A Busy Year at the Old Squire's
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Title: A Busy Year at the Old Squire's
Author: C. A. Stephens
Release date: November 29, 2006 [eBook #19968]
Most recently updated: January 1, 2021
Language: English
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A BUSY YEAR AT THE OLD SQUIRE'S
by
C. A. STEPHENS
Published by
The Old Squire's Bookstore
Norway, Maine
Copyright, 1922
By C. A. Stephens
All rights reserved
Electrotyped and Printed by
The Colonial Press
Clinton, Mass., U. S. A.
DEDICATED WITH CORDIAL BEST WISHES TO THE THOUSANDS OF READERS WHO HAVE
REQUESTED THIS Memorial Edition OF THE C. A. STEPHENS BOOKS
Contents
CHAPTER
I. Master Pierson Comes Back
II. Cutting Ice at 14° Below Zero
III. A Bear's "Pipe" in Winter
IV. White Monkey Week
V. When Old Zack Went to School
VI. The Sad Abuse of Old Mehitable
VII. Bear-Tone
VIII. When We Hunted the Striped Catamount
IX. The Lost Oxen
X. Bethesda
XI. When We Walked the Town Lines
XII. The Rose-Quartz Spring
XIII. Fox Pills
XIV. The Unpardonable Sin
XV. The Cantaloupe Coaxer
XVI. The Strange Disappearance of Grandpa Edwards
XVII. Our Fourth of July at the Den
XVIII. Jim Doane's Bank Book
XIX. Grandmother Ruth's Last Load of Hay
XX. When Uncle Hannibal Spoke at the Chapel
XXI. That Mysterious Daguerreotype Saloon
XXII. "Rainbow in the Morning"
XIII. When I Went After the Eyestone
XXIV. Borrowed for a Bee Hunt
XXV. When the Lion Roared
XXVI. Uncle Solon Chase Comes Along
XVII. On the Dark of the Moon
XXVIII. Halstead's Gobbler
XXIX. Mitchella Jars
XXX. When Bears Were Denning Up
XXXI. Czar Brench
XXII. When Old Peg Led the Flock
XXXIII. Witches' Brooms
XXXIV. The Little Image Peddlers
XXXV. A January Thaw
XXXVI. Uncle Billy Murch's Hair-Raiser
XXXVII. Addison's Pocketful of Auger Chips
A Busy Year at the Old Squire's
CHAPTER I
MASTER PIERSON COMES BACK
Master Joel Pierson arrived the following Sunday afternoon, as he had
promised in his letter of Thanksgiving Day eve, and took up his abode
with us at the old Squire's for the winter term of school.
Cousin Addison drove to the village with horse and pung to fetch him;
and the pung, I remember, was filled with the master's belongings,
including his school melodeon, books and seven large wall maps for
teaching geography. For Master Pierson brought a complete outfit, even
to the stack of school song-books which later were piled on the top of
the melodeon that stood in front of the teacher's desk at the
schoolhouse. Every space between the windows was covered by those wall
maps. No other teacher had ever made the old schoolhouse so attractive.
No other teacher had ever entered on the task of giving us instruction
with such zeal and such enthusiasm. It was a zeal, too, and an
enthusiasm which embraced every pupil in the room and stopped at nothing
short of enlisting that pupil's best efforts to learn.
Master Pierson put life and hard work into everything that went on at
school--even into the old schoolhouse itself. Every morning he would be
off from the old Squire's at eight o'clock, to see that the schoolhouse
was well warmed and ready to begin lessons at nine; and if there had
been any neglect in sweeping or dusting, he would do it himself, and
have every desk and bench clean and tidy before school time.
What was more, Master Pierson possessed the rare faculty of
communicating his own zeal for learning to his pupils. We became so
interested, as weeks passed, that of our own accord we brought our
school books home with us at night, in order to study evenings; and we
asked for longer lessons that we might progress faster.
My cousin Halstead was one of those boys (and their name is Legion) who
dislike study and complain of their lessons that they are too long and
too hard. But strange to say, Master Joel Pierson somehow led Halse to
really like geography that winter. Those large wall maps in color were
of great assistance to us all. In class we took turns going to them with
a long pointer, to recite the lesson of the day. I remember just how the
different countries looked and how they were bounded--though many of
these boundaries are now, of course, considerably changed.
