We
ought to have been successful, considering our vigilance and attention, and
that we had repeatedly seen the cayman. It was useless to tarry here any
longer; moreover, the coloured man began to take airs, and fancied that I
could not do without him. I never admit of this in any expedition where I
am commander; and so I convinced the man, to his sorrow, that I could do
without him, for I paid him what I had agreed to give him, which amounted
to eight dollars, and ordered him back in his own curial to Mrs.
Peterson's, on the hill at the first falls. I then asked the negro if there
were any Indian settlements in the neighbourhood; he said he knew of one, a
day and a half off. We went in quest of it, and about one o'clock the next
day the negro showed us the creek where it was.
The entrance was so concealed by thick bushes that a stranger would have
passed it without knowing it to be a creek. In going up it we found it
dark, winding, and intricate beyond any creek that I had ever seen before.
When Orpheus came back with his young wife from Styx his path must have
been similar to this, for Ovid says it was
Arduus, obliquus, caligine densus opaca,
and this creek was exactly so.
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