Second Chance: Book Ii of the Early Chronicles

By Dallas Denny

The Early Saga

The Early Chronicles follow the adventures of young Chance Early of Western North Carolina from 1834 onward.


About Second Chance

In 1836, America is a wilderness. 16 year-old Chance Early finds himself hired by statesman Oliver Pressley to accompany Pressley’s nephew Noah, a haughty young lawyer-in-training as they journey via stagecoach, farm cart, and boat from Columbia, South Carolina to Nashville, Tennessee on a political mission that is revealed to Chance only upon their arrival. Chance has a mission of his own—to acquire and enslaved woman and free her—but first he will meet the President of the United States and two future Presidents. This is a tale full of adventure, humor, political intrigue, and love won and lost, set in a tumultuous decade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669827443

Dallas Denny

Dallas Denny has been called a “rather charming writer.” She appreciates and does her best to convey the wit of Mark Twain, the straightforward writing style of Ernest Hemingway, the terse dialogue of Elmore Leonard, and Louis L’Amour’s knowledge of the American frontier. She’s far too modest to compare herself to any of the above, but she adores their work and is happy to be influenced by them. She writes in any number of genres and has had the good fortune to be widely published. She is happy to receive a royalty check, but writes for the sheer joy of the experience. Dallas was born in Asheville, North Carolina, only 20 miles from the Chance family’s cabin on the slopes of Mount Mitchell. Except for a four-year stretch in France when she was a child, Dallas spent her live in the American South—until 2015, when she ventured north of the Mason-Dixon line to the mountains of northern New Jersey, where she experienced her first true winter and learned that sometimes you just must shovel snow.

Book preview

Chapter 1

It was six in the morning and I was standing in the yard outside the farmhouse that had once belonged to Johannes Disseldorp. My hat was in my hand and I was asking a man named Arvil Thomas for his daughter’s hand in marriage. I was, as they say, and I don’t know why they do say, plighting my troth.

When I had run down—I won’t say finished, as it’s more like I ran out of steam in mid-proposal—Thomas looked at me and said, You’re a bit young to be getting hitched, aren’t you? What are you, eighteen?

Sixteen, sir, I said. I didn’t add Just barely.

Well, you’re well growed for sixteen, he said. What are you, six foot?

Yes. sir. Close, anyway.

You know how old Emily is?

Yes, sir. She told me she was two weeks from her fifteenth birthday. That was three weeks ago, so I reckon she’s fifteen now.

I’m afraid she exaggerated a bit, he said. She just turned fourteen.

In 1836, fourteen wasn’t an unusual age for a young woman in Western North Carolina to be married, but I reckoned a man like Arvil Thomas knew how old he wanted his daughter to be before he gave her away.

I wasn’t aware of that discrepancy, Mr. Thomas, I said. I took her at her word.

Call me Arvil. I appreciate that you’ve been calling me sir, but don’t wear it out.

No, sir. Sorry.

And don’t let one little lie mislead you about her character, he said. She’s a good girl. As good as they come.

There’s something we can agree on, I said.

She told me how you happened to meet.

I’m friends with Johannes Disseldorp, I said. When I saw a pretty yellow-haired girl in your kitchen, I thought it was his wife Hilga. I ran over to greet her.

Grabbed her from behind, you mean.

I’m afraid so. Please forgive me, Mr.—Arvil.

I was expecting the worst, but he broke into a broad grin. Well, you did your best to make up for that mistake, he said. I’m not holding it against you.

Thank you, sir. I’m afraid it might be a while before Arvil begins to slip off my tongue.

You’ve had good raising, he said. You’re a polite boy.

My ma and pa did their best, I said.

I checked on you, you know. I heard about that wanted poster.

Oh… that.

Yes, that.

It’s resolved, I said.

Don’t seem they hanged you, he said dryly.

No sir. The warrant was just for questioning, and they vacated it. I have to tell you, though, I did it. I killed Joe Webb.

