, put two hands on the eight-rail fence, and cleared it at a bound.

"That's him! that's his jump," said "little Kike," a nephew of Captain Lumsden. "Couldn't many fellers do that eight-rail fence so clean."

"Hello, Mort!" they all cried at once as he came up taking off his wide-rimmed straw hat and wiping his forehead. "We thought you wuzn't a comin'. Here, you and Conkey choose up."

[Illustration: MORT GOODWIN.]

"Let somebody else," said Morton, who was shy, and ready to give up such a distinction to others.

"Backs out!" said Conkey, sneering.

"Not a bit of it," said Mort. "You don't appreciate kindness; where's your stick?"

By tossing a stick from one to the other, and then passing the hand of one above that of the other, it was soon decided that Bill McConkey should have the first choice of men, and Morton Goodwin the first choice of corn. The shuckers were thus all divided into two parts. Captain Lumsden, as host, declining to be upon either side. Goodwin chose the end of the corn which had, as the boys declared, "a desp'rate sight of nubbins." Then, at a signal, all hands went to work.

The corn had to be husked and thrown into a crib, a mere pen of fence-rails.

"Now, boys, crib your corn," said Captain Lumsden, as he started the whiskey bottle on its encouraging travels along the line of shuckers.

"Hurrah, boys!" shouted McConkey. "Pull away, my sweats! work like dogs in a meat-pot; beat 'em all to thunder, er bust a biler, by jimminy! Peel 'em off! Thunder and blazes! Hurrah!"

This loud hallooing may have cheered his own men, but it certainly stimulated those on the other side. Morton was more prudent; he husked with all his might, and called down the lines in an undertone, "Let them holler, boys, never mind Bill; all the breath he spends in noise we'll spend in gittin' the corn peeled. Here, you! don't you shove that corn back in the shucks! No cheats allowed on this side!"

Goodwin had taken his place in the middle of his own men, where he could overlook them and husk, without intermission, himself; knowing that his own dexterity was worth almost as much as the work of two men. When one or two boys on his side began to run over to see how the others were getting along, he ordered them back with great firmness. "Let them alone," he said, "you are only losing time; work hard at first, everybody will work hard at the last."

For nearly an hour the huskers had been stripping husks with unremitting eagerness; the heap of unshucked corn had grown smaller, the crib was nearly full of the white and yellow ears, and a great billow of light husks had arisen behind the eager workers.

"Why don't you drink?" asked Jake Sniger, who sat next to Morton.

"Want's to keep his breath sweet for Patty Lumsden," said Ben North, with a chuckle.

Morton did not knock Ben over, and Ben never knew how near he came to getting a whipping.

It was now the last heavy pull of the shuckers. McConkey had drunk rather freely, and his "Pull away, sweats!" became louder than ever. Morton found it necessary to run up and down his line once or twice, and hearten his men by telling them that they were "sure to beat if they only stuck to it well."

The two parties were pretty evenly matched; the side led by Goodwin would have given it up once if it had not been for his cheers; the others were so near to victory that they began to shout in advance, and that cheer, before they were through, lost them the battle,--for Goodwin, calling to his men, fell to work in a way that set them wild by contagion, and for the last minute they made almost superhuman exertions, sending a perfect hail of white corn into the crib, and licking up the last ear in time to rush with a shout into the territory of the other party, and seize on one or two dozen ears, all that were left, to show that Morton had clearly gained the victory. Then there was a general wiping of foreheads, and a general expression of good feeling. But Bill McConkey vowed that he "knowed what the other side done with their corn," pointing to the husk pile.

"I'll bet you six bits," said Morton, "that I can find more corn in your shucks than you kin in mine." But Bill did not accept the wager.

After husking the corn that remained under the rails, the whole party adjourned to the house, washing their hands and faces in the woodshed as they passed into the old hybrid building, half log-cabin, the other half block-house fortification.

The quilting frames were gone; and a substantial supper was set in the apartment which was commonly used for parlor and sitting room, and which was now pressed into service for a dining room. The ladies stood around against the wall with a self-conscious air of modesty, debating, no doubt, the effect of their linsey-woolsey dresses. For what is the use of carding and spinning, winding and weaving, cutting and sewing to get a new linsey dress, if you cannot have it admired?

_CHAPTER II._

THE FROLIC.

The supper was soon dispatched; the huskers eating with awkward embarrassment, as frontiermen always do in company,--even in the company of each other. To eat with decency and composure is the final triumph of civilization, and the shuckers of Hissawachee Bottom got through with the disagreeable performance as hurriedly as possible, the more so that their exciting strife had given them vigorous relish for Mrs. Lumsden's "chicken fixin's," and batter-cakes, and "punkin-pies." The quilters had taken their supper an hour before, the table not affording room for both parties. When supper was over the "things" were quickly put away, the table folded up and removed to the kitchen--and the company were then ready to enjoy themselves. There was much gawky timidity on the part of the young men, and not a little shy dropping of the eyes on the part of the young women; but the most courageous presently got some of the rude, country plays a-going. The pawns were sold over the head of the blindfold Mort Goodwin, who, as the wit of the company, devised all manner of penalties for the owners. Susan Tomkins had to stand up in the corner, and say,

"Here I stand all ragged and dirty, Kiss me quick, or I'll run like a turkey."

These lines were supposed to rhyme. When Aleck Tilley essayed to comply with her request, she tried to run like a turkey, but was stopped in time.