When lessons dragged and dullness settled on the room, Master Joel was
wont to cry, "Halt!" then sit down at the melodeon and play some school
song as lively as the instrument admitted of, and set us all singing for
five or ten minutes, chanting the multiplication tables, the names of
the states, the largest cities of the country, or even the Books of the
Bible. At other times he would throw open the windows and set us
shouting Patrick Henry's speech, or Byron's Apostrophe to the Ocean. In
short, "old Joel" was what now would be called a "live wire." He was
twenty-two then and a student working his own way through Bates College.
After graduating he migrated to a far western state where he taught for
a year or two, became supervisor of schools, then State Superintendent,
and afterwards a Representative to Congress. He is an aged man now and
no word of mine can add much to the honors which have worthily crowned
his life. None the less I want to pay this tribute to him--even if he
did rub my ears at times and cry, "Wake up, Round-head! Wake up and find
out what you are in this world for." (More rubs!) "You don't seem to
know yet. Wake up and find out about it. We have all come into the world
to do something. Wake up and find out what you are here for!"--and then
more rubs!
It wasn't his fault if I never fairly waked up to my vocation--if I
really had one. For the life of me I could never feel sure what I was
for! Cousin Addison seemed to know just what he was going to do, from
earliest boyhood, and went straight to it. Much the same way, cousin
Theodora's warm, generous heart led her directly to that labor of love
which she has so faithfully performed. As for Halstead, he was perfectly
sure, cock-sure, more than twenty times, what he was going to do in
life; but always in the course of a few weeks or months, he discovered
he was on the wrong trail. What can be said of us who either have no
vocation at all, or too many? What are we here for?
In addition to our daily studies at the schoolhouse, we resumed Latin,
in the old sitting-room, evenings, Thomas and Catherine Edwards coming
over across the field to join us. To save her carpet, grandmother Ruth
put down burlap to bear the brunt of our many restless feet--for there
was a great deal of trampling and sometimes outbreaks of scuffling
there.
Thomas and I, who had forgotten much we had learned the previous winter,
were still delving in _Æsop's Fables_. But Addison, Theodora and
Catherine were going on with the first book of Cæsar's _Gallic War_.
Ellen, two years younger, was still occupied wholly by her English
studies. Study hours were from seven till ten, with interludes for
apples and pop-corn.
Halstead, who had now definitely abandoned Latin as something which
would never do him any good, took up Comstock's _Natural Philosophy_, or
made a feint of doing so, in order to have something of his own that was
different from the rest of us. Natural philosophy, he declared, was far
and away more important than Latin.
Memory goes back very fondly to those evenings in the old sitting-room,
they were so illumined by great hopes ahead. Thomas and I, at a
light-stand apart from the others, were usually puzzling out a
Fable--_The Lion, The Oxen, The Kid and the Wolf, The Fox and the Lion_,
or some one of a dozen others--holding noisy arguments over it till
Master Pierson from the large center table, called out, "Less noise over
there among those Latin infants! Cæsar is building his bridge over the
Rhine. You are disturbing him."
Addison, always very quiet when engrossed in study, scarcely noticed or
looked up, unless perhaps to aid Catherine and Theodora for a moment,
with some hard passage. It was Tom and I who made Latin noisy,
aggravated at times by pranks from Halstead, whose studies in natural
philosophy were by no means diligent. At intervals of assisting us with
our translations of Cæsar and the Fables, Master Pierson himself was
translating the Greek of Demosthenes' Orations, and also reviewing his
Livy--to keep up with his Class at College. But, night or day, he was
always ready to help or advise us, and push us on. "Go ahead!" was "old
Joel's" motto, and "That's what we're here for." He appeared to be
possessed by a profound conviction that the human race has a great
destiny before it, and that we ought all to work hard to hurry it up and
realize it.
It is quite wonderful what an influence for good a wide-awake teacher,
like Master Pierson, can exert in a school of forty or fifty boys and
girls like ours in the old Squire's district, particularly where many of
them "don't know what they are in the world for," and have difficulty in
deciding on a vocation in life.
At that time there was much being said about a Universal Language. As
there are fifty or more diverse languages, spoken by mankind, to say
nothing of hundreds of different dialects, and as people now travel
freely to all parts of the earth, the advantages of one common language
for all nations are apparent to all who reflect on the subject. At
present, months and years of our short lives are spent learning foreign
languages. A complete education demands that the American whose mother
tongue is the English, must learn French, German, Spanish and Italian,
to say nothing of the more difficult languages of eastern Europe and the
Orient. Otherwise the traveler, without an interpreter, cannot make
himself understood, and do business outside his own country.