With a rock, I understand.

Yes, sir. I shot his brother Mark, too, I said, and dislocated another brother’s jaw, and blinded him.

My, that made me sound violent! I wasn’t, of course.

That third brother was named Augustus. I left Yancey so we Earlies wouldn’t get into a shooting war with the Webbs, but Gus trailed me and caught up with me in Béjar—San Antonio, in Texas.

I heard about that as well, he said. Seems he ended up the worse for wear.

He did, and I’m not proud about how that came about, but Gus and I are on good terms now. There’s no love lost between me and his family, but the Earlies and the Webbs are at peace and likely to remain so.

Until that Gus pulls another button from your shirt, Arvil said.

There’s that, I said.

Chapter 2

Did you ever have a jacket you loved and put away for a while and finally got it out of its box and discovered it didn’t quite fit you? Sure, you did. That’s how it was for me, more or less, after I came back up the mountain to my home in Yancey County. Yancy is in North Carolina, to the north of Asheville. Asheville is a town you might have heard of, as people go there to escape the summer heat, and it’s—Yancey is, that is, I didn’t mean to get sidetracked by no dadblamed Ashevilles—mostly up and down and no more than two percent flat. My family lived in a hollow high on the flanks of Black Dome. That’s a mighty tall mountain. It’s known as Mount Mitchell these days, renamed for the man who claimed it was the highest American peak east of the Mississippi and was eventually proven right.

I had run into Elisha Mitchell two years earlier as I was leaving my homeland for the first time, and over the space of three weeks he had introduced me to science, and history, and geology, and mathematics that went above and beyond ciphering, and in the process convinced me I could read. By that last, I don’t mean he made me believe I was capable of learning—I mean he showed me I was already reading, and at a considerable level.

Now it might strike you as a puzzlement that a fourteen-year-old boy could have an ability to read without realizing it, but that’s how it was with me. I had spent many hours puzzling over the King James version of the Bible and A Pilgrim’s Progress as I lay on the rough log floor in front of the fireplace in the winters and, in the summers, in the hay in the loft of our barn or in the grass alongside the little brook that ran close to our cabin.

My Uncle Nash would read from those good books and others he carried with him, and I would stand, looking over his shoulder as he read aloud about the struggles of John Bunyan’s pilgrim and the misbehavior of the Good Lord in the Old Testament. And when I say misbehavior, don’t tell me you don’t know about Jehovah’s bad temper and propensity for violence and cruelty. After all, what sort of god tells a man to kill His only son? And oh, hell, I’m just going to say it. What sort of creator forces Himself upon a virgin and sets His own spawn up to be executed in the cruelest possible way?

You might think I have a bad way of thinking about God, but I maintain any deity who created the wonderful diversity and beauty of life and a hospitable planet on which to place it would not have set Adam and Eve up for failure or inflict—and on a bet, at that—a thousand cruelties on a man who had only love in his heart for He who made him—that’s Lot I’m talking about. Such a god ought not to have such a bad way of treating that which he created. I see I’m getting all worked up and starting to tie my sentences in knots, so that’s all the bad I’m going to say about God in this book. Maybe, if I ever get around to writing volume three of the remarkable adventures and coincidences and occasional bouts of violence that have marked my life, I’ll talk about Him again. I still have plenty to say.

This is what has resulted from my Baptist raising. Obviously, it didn’t take. I will close this probably unwanted discussion about God by saying I don’t dislike Him. It’s the Baptist’s vision of God I can find no peace with. Either they’re lying about Him, or they’re blind to who He is, or perhaps both. Most likely both.

For the record, there are any number of types of Baptists, and they are forever uniting and dividing and believing in this and not believing in that, and don’t you dare dance or play cards or hold hands. If you can get two Baptists in a room together, sooner or later they will come to verbal blows over something or other and one of them will split off from the other and form a new branch and inform his former friend and now heretic he and his fellow believers will be going straight to hell for their mistaken beliefs—and yet they all worship the same devilish deity.

