He was what you might call
a hermit. There were no white people in these parts except a few
scattered trappers and some people living in a settlement twenty-odd
miles south of here. As the story goes, this man Quill lived up there
in that cave for about four or five years, hunting and trapping all
around the country. White people begin to get purty thick in these
parts soon after that, Indiana having been made a state. There was
a lot of coming and going up and down the river. A feller named
Digby started a kind of settlement or trading-post further up,
and clearings were made all around,--farms and all that, you see.
Your great grandfather was one of the first men to settle in this
section. Coming down the river by night you could see the light,
up there in Quill's Cave. You could see it for miles, they say.
People begin to speak of it as the light in Quill's window,--and
that's how the name happened. I'm over seventy, and I've never
heard that hill called anything but Quill's Window."
"What happened to Quill?"
"Well, that's something nobody seems to be quite certain about.
Whether he hung himself or somebody else done the job for him,
nobody knows. According to the story that was told when I was a
boy, it seems he killed somebody down the river and come up here
to hide. The relations of the man he killed never stopped hunting
for him.
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