Page:The American review - a Whig journal of politics, literature, art, and science (1845).djvu/137

1843.] county in so many days, or else shot if they persisted in remaining! So relentless and vindictive did those wretches show themselves in hunting down every one who dared oppose himself to them in any way, that very soon their ascendency in the county was almost without any dispute. Indeed, there were very few left who from any cause presumed to do it. Among them was one of this last class of wandering Hunters, known as Jack Long. Jack had come of a "wild-turkey breed," as the phrase is in the west for a family remarkable for its wandering propensities. He had already pushed a-head of the settlement of two States and one Territory, and following the game still farther towards the south, had been pleased with the promise of an abundance of it in Shelby county, and stopped there, just as he would have stopped at the foot of the Rocky mountains, had it been necessary to go as far, without troubling himself or caring to know who his neighbors were. He had never thought it at all essential to ask leave of any government as to how or where he should make himself at home, or even to inquire what particular nation put in its claim to any region he found suited to his purposes. His heritage had been the young Earth, with its skies, its waters and its winds, its huge primeval forests and plains throwing out their broad breasts to the sun—with all the sights and sounds and living things that moved and were articulate beneath God's eye—and what cared he for the authority of men! The first indeed that was known or heard of Jack, was when he had already built him a snug log-cabin, on the outskirts of the county, near the bank of a small stream; stowed away his fair-faced young wife and two children cosily into it, (for "Dan Cupid" had found Jack out, with all his rough shyness, several years before,) and he was busily engaged in slaying the deer and bear, right and left.

He kept himself so much to himself, that for a long time little was thought or said of him. His passion for hunting seemed to be absorbing. He did nothing else but follow up the game from morning till night, and it was so abundant that he had full opportunity for indulgence to his entire content. Beyond this he seemed to have no earthly pleasure but in that solitary hut, which, however rude, held dear associations enough to fill that big heart, and quicken all those sluggish veins of his ungainly body. Sometimes one of the rangers would come across him alone with his long rifle, amidst the timber islands of the plain, or in the deep woods; and he always appeared to have been so successful, that the rumor gradually got abroad that he was a splendid shot. This attracted attention somewhat more to his apparently unsocial and solitary habits. They had the curiosity to watch him, and when they saw how devoted he appeared to his wife—the gibe became general, that he was a "henpecked husband, under petticoat government," and other like gratifying expressions. This, taken in connection with his lolling, awkward gait and rather excessive expression of simplicity and easy temper, disposed those harsh, rude men very greatly to sneer at him as a soft fellow, who could be run over with impunity. They even bullied him with taunts—but Jack looked like such a formidable customer to be taken hold of, that no one of them felt disposed to push him too far and risk being made individually the subject of a display of the great strength indicated in the size of his body and limbs. He was upwards of six feet four in height, with shoulders like the buttresses of a tower, and proportions developed in fine symmetry. Indeed, but for a slight inclination to corpulency, and that sluggishness of manner we have spoken of, which made him seem too lazy ever to undertake the feat—he looked just the man who would take a Buffalo bull by the horns amidst his bellowing peers, and bring him to the ground with all his shaggy bulk. Finding they could not tempt him to a personal fray, they changed the note, and by every sort of cajolery endeavored to enlist the remarkable physical energy and skill he was conjectured to possess, in the service of their schemes of brutal violence. But Jack waived all sort of participation in them with a smiling and unvarying good humor, which, though it enraged the baffled ruffians, gave them no possible excuse for provocation. They would not have regarded this, but that there was still less invitation in that formidable person and rifle, and somehow or other they had an undefined sense that the man was not "at himself," as the phrase goes in the west—that he had not yet been roused to a consciousness of his own energies and capabilities, and they were, without acknowledging it, a little averse to waking him