I can’t believe He’s anything like the monster in the Old Testament. I believe in God, and I believe we mold God in our mind to our own image, rather than the other way around. I think God lets us be who we want and need to be. I think God is benevolent and merciful and is certainly not an angry old white man like just about every Baptist preacher I ever knew. God probably doesn’t have a sex at all. Why should He? Or She? So, you see, I’m not mad about God at all. Am I mad about the Baptists? Well, yes, for they misled me about the nature of the Creator. Someone should set them straight in their ignorance. I hope one day God Himself will do that, but I’m not about to take on those Baptists by my lonesome. There are just too damn many of them.

So anyway, by puzzling over those two books, I learned to read, as Doc Mitchell discovered when I told him the Latin name of a garter snake in a caption in one of his books. I didn’t know my ABCs, had never heard them said aloud, but although I didn’t know the names of the letters of the alphabet, I had puzzled out how they sounded. I could, although I hadn’t realized it, read. It took me a while to believe Doc when he told me I was a reader.

When we parted, Doc gave me a little Webster dictionary I consulted almost hourly, and I built my vocabulary daily until the book and I were parted in a catastrophic—that’s what the newspapers called it— riverboat explosion on the Mississippi. I never got to the end, and to this day I’m deficient in the last part of the alphabet, Ws and Xs and Zs. I had skipped ahead to the Y words, which was a good thing, as there are a lot of them, and they would be harder to do without than the Xs and Zs. I mean, if I get into a conversation, who’s going to notice the lack of xylophones and zooplanktons? Well, maybe Doc Mitchell, but hardly anyone else would.

It’s important you know how I came to be able to read and how my few weeks with Elisha Mitchell shaped my view of the world. Before I met Doc, I knew little other than what my ma and pa and the aforementioned circuit riding preachers had taught me, and while my knowledge came in handy in our sheltered world on the flanks of Black Dome, it didn’t do for squat out in the wide world where someone might ask me to play whist or tell them why the ocean has tides. My education with Doc was short and sketchy, but I absorbed enough in my time with him to get an understanding far broader and more diverse than I would have received in a lifetime in Yancey County or four years of lollygagging about in college. For one thing, he confirmed my opinion that the Baptists were good at blowing hot air and not so good at much else, and for another he made me think for the first time about the practice of slavery and understand how truly evil it is. I learned the scientific method and what it has taught us and why it’s important, and I learned the rudiments of geometry and trigonometry and algebra and chemistry and physics. You might not think a body could get an education in three weeks, but we’re talking twelve or so hours a day, one on one, with me paying rapt attention, for 21 days of first-rate learning supplemented by ferocious reading ever since. The seeds Elisha Mitchell planted in my head grew and flourished and changed the way I saw the world. I learned enough to be curious, and I still read every book that comes my way.

An education that at first glance might seem to have no practical use has in fact come in handy, and more than once. If you’ve never seen a mountain man stare at you slack-jawed when you use trigonometry to tell him the height of a tall tree by comparing its shadow with that of a six-foot stick, I can tell you I recommend you find a mountain man and try it. I warn you, though, they’ll be likely to chop down the tree just to try to prove you wrong.

Before I went down the mountain in 1834, I had seen a few enslaved people. They weren’t common in the mountains, as there were no plantations or big houses. The land was all up and down and there was just no place large enough and flat enough for crops of cotton or tobacco or rice. Occasionally, I would come across one or maybe two Black folks, mostly personal servants who as a rule escaped the brutality visited upon the field hands of the flat country. The few I saw weren’t owned by anyone I knew and so didn’t personally concern me, and I didn’t think about slavery much until my conversations with Doc Mitchell made me understand how awfully Black men and women and children were treated and why it’s wrong for one human to own another. It made me an abolitionist, which was not then and still isn’t a popular position in the South, but it turned out to be fortunate that I came to terms with the immorality of the ownership of humans by other humans, as I soon enough found myself the owner of a badly wounded gentleman named Lloyd.

