traffic from the trails which the wild beasts had pursued. It led
through the mountain gaps, by devious ways but by easy grades,
along the banks of the water-courses and across the shallowest
fords down to the rich lowlands of the East. It was said that the
buffalo, in forgotten ages, had marked out this way to the ever-verdant
reed-pastures of the then unwooded East; that afterward the Indians
had followed his lead, and, as the season served, had fished upon
the waters of Currituck or hunted amid the romantic ruggedness
of the Blue Appalachians. It was known that the earlier settlers
along the Smoky Range and on the Piedmont foot-hills had used this
thoroughfare to take the stock and produce of their farms down to
the great plantations of the East, where cotton was king, and to
the turpentine orchards of the South Atlantic shore line.

At the crossing of these roads was situated a single house, which
had been known for generations, far and near, as the Red Wing
Ordinary. In the old colonial days it had no doubt been a house
of entertainment for man and beast. Tradition, very well based and
universally accepted, declared that along these roads had marched
and countermarched the hostile forces of the Revolutionary period.
Greene and Cornwallis had dragged their weary columns over the
tenacious clay of this region, past the very door of the low-eaved
house, built up of heavy logs at first and covered afterward with
fat-pine siding, which had itself grown brown and dark with age.
It was said that the British regulars had stacked their arms around
the trunk of the monster white-oak that stretched its great arms
out over the low dark house, which seemed to be creeping nearer
and nearer to its mighty trunk for protection, until of late years
the spreading branches had dropped their store of glossy acorns and
embossed cups even on the farther slope of its mossy roof, a good