The Frontiersmen | Page 6

ranges,
the elms had put forth delicate sprays of emerald tint, and the pines all
bore great wax-like tapers amidst their evergreen boughs, as if ready
for kindling for some great festival. It is a wonderful thing to hear a
wind singing in myriads of their branches at once. The surging tones of
this oratorio of nature resounded for miles along the deep indented
ravines and the rocky slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains. Now and
again the flow of a torrent or the dash of a cataract added fugue-like
effects. The men were constantly impressed by these paeans of the
forests; the tuft of violets abloom beneath a horse's hoofs might be
crushed unnoticed, but the acoustic conditions of the air and the high
floating of the tenuous white clouds against a dense blue sky,
promising rain in due season, evoked a throb of satisfaction in the
farmer's heart not less sincere because unaesthetic. The farmer's toil
had hardly yet begun, the winter's hunt being just concluded, and each
of the stationers with a string of led horses was bound for his camps
and caches to bring in the skins that made the profit of the season.
One of this group of three was the psalm-singer of the blockhouse. His
name was Xerxes Alexander Anxley, and he was unceremoniously
called by the community "X," and by Mivane "the unknown quantity,"

for he was something of an enigma, and his predilections provoked
much speculation. He was a religionist of ascetic, extreme views,--a
type rare in this region,--coming originally from the colony of the
Salzburgers established in Georgia.
We are less disposed to be tolerant of individual persuasions which
imply a personal and unpleasant reflection. Xerxes Alexander Anxley
disapproved of dancing, and the community questioned his sanity; for
these early pioneers in the region of the Great Smoky Range carried the
rifle over one shoulder and the fiddle over the other. He disapproved of
secular songs and idle stories, and the settlement questioned his taste;
for it was the delight of the stationers, old and young, to gather around
the hearth, and, while the chestnuts roasted in the fire for the juniors,
and the jovial horn, as it was called, circulated among the elders, the
oft-told story was rehearsed and the old song sung anew. He even
disapproved of the jovial horn--and the settlement questioned his
sincerity.
This man Anxley looked his ascetic character. He had a hard pragmatic
countenance, and one of those noses which though large and bony
come suddenly short and blunted. His eyes, small, gray, and inscrutable,
seemed unfriendly, so baffling, introspective, unnoting was their
inattentiveness. His hair was of a sort of carrot tint, which color was
reproduced in paler guise in his fringed buckskin shirt and leggings,
worn on a sturdy and powerful frame. His mouth was shut hard and fast
upon his convictions, as if to denote that he could not be argued out of
them, and when the lips parted its lines were scarcely more mobile, and
his words were usually framed to doubt one's state of grace and to
contravene one's tenets as to final salvation. He rode much of the time
with the reins loose on his horse's neck, and perhaps no man in the
saddle had ever been so addicted to psalmody since the days of
Cromwell's troopers. His theological disputations grated peculiarly
upon Emsden's mood, and he always laid at his door the disaster that
followed.
"If I hadn't been so traveled that day,--dragged through hell and skirting
of purgatory and knocking at the gates of heaven,--I wouldn't have lost
my wits so suddenly when I came back to earth with a bounce,"
Emsden afterward declared.
For as the hunters were coming at a brisk trot in single file along the

"old trading path," as it was called even then, the fleecy white clouds
racing above in the dense blue of the sky, their violet shadows fleeting
as swift along the slopes of the velvet-soft azure mountains, and the
wind far outstripping them in the vernal budding woods, a sudden stir
near at hand caused Emsden to turn his head. Just above him, on a
rugged slope where no trees grew save a scraggy cedar here and there
amidst the shelving ledges of rock outcropping through the soft verdant
turf, he saw a stealthy, furtive shape; he was aware of a hasty cowed
glance over the shoulder, and then a stretching of supple limbs in flight.
Before he himself hardly knew it the sharp crack of his rifle rang
out,--the aim was almost instinctive.
And it was as true as instinct,--a large black wolf, his pelt glossy and
fresh with the renewal of the season, lay stretched dead in an instant
upon the slope. Emsden sprang from his horse, tossed the