I bought Lloyd by happenstance, and for only five dollars, and as soon as he came to consciousness, I told him he was a free man. He refused manumission, telling me the only way he would allow me to liberate him would be to first take him to a free state. It took me a good year and the aforementioned steamboat disaster to get him somewhere he would allow me to free him. That happened to be Mexico, and he knocked me out of my saddle not a minute after I freed him. My jaw hurt like the dickens, but I can’t say I blame him. No man should own another man.

Chapter 3

Before I get back to that jacket that no longer fits, I have something to say about money, or, rather, how I managed to acquire some before even my fourteenth birthday.

We Earlies are hard-working folk, and my pa was always open to opportunity. We farmed and hunted and fished and raised a few critters in the little cove in which we lived, cows and pigs and chickens and such, but we wandered the ranges of the Southern Appalachians and found bounty there as well, from game like turkey and deer and elk, and from plants of every sort, and also from the very earth. We trapped and traded furs and sold ginseng and honey and vegetables, and meat when there was a surplus. We were enterprising, and Ma and Pa were thrifty. Unlike many of our neighbors and kinfolk, we wanted for nothing. And then there was the gold.

Geologists say the Appalachian Mountains are the oldest on earth, and I believe them, for unlike the jagged and pointy Rocky Mountains out West, they’re rounded and stoop-shouldered. Even though they’ve been eroding for hundreds of millions of years, they still have some height to them. The tallest, as I have mentioned, is Mount Mitchell, here in Yancy County. Its summit is more than 6680 feet above sea level, and you can stand at its highest point and look out over ranges in all directions with peaks nearly as high. It doesn’t really matter, I suppose, which mountain has a few feet in advantage of the others, but people tend to be fools about such things. Doc Mitchell and a Tennessee Congressman named Thomas Clingman made careers out of measuring mountains, and both had hard words to say about which was taller, Mitchell’s Black Dome or Clingman’s Smoky Dome. Doc was proven right in the 1850s, but tumbled off a waterfall on the mountain that would be named for him and didn’t survive to enjoy his victory.

Speaking of mountains, I would love to take a poke at the Tejanos here and say Mount Mitchell is taller than any peak in Texas, but that’s not true, as those land-grabbing braggarts claimed the entirety of New Mexico and managed to keep a good portion of it. Therefore the Guadalupe Mountains are part of Texas, even though they should by rights be in New Mexico or Mexico itself, if only to keep Texans humble, not that that seems possible. I will refrain from lying, however, and say for the record there are peaks in West Texas that are more than 7000 feet tall. Still, I take satisfaction that so much of Texas is horizontal.

Like the mountains out West, the Southern Appalachians are full of minerals and gems. How could they not be, since the mountains are made of rock pushed up from deep under the earth? Their outer layers have worn away over millennia, leaving on and near the surface strata containing every sort of mineral. Take copper, for instance. There’s a wide belt reaching from Ducktown in Tennessee to the narrows of the Little Tennessee River in North Carolina. It’s rich ore, too, as high as seven percent metal in places. The rocks are green with oxidized copper and golden yellow with streaks of copper when you break them. They’ve fooled many a white man into thinking they’re made of gold. So, too, has iron pyrite—fool’s gold—and the Appalachians have aplenty of that, too.

You have to know where to look and how to get at the wealth that’s in the ground, but if you do you can find veins of coal, mica, zinc, iron, the aforementioned copper, and rocks of every sort—limestone, shale, sandstone, gypsum, granite, flint, marble, dolomite—you name it. Along with those minerals come gems: aquamarine, beryl, citrine, emerald, garnet, moonstone, rose quartz, smoky quartz, rubies, sapphires, topaz, and tourmaline among them—even diamonds, in a very few places. Notwithstanding that a lot of the gems look like stones and a lot of the stones look like gems, a body who understands the difference can dig up a fortune.

