Quills Window | Page 4

as plain as day, covered with grass but beaten down till it's like a macadam road. I suppose the Indians followed that trail for hundreds of years. There's still traces of their camps over there on that side, and a little ways down the river is a place where they had a regular village. Over here on this side, quite a little ways farther down, is the remains of an old earthwork fort used by the French long before the Revolution, and afterwards by American soldiers about the time of the War of 1812. We'll go and look at it some day if you like. Most people are interested in it, but for why, I can't see.
"There ain't nothing to see but some busted up breastworks and lunettes, covered with weeds, with here and there a sort of opening where they must have had a cannon sticking out to scare the squaws and papooses. You was askin' about the name of that rock. Well, it originally had an Indian name, which I always forget because it's the easiest way to keep from pronouncing it. Then the French came along and sort of Frenchified the name,--which made it worse, far as I'm concerned. I'm not much on French. About three-quarters of the way up the rock, facing the river, is a sort of cave. You can't see the opening from here, 'cause it faces north, looking up the river from the bend. There are a lot of little caves and cracks in the rock, but none of 'em amounts to anything except this one. It runs back something like twenty foot in the rock and is about as high as a man's head.
"Shortly after General Harrison licked The Prophet and his warriors up on the Tippecanoe, a man named Quill,--an Irishman from down the river some'eres towards Vincennes,--all this is hearsay so far as I'm concerned, mind you,--but as I was saying, this man Quill begin to make his home up in that cave. He was what you might call a hermit. There were no white people in these parts except a few scattered trappers and some people living in a settlement twenty-odd miles south of here. As the story goes, this man Quill lived up there in that cave for about four or five years, hunting and trapping all around the country. White people begin to get purty thick in these parts soon after that, Indiana having been made a state. There was a lot of coming and going up and down the river. A feller named Digby started a kind of settlement or trading-post further up, and clearings were made all around,--farms and all that, you see. Your great grandfather was one of the first men to settle in this section. Coming down the river by night you could see the light, up there in Quill's Cave. You could see it for miles, they say. People begin to speak of it as the light in Quill's window,--and that's how the name happened. I'm over seventy, and I've never heard that hill called anything but Quill's Window."
"What happened to Quill?"
"Well, that's something nobody seems to be quite certain about. Whether he hung himself or somebody else done the job for him, nobody knows. According to the story that was told when I was a boy, it seems he killed somebody down the river and come up here to hide. The relations of the man he killed never stopped hunting for him. A good many people were of the opinion they finally tracked him to that cave. In any case, his body was found hanging by the neck up there one day, on a sort of ridge-pole he had put in. This was after people had missed seeing the light in Quill's Window for quite a spell. There are some people who still say the cave is ha'nted. When I was a young boy, shortly before the Civil War, a couple of horse thieves were chased up to that cave and--ahem!--I reckon your grandfather, if he was alive, could tell you all about what became of 'em and who was in the party that stood 'em up against the back wall of the cave and shot 'em. There's another story that goes back even farther than the horse thieves. The skeleton of a woman was found up there, with the skull split wide open. That was back in 1830 or 1840. So, you see, when all of them ghosts get together and begin scrapping over property rights, it's enough to scare the gizzard out of 'most anybody that happens to be in the neighbourhood. But I guess old man Quill was the first white man to shuffle off, so it's generally understood that his ghost rules the roost. Come on now,