It was a mellow summer evening about the first of June, when the party arrived at the small town of Hickman in Kentucky.

Ever since they had left the upper river, their birch-bark canoe had been an object of curiosity to all who had seen it, because the white-birch or canoe-birch does not grow on the lower river.

At Hickman, the four travelers went into a store to replenish their supplies. In front of the store, sitting on a cracker-box, a man greeted Barker with, “Hello, Sam! Where on earth do you come from? Haven’t seen you since you were trapping coons and hunting wild turkeys on the Wabash.”

“And what brings you into this little river burg, Dick Banks?” the trapper asked, equally surprised.

“Oh, I just drifted down the Wabash and the Ohio to this old river. You know I always wanted to see the Mississippi, when we were boys. Well, I’m working on a steamboat between New Madrid and St. Louis.”

After a while Banks took Barker aside.

“Say, Sam,” he spoke in a low voice, “it seems sort of strange, but I reckon there was a fellow here looking for you just this morning. He asked whether we ones had seen a white man with an Indian and two boys traveling down river?

“Hadn’t the faintest idea you could be the man he referred to. You hadn’t any beard and gray hair when I saw you last, but sure as I’m Dick Banks, his story fits your party exactly. Fellow seemed to be mighty set on finding you. Told us you had kidnapped his two nephews and stolen two horses of him ’way up in Minnesota. Said he was going to swear out a warrant and have you arrested.”

“That dirty pup,” exclaimed Barker, with his eyes flashing. “My Indian and I saved those lads from being murdered by the Sioux. The lads rode away on our own horses and we didn’t even take a blanket of the dirty bootlegger. The old squint-eyed scoundrel deserted the lads. Dern his soul! I always believed he wanted them to get killed. He doesn’t want them to get back home for some reason. My Indian and I are going to take them home to Vicksburg. I knew Hicks in Indiana. He always was a blackguard.”

Dick Banks puffed vigorously at his corncob pipe.

“Sam,” he replied, “I’ll tell you something. You used to be some scrapper back in Indiana. I figure you could handle that friend of yours all right, but you might as well go back with me to St. Louis. You can’t get into Vicksburg.”

“And why can’t I get in?”

“You haven’t seen as much of the war as I have seen. I have been clear down to Haynes Bluff a little way above Vicksburg. Grant and his men have got the place bottled up. You can’t get in. Gunboats, big ones, little ones, the whole river is full of them. Guards and soldiers everywhere. Don’t try it, Sam. They might think you were a spy and hang you. Those army courts aren’t as good-natured as our old Indiana juries.”

“No, Dick,” the trapper argued. “I can’t go back with you. I’m going to take those boys home. I’ll either fight Hicks or give him the slip. We’re going to Vicksburg. May be I can get a pass through the lines.”

“All right then, Sam; I’ve said my say. Get a pass? Why, man, Abe Lincoln himself couldn’t get a pass! You’re as set on having your way as you were as a kid.

“Now don’t hurry that Vicksburg campaign of yours. Better paddle about in the swamps and bayous for a few weeks. They say in about a month the town will have to surrender. You can’t get a pass into Vicksburg. They’ve been shut up two weeks now.”

That evening the four travelers had a good supper on board of Dick Bank’s boat and Dick also fixed beds for them on board the steamer, and at daylight before the town was awake, they paddled their light craft into a small winding channel which led into one of the most mysterious lakes of North America, Reelfoot Lake, a lake made by the great earthquake of 1811, generally known as the earthquake of New Madrid.

Tatanka was especially happy to be on this small winding stream.

“It is like the winding Minnesota River,” he said, “and it is beautiful like the small rivers that join the Mississippi above Lake Pepin. For a long time they follow their own winding trail in the bottom woods, as if they were afraid to go near the great Mississippi in which all big and little rivers lose themselves.”

“The trees are different here,” Bill remarked. “We never saw any cypress on the Minnesota.”

They spent nearly all day on this winding channel, and it was not until an hour before sunset that they came in sight of the strange waters and scene of Reelfoot Lake.

“I will not go there,” said Tatanka, when, at last, the Lake of the Sunken Lands spread out before them. “It is a spook lake, a lake of bad spirits. We must not camp on it. My brother, you told me that a bad spirit shook the earth and trampled down the farms to make the lake.

“Look, the water is very black and very many dead trees grow out of it.”

“Tatanka,” exclaimed Barker, “you are forgetting what the missionaries have taught you. Haven’t they told you many times that there are no spook lakes, no bad medicine lakes? Those dead trees didn’t grow dead. They died, when the water rose around them. There are no bad spirits in the earth. The earth just shook and sank. You have been a scout for the white soldiers, and you have to forget your Dakotah superstitions.”

Tatanka was silent a while, and stopped paddling.

“The missionaries,” he admitted, “are our friends and I believe they tell us the truth. They do not want our land and they do not cheat us as some of the traders do. They say our beliefs in spook lakes and bad medicine are superstition, but it is hard to forget our beliefs, because our fathers have taught them to us for many generations.

“My father once took me along on a buffalo hunt far west and he showed me a spook lake. The hunters camped on the shore of the lake, but none of them would have been brave enough to paddle a canoe on its waters. Some of them would not even gather the dead wood on its shore, but my father told us boys to gather the wood and we did. Our women used the wood to smoke and dry the buffalo meat, and we boys watched for the bad spirits to fly out of the wood.

“I did not see the spirits, but some of the boys told me that they heard the spirits whistle and howl and rise with the smoke after the sun had gone down, and they said that Katinka, the medicine man, saw them, too.”

“Where is that spook lake?” the boys asked, also forgetting to paddle.

“That spook lake,” Tatanka continued, “lies far west on the plains, which the white men call Dakotah. No trees grow on the plains, but trees and bushes grow on the lake shore and many dead trees and stumps grow in the water. Our people call it the Lake of the Stumps. The water was so bitter that we could not drink it, but our horses drank it.”

Bill and Tim dipped a handful of the brown water from Reelfoot Lake.

“It isn’t bitter,” both exclaimed at once. “This isn’t a spook lake.”

“Did your horses die, after they drank out of Stump Lake?”

“No, they liked the water.”

“Then it wasn’t a haunted lake,” both of them argued.

“But why did the trees die?” Tatanka objected.

“May be the outlet became choked and the trees were drowned,” Barker explained. “You know that white trappers always catch plenty of mink and muskrats and find good fish in the lakes which the Indians say are haunted.”

Tatanka began to paddle again, but looked as if he were not convinced but had given up arguing against all three of his friends.

The scene spread out before them looked indeed weird and almost forbidding. A dead forest of tall straight cypress spires arose like tree specters from the dark waters of the lake. The gray trunks had long ago been stripped of bark and branches; a few bald eagles and fish-hawks sailed in spirals over the dead pointed poles and uttered a shrill, piercing cry at the intruders of their solitude.

“It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka murmured. “We should not stay here.”
“It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka murmured.
“It is a forest of ghost trees,” Tatanka m............