And then there’s gold.

I like gemstones, and I’ve even learned how to cut them, but I and my pa and my brothers figured out in my early years how to pan the rivers and creeks of the mountains and trace color we found in the stream beds back to its source. We never got rich because we were never fools for gold and were unwilling to sully this beautiful land in extracting it. We weren’t interested in getting all the gold, just a bit of it, and spending a month or two now and again in pursuit of color has always been a handy way to get us through the hard times—and, in my case, finance my assorted journeys. Finding the occasional gemstone? I consider that a bonus.

There’s also gold in places not yet revealed. Pa and I and my brothers know some of those places. We visit them once in a while and pan a bit in the streams that are nearby, but otherwise leave them alone. In five or ten years more gold will have washed out of the ravines and hillsides into the creeks and we pan again. Those deposits are still there, scattered here and there throughout the Southern Appalachians.

No, I’m not going to tell you where the gold is. Every time word gets out, every damned fool in the hemisphere drops whatever he or she is doing and takes off for gold country. I and my pa and my brothers saw that happen in North Georgia in 1829 and were happy to sell our claims and get out when the hordes began to arrive from all over America and half the world to boot, tens of thousands of characters, many of them notorious, and most of them penniless when they arrived. Those imbeciles called themselves the ‘29ers twenty years before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California, upon the news of which they all headed for California and were known as the ‘49ers. We had them first, sad to say.

Clearly, the trick is to get to gold country early, before the throngs. Those who do have their pick of sites and avoid the high prices for tools and supplies and food that arrive along with the thousands of men and women who dropped everything to make their way to the back country. That’s what we did—get there early, I mean. We panned and dug as much as we cared to carry and went back home with it before the price of goods began to soar. By late 1829, the profit margin for merchants in North Georgia was somewhere around ten thousand percent. We were tempted to go into the egg business, but not being inclined to go find eggs at a dime a dozen, haul them to Auraria, and sit in a tent all day selling them for two dollars apiece, we called it a day and returned to the Black Mountains with our bounty on our backs and strapped to the back of our mule.

Pa had family in Lumpkin County and got word of the strike early. We looked where all the fools thought the gold wasn’t, and within a week we were on Yahoola Creek, panning for color and building rocker boxes to improve our efficiency. In the outsides of the bends, mixed with sand and gravel, we found gold enough, flakes and nuggets, and when we left three months later, the creek looked pretty much the same as when we arrived. Within a year fools would be digging holes everywhere, like moles, and before twenty years had passed they would be blasting away entire mountainsides with streams of pressurized water, disfiguring the country forever. Served them ‘29ers and ‘49ers right to have to pay sixteen bits apiece for eggs.

There were earlier gold rushes in America, of course, but our gold rush was the one in North Georgia, and I learned how to find gold wherever it was present, and how to extract enough to line my pockets without tearing up entire landscapes. That’s a skill that has stood me in good stead throughout my life. As I noted, I haven’t made a fortune, but then I wasn’t looking to, but pocket money? Travel money? Emergency money? Sure enough. All it takes is a bit of luck and a month or so of panning.

Chapter 4

So, finally getting around to that jacket….

I was home less than two weeks before I began to get itchy feet. Things were bothering me. Home wasn’t the same. The people were the same, the mountains were the same, but I wasn’t. I was the one that was different, and it made me out of sorts and restless, and truth to tell, a little cranky.

My ma sensed it and said, You’re restless. You’ll be off down the mountain again?

Soon, I said, but I won’t be gone long.

Is it about that girl?

Yes. She’s the one, Ma.

I figured that, Ma said. You’ll be proposing?

Yes, Ma.

You’re young, but clearly you’re becoming a man, and a good one. She’ll be lucky to have you.