The want of a common means of communication therefore has long been
recognized; and about that time some one had invented a somewhat
imperfect method of universal speech, with the idea of having everybody
learn it, and so be able to converse with the inhabitants of all lands
without the well-nigh impossible task of learning five, or ten, or fifty
different languages.
The idea impressed everybody as a good one, and enjoyed a considerable
popularity for a time. But practically this was soon found to be a
clumsy and inadequate form of speech, also that many other drawbacks
attended its adoption.
But the main idea held good; and since that time Volapuk, Bolak,
Esperanto and Ido have appeared, but without meeting with great success.
The same disadvantages attend them, each and all.
In thinking the matter over and talking of it, one night at the old
Squire's, that winter, Master Pierson hit on the best, most practical
plan for a universal language which I have ever heard put forward.
"Latin is the foundation of all the modern languages of Christendom," he
said. "Or if not the foundation, it enters largely into all of them.
Law, theology, medicine and philosophy are dependent on Latin for their
descriptive terms. Without Latin words, modern science would be a jargon
which couldn't be taught at all. Without Latin, the English language,
itself, would relapse to the crude, primitive Saxon speech of our
ancestors. No one can claim to be well educated till he has studied
Latin.
"Now as we have need to learn Latin anyway, why not kill two birds with
one stone, and make Latin our universal language? Why not have a
colloquial, every-day Latin, such as the Romans used to speak in Italy?
In point of fact, Latin was the universal language with travelers and
educated people all through the Middle Ages. We need to learn it anyhow,
so why not make it our needed form of common speech?"
I remember just how earnest old Joel became as he set forth this new idea
of his. He jumped up and tore round the old sitting-room. He rubbed my
ears again, rumpled Tom's hair, caught Catherine by both her hands and
went ring-round-the-rosy with her, nearly knocking down the table, lamp
and all! "The greatest idea yet!" he shouted. "Just what's wanted for a
Universal Language!" He went and drew in the old Squire to hear about
it; and the old Squire admitted that it sounded reasonable. "For I can
see," he said, "that it would keep Latin, and the derivation of words
from it, fresh in our minds. It would prove a constant review of the
words from which our language has been formed.
"But Latin always looked to me rather heavy and perhaps too clumsy for
every-day talk," the old gentleman remarked. "Think you could talk it?"
"Sure!" Master Pierson cried. "The old Romans spoke it. So can we. And
that's just what I will do. I will get up a book of conversational
Latin--enough to make a Common Language for every-day use." And in point
of fact that was what old Joel was doing, for four or five weeks
afterwards. He had Theodora and Catherine copy out page after page of
it--as many as twenty pages. He wanted us each to have a copy of it; and
for a time at least, he intended to have it printed.
A few days ago I came upon some of those faded, yellow pages, folded up
in an old text book of Æsop's Latin Fables--the one Tom and I were then
using; and I will set down a few of the sentences here, to illustrate
what Master Pierson thought might be done with Latin as a universal
language.
Master Pierson's Universal Language in Latin, which he named _Dic_
from _dico_, meaning to speak.
1 It is time to get up. = Surgendi tempus est.
2 The sun is up already. = Sol jamdudum ortus.
3 Put on your shoes. = Indue tibi ocreas.
4 Comb your head. = Pecte caput tuum.
5 Light a candle and build a fire. = Accende lucernum, et fac ut
luceat faculus.
6 Carry the lantern. We must water = Vulcanum in cornu geras.
the horses. Equi aquatum agenda sunt.
7 It is a very hot day. = Dies est ingens æstus.
8 Let's go to the barn. = Jam imus horreum.
9 Grind the axes. = Acuste ascias.
10 It is near twelve o'clock. = Instat hora duodecima.
11 It is time for dinner. = Prandenti tempus adest.
12 Please take dinner with us. = Quesso nobiscum hodie sumas
prandiolum.
