Spring term of the courts came on, and the lawyers all started on their circuit, and, with them, Colonel Jones went over the mountain. The whole town was alive to the consequences of this trip, and without much communion or understanding on the subject, most of the population either gathered at the tavern at his departure, or noticed it from a distance, and he rode off, gaily saluting his acquaintances, and raising his hat to the ladies, on both sides of the street, as he passed out of town. From that time, only one subject engaged the thoughts of the good people of Summerville; and on the third day the common salutation was: “Any news from over the mountain?” “Has any one come down the road?” The fourth, fifth, and sixth came, and still the public anxiety was unappeased: it had, with the delay, become insufferable, quite agonizing; business and occupation was at a stand still; a doctor or a constable would not ride to the country lest news of the fight might arrive in their absence. People in crossing the square, or entering or coming out of their houses, all had their heads turned up that road. And many, though ashamed to confess it, sat up an hour or two past their usual bed-time, hoping some one would return from court. Still all was doubt and uncertainty. There is an unaccountable perversity in these things that bothers conjecture. I watched the road from Louisville two days, to hear of Grey Eagle beating Wagner, on which I had one hundred dollars staked, of borrowed money, and no one came; though before that, some person passed every hour. On the seventh morning, the uneasy public were consoled by the certainty that the lawyers must be home that day, as court seldom held a week, and the universal resolve seemed to be that nothing was to be attended to until they were satisfied about the fight. Storekeepers and their clerks, saddlers, hatters, cabinet-makers, and their apprentices, all stood out at the doors. The hammer ceased to ring on the anvil, and the bar-keeper would scarcely walk in to put away the stranger’s saddle-bags, who had called for breakfast; when suddenly a young man, that had been walking from one side of the street to the other, in a state of feverish anxiety, thought he saw dust away up the road, and stopped. I have been told a man won a wager in Philadelphia, on his collecting a crowd by staring, without speaking, at an opposite chimney. So no sooner was this young man’s _point_ noticed, than there was a regular reconnoissance of the road made, and before long, doubt became certainty, when one of the company declared he knew the colonel’s old sorrel riding-horse, “General Jackson,” by the blaze on his face.