The House of the Black Ring: A Romance of the Seven Mountains

Chapter I: The Affair at Tressler's Farm

chapter i the affair at tressler’s farm when the great architect had finished building the earth, he dumped the chips and débris into the centre of Pennsylvania, and men called the heap the Seven Mountains. They are not mountains at all, but long ridges like giant furrows plowed deep into the very sandstone and left ragged and chaotic. Straight on they go for leagues, making a right line of the horizon, the second and third ridges following as if drawn with a pantograph. Here and there is a wild slash across the furrow, a rip into the very foundations of the range, and through the rock-snarl at the bottom worms a scared little stream. It is a gap—so they call it—and if one can wriggle through the jagged litter and the rhododendron, spiked like a wire tangle, it will lead him into the next valley, which is often a narrow gut full of torn sandstone and matted scrub, where only the rattlesnake may freely go. Often there is a bend in the furrows, a mad swirl as if the primal dough had been stirred with a giant mixer. Then the furrows run straight again. Thus the Seven Mountains, a ragged hole in the heart of the East, where the wild turkey still wakes the morning, where the bear and the deer still flourish, and where the eagle and the buzzard wing undisturbed . The ridge-sides, rising sheer, and as steep as rock débris will the house of the black ring { 8 } lie, are like the tailings of mighty stone-quarries. A few dead scrags of trees break the sky-line; here and there in the rock chaos are scrub-oak thickets blasted by fire, and in the angle of the V always a little brook filtering through the rhododendron tangle. Then come ridges and mighty breaks and jagged cliffs and right-angle turns, and sometimes there are the ruthless tracks of lumbermen,—valleys choked up with hemlock tops snarled into the rhododendron, ramshackle saw-mills long since deserted, winding “dinkey” roads rusted out long ago and half buried in the fire-growth, and the effect of it all is indescribably lonely and wild. But the valleys are not all of them V-shaped and littered. There are placeswheretheridgesleapfarasunderleavingaribbonof bottomland, the seat of prosperous farms. Sometimes there are small, shut-in valleys , like pockets in the range, the homes of secluded communities,—a cozy bunch of farms strung on a winding road and bounded sharply by two gaps and the stone-line at the foot of the ridges. And of these might be counted the alluvial banks of Heller’s Run, better known on the local maps as Hell Bottom. So much for geography. It was December the fifth, Dan Tressler’s butchering day, as any one in the valley could have told as early as the preceding June. The sign was right, and the moon was“in the up.” Squire Hartswick, lord of the Bottom, had butchered on Thanksgiving Day, as he and his fathers always had done; Jake Kisterbock had duly followed, and now by every valley right it was Dan Tressler’s day. Things are not done by chance among the thrifty“Dutch.” Baer’s almanac and the tradition of the fathers rule Central Pennsylvania with despotic sway. There was no lack of help. A “meetin’” on Sunday at the Bottom church brings out a goodly number, if the weather be fine; a funeral gathers the old people; a“schnittin’”in the fall, the young; but a“butcherin ’” calls for everybody not “bed-fast,” be the weather what it may. Not that all the inhabitants, hit or miss, are called. “Invitations For your ’lations” goes the valley proverb, but the rule bars no one; for another valley saying is to the effect that nobody can“fire a stone”at random in any of the“Dutch” valleys and not hit his second cousin. the affair at tressler’s farm { 9 } It promised ideal butchering weather. As early as four in the morning lanterns were dancing like fireflies. All was bustle and din. Water was heating in copper kettles,—the valley’s supply of kettles; scalding-tubs were rolling upon temporary blockings; scraping-tables were arising; knives were grinding, the sound coming up a dull creaking from behind the corn-cribs; and boys, eager and excited, were scurrying hither and back in...