13 Make a good fire. = Instruas optimum focum.
14 This chimney smokes. = Male fumat hic caminus.
15 The wood is green. = Viride est hoc lignum.
16 Fetch kindling wood. = Affer fomitem.
17 Lay the table cloth. = Sterne mappam.
18 Dinner is ready. = Cibus est appositus.
19 Don't spoil it by delay. = Ne corrumpatur mora vestra.
20 Sit down. = Accumbe.
21 This is my place. = Hic mihi locus.
22 Let him sit next me. = Assideat mihi.
23 Say grace, or ask a blessing. = Recita consecrationem.
24 Give me brown bread. = Da mihi panem atrum.
25 I am going to school. = Eo ad scholam.
26 What time is it? = Quota est hora?
27 It is past seven. = Præteriit hora septima.
28 The bell has rung. = Sonuit tintinnabulum.
29 Go with me. = Vade mecum.
30 The master will soon be here. = Brevi præceptor aderit.
31 I am very cold. = Valde frigeo.
32 My hands are numb. = Obtorpent manus.
33 Mend the fire. = Apta ignem.
I have copied out only a few of the shorter sentences. There were, as I
have said, fully twenty pages of it, enough for quite a respectable
"Universal Language," or at least the beginnings of one. Perhaps some
ambitious linguist will yet take it up in earnest.
CHAPTER II
CUTTING ICE AT 14° BELOW ZERO
Generally speaking, young folks are glad when school is done. But it
wasn't so with us that winter in the old Squire's district, when Master
Pierson was teacher. We were really sad, in fact quite melancholy, and
some of the girls shed tears, when the last day of school came and "old
Joel" tied up the melodeon, took down the wall maps, packed up his books
and went back to his Class in College. He was sad himself--he had taken
such interest in our progress.
"Now don't forget what you have learned!" he exclaimed. "Hang on to it.
Knowledge is your best friend. You must go on with your Latin,
evenings."
"You will surely come back next winter!" we shouted after him as he
drove away.
"Maybe," he said, and would not trust himself to look back.
The old sitting-room seemed wholly deserted that Friday night after he
went away. "We are like sheep without a shepherd," Theodora said.
Catherine and Tom came over. We opened our Latin books and tried to
study awhile; but 'twas dreary without "old Joel."
Other things, however, other duties and other work at the farm
immediately occupied our attention. It was now mid-January and there was
ice to be cut on the lake for our new creamery.
For three years the old Squire had been breeding a herd of Jerseys.
There were sixteen of them: Jersey First, Canary, Jersey Second, Little
Queen, Beauty, Buttercup, and all the rest. Each one had her own little
book that hung from its nail on a beam of the tie-up behind her stall.
In it were recorded her pedigree, dates, and the number of pounds of
milk she gave at each milking. The scales for weighing the milk hung
from the same beam. We weighed each milking, and jotted down the weight
with the pencil tied to each little book. All this was to show which of
the herd was most profitable, and which calves had better be kept for
increase.
This was a new departure in Maine farming. Cream-separators were as yet
undreamed of. A water-creamery with long cans and ice was then used for
raising the cream; and that meant an ice-house and the cutting and
hauling home of a year's stock of ice from the lake, nearly two miles
distant.
We built a new ice-house near the east barn in November; and in December
the old Squire drove to Portland and brought home a complete kit of
tools--three ice-saws, an ice-plow or groover, ice-tongs, hooks,
chisels, tackle and block.
Everything had to be bought new, but the old Squire had visions of great
profits ahead from his growing herd of Jerseys. Grandmother, however,
was less sanguine.
It was unusually cold in December that year, frequently ten degrees
below zero, and there were many high winds. Consequently, the ice on the
lake thickened early to twelve inches, and bade fair to go to two feet.
For use in a water-creamery, ice is most conveniently cut and handled
when not more than fifteen or sixteen inches thick. That thickness, too,
when the cakes are cut twenty-six inches square, as usual, makes them
quite heavy enough for hoisting and packing in an ice-house.
Half a mile from the head of the lake, over deep, clear water, we had
been scraping and sweeping a large surface after every snow, in order to
have clear ice. Two or three times a week Addison ran down and tested
the thickness; and when it reached fifteen inches, we bestirred
ourselves at our new work.
None of us knew much about cutting ice; but we laid off a straight
base-line of a hundred feet, hitched old Sol to the new groover, and
marked off five hundred cakes. Addison and I then set to work with two
of our new ice-saws, and hauled out the cakes with the ice-tongs, while
Halstead and the old Squire loaded them on the long horse-sled,--sixteen
cakes to the load,--drew the ice home, and packed it away in the new
ice-house.
