All this was before old lady Gordon came as a young bride to live in Oldfield; but another band of robbers and assassins still terrorized that part of the Pennyroyal Region. The cavern in which the band made its den was on the other side of the Ohio River, but it was Kentucky that suffered most from its ravages. Many a richly laden flatboat was never heard of after it was known to have stopped at the entrance to Cave-in-Rock, as the place was called in the beginning of the last century, and as it is called at the present time. Many a gold-laden boatman, who had unknowingly passed down the river without stopping at the Cave-in-Rock, was beguiled into entering it on his way homeward--only to vanish forever off the face of the earth. The cavern would seem to have offered powerful temptations to the unwary traveller. The cave itself was then as it is now a most curious and interesting survival of prehistoric times. It is a single chamber in the solid rock, opening at the river's brink, two hundred feet long and eighty feet wide, its sides rising by regular stages after the manner of the seats in an amphitheatre. Its walls are covered with strange carvings cut deep in the stone; there are representations of several animals unknown to science, and there are also inscribed characters which have led those learned in such matters to believe the cavern to have been the council house of some ancient race. But nothing was known of these things while Cave-in-Rock remained the hiding-place of robbers and assassins. The terrified country round about Oldfield knew the place only by vague hearsay as a drinking, gambling resort, wherein boatmen and all unwary travellers going up or down the Ohio were lured to destruction. No one who entered the awful mystery of the cavern ever came out to tell what he had seen or what had befallen him. It seemed--so old lady Gordon said--as if the hand of the law would never be able to lay hold upon actual proof of the crimes committed at Cave-in-Rock, but when the band was ultimately run to earth, an upper and secret chamber was found to be filled with the bones of human beings. The grandmother and the grandson sat silent for a space after she grew weary of story-telling. They were thinking in widely different ways of the wild, true tales of these terrific passion storms which had swept Kentucky throughout her existence. Was another fair portion of the good green earth ever so deep-dyed in the blood of both the innocent and the guilty? "And yet through all we have always been a most religious people," the young man said musingly. "Very!" responded the old lady, who was growing hungry. "None more so. We've about all the different religions that anybody else ever had, and we've started one or two of our own." X RELIGION IN OLDFIELD It is in the quiet village, remote, as this was, from the rushing change of city life, that the fervor of religion always appears warmest and seems to linger longest.