Maybe you can tell her pa that.

You’ve not talked to him?

I’ve not met him, I said. I met her just once, and he wasn’t present, and I’m afraid he may take exception to the way we became acquainted.

You mean grabbing her from behind? She was trying not to smile, and not quite succeeding.

Yes, ma’am. I took her for Miz Disseldorp. Emily favors her from the rear.

It was an accidental hugging. Or, rather, a mistaken hugging. If her pa is any kind of man, he’ll understand.

I’m just hoping he doesn’t greet me with a shotgun, I said.

You saw her just the once? And you’re sure she’s the one for you?

Yes, Ma.

She nodded. It wasn’t like that with me and your pa, she said. We knew each other most of our lives and each of us considered the other a nuisance. Until we didn’t. She lowered her head, and despite her bonnet, I could see her blush.

I was pining for a girl I had indeed met only once—Emily. I didn’t even know her last name. I thought I’d best write before I showed up on her doorstep, hat in hand, and so I sent a letter to Emily’s father asking for his permission to court her. That wasn’t easy, as I didn’t know her last name or his first name. I addressed the letter to Emily’s Pa, Johann Disseldorp’s farm, Swannanoa Valley, and walked to Burnsville and handed it to Mayfield Ricker at what passed for the post office, hoping for the best. He looked at the address and said, Improbable as it sounds, I think this will likely get to its intended recipient.

I was afraid I would receive a hostile greeting when I knocked on Emily’s door, but I knew I would have to go back down the mountain, and soon, as my brothers and sisters were calling me highfalootin’ because of my new and expanded vocabulary and teasing me no end about Emily. To make matters worse, they weren’t at all interested in how old the Earth was or learning how to measure a tree without a ruler.

Cut that sucker down and pace it out, said Jefferson. That’ll do it without your fancy calculations.

And the tree would be dead, I said. Needlessly.

He waved an arm about. You see any shortage of hemlock trees, Junior?

Why kill a tree when you don’t need to?

Why not? Besides, they’re poisonous. Wasn’t it hemlock that killed that Greek fellow you’ve been going on about?

Wrong sort of hemlock. This tree isn’t going to hurt anybody.

Joanna, fetch me the ax, said Jefferson to my sister, who had been having a good time bystanding. He was going to cut down that hemlock, and short of fighting, there was nothing I could do about it. I considered this was one of those times when it wasn’t necessary to fight, so I just spat on the ground and walked away.

And so I set out one fine May morning, carrying my knife, a water pouch, a bedroll and a slicker, and a knapsack containing some vittles for the trip.

I had shined my boots and was wearing store-bought pants and a shirt on which I had splurged at Penland’s Dry Goods in Burnsville, the county seat. Burnsville was eight miles from our home, and Swannanoa twelve, as the crow flies, but in the mountains, humans don’t get off as easily as do crows. For earthbound creatures like me it was fifteen miles to Burnsville and nigh on to forty to Swannanoa. Paths wander in the mountains to take advantage of the terrain, but even so, one mile in the Black Mountains feels like four or five in the flatland. I could make Burnsville and back in a day, but Swannanoa required an overnight, and two if you didn’t make good time.

Chapter 5

I’m not looking to marry Emily off, Arvil said. Not now, anyhow. I’d like her to finish her schooling before she starts mothering young Earlies or Webbs or anyone else.

I understand.

I’m fine with you sparking her, he said. She’s old enough for that, but there will be no sneaking away with her. You will romance her in a proper manner, here on the porch, and you may take her to Asheville during the daytime, if I can find a chaperone of good character or have time to accompany you myself.

Thank you, sir, I said.

Thank you, Arvil.

Thank you, Arvil.

Well, now it’s established I’m not going to shoot you, there’s no use standing around in the yard, is there?

No sir, I said. I’d be happy to help you with any chores before I commence the courting.

He thought for a moment.