Although at first the sawing seemed easy, we soon found it tiresome, and
learned that two hundred cakes a day meant a hard day's work,
particularly after the saws lost their keen edge--for even ice will dull
a saw in a day or two. We had also to be pretty careful, for it was over
deep black water, and a cake when nearly sawed across is likely to break
off suddenly underfoot.
Hauling out the cakes with tongs, too, is somewhat hazardous on a
slippery ice margin. We beveled off a kind of inclined "slip" at one end
of the open water, and cut heel holes in the ice beside it, so that we
might stand more securely as we pulled the cakes out of the water.
For those first few days we had bright, calm weather, not very cold; we
got out five hundred cakes and drew them home to the ice-house without
accident.
The hardship came the next week, when several of our neighbors--who
always kept an eye on the old Squire's farming, and liked to follow his
lead--were beset by an ambition to start ice-houses. None of them had
either experience or tools. They wanted us to cut the ice for them.
We thought that was asking rather too much. Thereupon fourteen or
fifteen of them offered us two cents a cake to cut a year's supply for
each of them.
Now no one will ever get very rich cutting ice, sixteen inches thick, at
two cents a cake. But Addison and I thought it over, and asked the old
Squire's opinion. He said that we might take the new kit, and have all
we could make.
On that, we notified them all to come and begin drawing home their cakes
the following Monday morning, for the ice was growing thicker all the
while; and the thicker it got, the harder our work would be.
They wanted about four thousand cakes; and as we would need help, we
took in Thomas Edwards and Willis Murch as partners. Both were good
workers, and we anticipated having a rather fine time at the lake.
In the woods on the west shore, nearly opposite where the ice was to be
cut, there was an old "shook" camp, where we kept our food and slept at
night, in order to avoid the long walk home to meals.
On Sunday it snowed, and cleared off cold and windy again. It was eight
degrees below zero on Monday morning, when we took our outfit and went
to work. Everything was frozen hard as a rock. The wind, sweeping down
the lake, drove the fine, loose snow before it like smoke from a forest
fire. There was no shelter. We had to stand out and saw ice in the
bitter wind, which seemed to pierce to the very marrow of our bones. It
was impossible to keep a fire; and it always seems colder when you are
standing on ice.
It makes me shiver now to think of that week, for it grew colder instead
of warmer. A veritable "cold snap" set in, and never for an hour, night
or day, did that bitter wind let up.
We would have quit work and waited for calmer weather,--the old Squire
advised us to do so,--but the ice was getting thicker every day. Every
inch added to the thickness made the work of sawing harder--at two cents
a cake. So we stuck to it, and worked away in that cruel wind.
On Thursday it got so cold that if we stopped the saws even for two
seconds, they froze in hard and fast, and had to be cut out with an ax;
thus two cakes would be spoiled. It was not easy to keep the saws going
fast enough not to catch and freeze in; and the cakes had to be hauled
out the moment they were sawed, or they would freeze on again. Moreover,
the patch of open water that we uncovered froze over in a few minutes,
and had to be cleared a dozen times a day. During those nights it froze
five inches thick, and filled with snowdrift, all of which had to be
cleared out every morning.
Although we had our caps pulled down over our ears and heavy mittens on,
and wore all the clothes we could possibly work in, it yet seemed at
times that freeze we must--especially toward night, when we grew tired
from the hard work of sawing so long and so fast. We became so chilled
that we could hardly speak; and at sunset, when we stopped work, we
could hardly get across to the camp. The farmers, who were coming twice
a day with their teams for ice, complained constantly of the cold;
several of them stopped drawing altogether for the time. Willis also
stopped work on Thursday at noon.
The people at home knew that we were having a hard time. Grandmother and
the girls did all they could for us; and every day at noon and again at
night the old Squire, bundled up in his buffalo-skin coat, drove down to
the lake with horse and pung, and brought us a warm meal, packed in a
large box with half a dozen hot bricks.
Only one who has been chilled through all day can imagine how glad we
were to reach that warm camp at night. Indeed, except for the camp, we
could never have worked there as we did. It was a log camp, or rather
two camps, placed end to end, and you went through the first in order to
get into the second, which had no outside door. The second camp had been
built especially for cold weather. It was low, and the chinks between
the logs were tamped with moss. At this time, too, snow lay on it, and
had banked up against the walls. Inside the camp, across one end, there
was a long bunk; at the opposite end stood an old cooking-stove, that
seemed much too large for so small a camp.
