The people about Reelfoot Lake have among them some of Davy’s descendants. His daughters and sons lived in that part of the State, and his relatives and neighbors from the mountains followed the trail he had made. It is not fair to say that his principles live in the code of the Night Riders, but human nature is always the same, and the hungry fishermen of Reelfoot are as jealous of their preserves as was the Red Man of his hunting-grounds. One night, when Davy sat with his friend’s family before the flare of the blazing logs in the wide fireplace, there was with them a Catholic Father who for years had wandered from St. Louis to New Orleans and Pensacola, and back again, even as Brébeuf and the beardless Garnier, and Isaac Le Jogue, had dared the dangers of the wilderness, seeing visions of Heaven while their stomachs were empty, and ever blazing the cross upon stately trees in the dark recesses of the forests. Davy asked the Padre to tell him the story of the earthquake to which the lake owed its origin. He filled his pipe with tobacco cut from one of Davy’s twists, and then for a long time looked into the heart of the fire, without speaking. “_Hay catorce años, Señores_,” he finally began in the softest of Spanish, and then, realizing that Davy would not understand him, began again: “It was fourteen years ago, almost, it being the night of the 16th of December, of the year 1811, that I went on shore at the little city of New Madrid, leaving at the landing the boat in which I had come from St. Louis with Brother Anselmo. When we had found a place in which to rest, and had refreshed ourselves with food for the first time in nearly two days, we walked about the place, being cramped and stiffened from our long sitting in the boat.