About twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash river, there was a resort of robbers such as might belong to the most lurid dime-novel list--the famous Cave-in-the-Rock, in the bank of the Ohio river. This cavern was about twenty-five feet in height at its visible opening, and it ran back into the bluff two hundred feet, with a width of eighty feet. The floor of this natural cavern was fairly flat, so that it could be used as a habitation. From this lower cave a sort of aperture led up to a second one, immediately above it in the bluff wall, and these two natural retreats of wild animals offered attractions to wild men which were not unaccepted. It was here that there dwelt for some time the famous robber Meason, or Mason, who terrorized the flatboat trade of the Ohio at about 1800. Meason was a robber king, a giant in stature, and a man of no ordinary brains. He had associated with him his two sons and a few other hard characters, who together made a band sufficiently strong to attack any party of the size usually making up the boat companies of that time, or the average family traveling, mounted or on foot, through the forest-covered country of the Ohio valley. Meason killed and pillaged pretty much as he liked for a term of years, but as travel became too general along the Ohio, he removed to the wilder country south of that stream, and began to operate on the old "Natchez and Nashville Trace," one of the roadways of the South at that time, when the Indian lands were just opening to the early settlers. Lower Tennessee and pretty much all of Mississippi made his stamping-grounds, and his name became a terror there, as it had been along the Ohio. The governor of the State of Mississippi offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive; but for a long time he escaped all efforts at apprehension. Treachery did the work, as it has usually in bringing such bold and dangerous men to book. Two members of his gang proved traitors to their chief. Seizing an opportunity they crept behind him and drove a tomahawk into his brain. They cut off the head and took it along as proof; but as they were displaying this at the seat of government, the town of Washington, they themselves were recognized and arrested, and were later tried and executed; which ended the Meason gang, one of the early and once famous desperado bands.