Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. THE CAVALIERS. At the time of which we write, there was a road, or, more correctly speaking, a trail, leading from the west shore of the bay of Saint Louis in a direction somewhat west of north through a wild country to the wilder region of the upper Pearl River. This trail, which was known as the Black-wolf Trail, had been a highway for the Indians as far back as tradition went—a road which led from their hunting- grounds to the breezy bluffs of the gulf, where they spent the hot season, like the philosophers that they were, in bathing, fishing, eating and smoking. Since the coming of the white men, the Black- wolf Trail had been put to other uses. Soldiers, horses and cannon had followed it; caravans of settlers, with their oxen, their mules, their slaves and their household appliances, had made it the road to new homes and a life of hardy and lordly independence. Large plantations were opened and comfortable, even spacious and, in a degree, luxurious houses built on the beautiful and fertile lands once tilled by the aborigines, whose descendants still skulkedin the swamps and held the fastnesses of cane-brake and cypress-jungle all around the coast. Many other trails, less distinct and more meandering, came into the Black-wolf Trail on its way from the highlands to the coast, and he was an alert and experienced woodman who could go among these crossing attd apparently entangled paths without bewilderment. In those days, all of the ways of the woods were ways of danger ; for not only were the Indians treacherous and savage in the extreme, there were white men more to be feared than the red ones ; reckless kniglits of adventure devoted to a life o£ utter lawlessness—bold riders whose dashing exploits would have been themes of song and story if done ...