the Tennessee instead of down it, and are on the road to Bainbridge. That’s all!” replied the supposed Yankee.
“On the road to Bainbridge!” repeated we, in voices in which astonishment and vexation were tolerably evident.
“You hadn’t a mind to go to Bainbridge, then?”
“How far is the infernal place from here?” asked I.
“How far, how far?” repeated the man with the metal buttons. “It’s not to say very far, nor yet so very near, as I may guess. Perhaps you know Squire Dimple?”
“I wish you and Squire Dimple were at the devil!” muttered I. But Richards, who took things more quietly, replied—
“No, we have not the honour of his acquaintance.”
“Humph! And whereaway may you be goin’?” enquired our tormentor, who was apparently waterproof.
“To Florence in Alabama,” answered Richards, “and thence down the Mississippi.”
“Ah, fine city, Florence! such as one only finds in this country. Ain’t it now? And a good market, too. Talkin’ of that, what’s the price of flour in the north? You’re come from thereaway, I guess. I did hear it was six and four levies, and Injun corn five and a fip—butter three fips.”
“Are you mad?” cried I, losing all patience, and unconsciously raising my whip as I spoke—“are you stark staring mad, to keep us talking here about flour and butter, and fips and levies, while the rain is falling by bucketsfull?”
“Hallo, stranger!” cried the man, raising himself for the first time out of his lounging position on the saddle. “Guess you’re gettin’ wolfish. I’m for you—stick, fist, or whiphandle, rifle or bowie-knife. Should like to see the man as could leather Isaac Shifty!”
“The road, the road, Mister Isaac Shifty!” interrupted friend Richards in a conciliating tone. There was another long pause.
“I guess you’re traders,” said the fiend at last.
“No, man.”
“And what may you be, then?”
Our answer was followed by another long inspection of our persons and physiognomies. He gazed at us for a couple of minutes or more, examining us from head to foot; at last he spoke.
“And so you’ve a mind to go down the Mississippi?”
“Yes, in the Jackson, which starts to-morrow, we are told.”
“Ah, the Jackson! a mighty good steamboat too—ain’t it now? But I guess you ain’t a thinkin’ of takin’ that thing and your horse with you?” continued the Yankee, pointing to our gig.
“Yes, we are.”
“Oh, you are! Well.—You haven’t seen two women in a dearborn on the road, have you?”
“No, we have not.”
“Well, then,” continued the man in the same indifferent tone, “it’s a’most too late now to get to Bainbridge; and yet you might try it, too. Better turn your horse round, and follow the road till you come to a big walnut-tree; there it divides. Take to the right hand for half a mile, till you come to neighbour Dims’s hedge; then you must go through the lane; and then, for about forty rods, right through the sugar-field; keep to your left till you come to some rocks, but then turn to your right, if you don’t want to break your necks. There’s a bit of a stream there; and when you are over that, the left-hand road will take you straight to Cox’s ferry. You can’t miss it,” concluded he, in a self-satisfied tone, striking his horse a blow with his riding-whip. The animal broke into a smart trot, and in ten seconds our obliging friend had disappeared into the fog.
My countenance, during the Yankee’s interminable directions, must have somewhat resembled that of a French recruit, to whom some scarred and mustached veteran is relating his Egyptian campaigns, and telling him wonderful stories of snakes and crocodiles at least half a mile long—monsters who made nothing of swallowing a drum-major to their breakfast, bearskin cap, cane, and whiskers, included. I was so completely bothered and confounded with the rights and lefts, that the metal-buttoned individual was out of sight and hearing before I thought of explaining to him, that, dark as it then was, we should never be able to find even the walnut-tree, let alone neighbour Dims’s hedge and the break-neck rocks. Patience is by no means one of my virtues; but the man’s imperturbable phlegm and deliberation, in the midst of the most pouring rain that ever wetted poor devil to the skin, tickled my fancy so exceedingly, that the sound of his horse’s hoofs had hardly died away, when I burst into an almost interminable fit of laughter. “First right, then left—look out for the big walnut-tree, and don’t break your neck over the crags!” repeated I, in a tone between merriment and despair. Richards, however, saw nothing to laugh at.
“The devil take the Yankee!” cried he. “May I be hanged if I know what you find so amusing in all this!”
“And hang me if I know how you manage to look so grave!” was my answer.
“How could we possibly have missed the ferry?” cried Richards; “and, what is still more stupid, to come back instead of going forward!”
“Not very astonishing,” replied I, “considering the multitude of by-roads and cross-roads, and waggon-tracks and cattle-paths, and the swamp into the bargain. It is quite impossible to see which way the river runs. And then you have been sleeping all the afternoon, and I had to find the way by myself.”
“And you found it after an extraordinary fashion—retracing your own steps,” said Richards in a vexed tone. “It is really too stupid.”
“Very stupid,” said I—“to sleep.”
As may be seen, we were on the verge of a quarrel; but we were old and sincere friends, and stopped in time. The discussion was dropped. The fact was, that our mistake was by no means a very surprising one. The country in which we were, seemed made on purpose to lose one’s-self in. The road winds along at some distance from the river, frequently out of sight of it; the shore is uneven, covered with crags and hillocks; nothing like a landmark to be seen, or a mountain to guide one’s-self by, except occasionally, when one gets a peep at the Appalachians rising out of the blue distance. The fog, however, had hidden them from us, and that just at the time when we most wanted them as guides. We found ourselves in a long low clearing—a sort of bottom, as they call it in that country—which was laid out in sugar-fields, and through which there ran nearly as many cart-roads as there were owners to the land. The morning had been bright and beautiful; but, towards noon, a grey mist had begun to rise in the south-western corner of the horizon, and had gone on, thickening and advancing, till it spread like a pall over the Tennessee. With a grey wall of fog on one side, and the swamp, intersected with a hundred cross-paths, on the other, we had gone on for about a mile; until it got so thick and dark, that it was quite as possible we should find our way into the marsh as over the Mussel shoals.4 So certain was I, however, of the proximity of the latter, that I pushed on, expecting each moment to find the ferry, until the unlucky Yankee brought all my hopes to a termination.
It was now quite night—one of those dreary pitch-dark nights that are of no unfrequent occurrence in the south-western states. I would as soon have been on the banks of Newfoundland as in this swamp, from which nothing was more probable than that we should carry away a rattling fever. The Yankee’s directions concerning the road were, as may be supposed, long since forgotten; and
The Mussel shoals are broad ridges of rocks, above Florence, which spread out into the Tennessee.
