After a few days Goshorn and I prepared to go up Elk River, to renew the leases of oil and coal lands. Now I must premise that at all times the man who was engaged in "ile" bore a charmed life, and was venerated by both Union men and rebels. _He_ could pass the lines and go anywhere. At one time, when not a spy could be got into or out of Richmond to serve us, Goshorn seriously proposed to me to go with him into the city! I had a neighbour named Fassit, an uncle of Theodore. He had oil-wells in Virginia, and when the war begun work on them was stopped. This dismayed the natives. One morning there came to Mr. Fassit a letter imploring him to return: "Come back, o come agin and bore us some more wels. We wil protec you like a son. We dont make war on _Ile_." And I, being thus respected, went and came from the Foeman's Land, and joined in the dreadful rebel-ry and returned unharmed, leading a charmed if _not_ particularly charming life all winter and the spring, to the great amazement and bewilderment of many, as will appear in the sequence. The upper part of Elk River was in the debatable land, or rather still in Slave-ownia or rebeldom, where a Union man's life was worth about a chinquapin. In fact, one day there was a small battle between me and home--with divers wounds and deaths. This going and coming of mine, among and with rebels, got me into a droll misunderstanding some time after. But I think that the real cause lay less in oil than in the simple truth that these frank, half-wild fellows _liked_ me. One said to me one day, "You're onlike all the Northern men who come here, and we all like you. What's the reason?" I explained it that he had only met with Yankees, and that as Pennsylvania lay next to Virginia, of course we must be more alike as neighbours. But the cause lay in the _liking_ which I have for Indians, gypsies, and all such folk. Goshorn began by buying a dug-out poplar canoe sixty-four feet in length, and stocking it with provisions. "Money won't be of much use," he said; "what we want chiefly is whisky and blue beads for presents." He hired two men who had been in the Confederate army, but who had absented themselves since the proceedings had become uninteresting. These men took to me with a devotion which ended by becoming literally superstitious. I am quite sure that, while naturally intelligent, anything like a mind stored with varied knowledge was something _utterly_ unknown to them. And as I, day by day, let fall unthinkingly this or that scrap of experience or of knowledge, they began to regard me as a miracle. One day one of them, Sam Fox, said to me meaningly, that I liked curious things, and that he knew a nest where he could get me a young _raven_. The raven is to an Indian conjuror what a black cat is to a witch, and I suppose that Sam thought I must be lonely without a familiar. Which recalls one of the most extraordinary experiences of all my life.