At dusk we dropped work, made for the camp, shut all the doors, built
the hottest fire we could make, and thawed ourselves out. It seemed as
though we could never get warmed through. For an hour or more we hovered
about the stove. The camp was as hot as an oven; I have no doubt that we
kept the temperature at 110°; and yet we were not warm.
"Put in more wood!" Addison or Thomas would exclaim. "Cram that stove
full again! Let's get warm!"
We thought so little of ventilation that we shut the camp door tight and
stopped every aperture that we could find. We needed heat to counteract
the effect of those long hours of cold and wind.
By the time we had eaten our supper and thawed out, we grew sleepy, and
under all our bedclothing, curled up in the bunk. So fearful were we
lest the fire should go out in the night that we gathered a huge heap of
fuel, and we all agreed to get up and stuff the stove whenever we waked
and found the fire abating.
Among the neighbors for whom we were cutting ice was Rufus Sylvester. He
was not a very careful or prosperous farmer, and not likely to be
successful at dairying. But because the old Squire and others were
embarking in that business, Rufus wished to do so, too. He had no
ice-house, but thought he could keep ice buried in sawdust, in the shade
of a large apple-tree near his barn; and I may add here that he tried it
with indifferent success for three years, and that it killed the
apple-tree.
On Saturday of that cold week he came to the lake with his lame old
horse and a rickety sled, and wanted us to cut a hundred cakes of ice
for him. The prospect of our getting our pay was poor. Saturday,
moreover, was the coldest, windiest day of the whole week; the
temperature was down to fourteen degrees below.
Halse and Thomas said no; but he hung round, and teased us, while his
half-starved old horse shivered in the wind; and we finally decided to
oblige him, if he would take the tongs and haul out the cakes himself,
as we sawed them. It would not do to stop the saws that day, even for a
moment.
Rufus had on an old blue army overcoat, the cape of which was turned up
over his head and ears, and a red woolen "comforter" round his neck. He
wore long-legged, stiff cowhide boots, with his trousers tucked into the
tops.
Addison, Thomas and I were sawing, with our backs turned to Rufus and to
the wind, and Rufus was trying to haul out a cake of ice, when we heard
a clatter and a muffled shout. Rufus had slipped in! We looked round
just in time to see him go down into that black, icy water.
Addison let go the saw and sprang for one of the ice-hooks. I did the
same. The hook I grabbed was frozen down; but Addison got his free, and
stuck it into Rufus's blue overcoat. It tore out, and down Rufus went
again, head and ears under. His head, in fact, slid beneath the edge of
the ice, but his back popped up.
Addison struck again with the hook--struck harder. He hooked it through
all Rufus's clothes, and took a piece of his skin. It held that time,
and we hauled him out.
He lay quite inert on the ice, choking and coughing.
"Get up! Get up!" we shouted to him. "Get up and run, or you'll freeze!"
He tried to rise, but failed to regain his feet, and collapsed.
Thereupon Addison and Thomas laid hold of him, and lifted him to his
feet by main strength.
"Now run!" they cried. "Run before your clothes freeze stiff!" The man
seemed lethargic--I suppose from the deadly chill. He made an effort to
move his feet, as they bade him, but fell flat again; and by that time
his clothes were stiffening.
"He will freeze to death!" Addison cried. "We must put him on his sled
and get him home!"
Thereupon we picked him up like a log of wood, and laid him on his
horse-sled.
"But he will freeze before we can get this old lame horse home with
him!" exclaimed Thomas. "Better take him to our camp over there."
Addison thought so, too, and seizing the reins and whip, started for the
shore. The old horse was so chilled that we could hardly get him to
hobble; but we did not spare the whip.
From the shore we had still fifteen or twenty rods to go, in order to
reach the camp back in the woods. Rufus's clothes were frozen as stiff
as boards; apparently he could not move. We feared that the man would
die on our hands.
We snatched off one of the side boards of his sled, laid him on it, and,
taking it up like a stretcher, started to carry him up through the woods
to the camp.
By that time his long overcoat and all the rest of his clothes were
frozen so stiff and hard that he rolled round more like a log than a
human body.
The path was rough and snowy. In our haste we stumbled, and dropped him
several times, but we rolled him on the board again, rushed on, and at
last got him inside the camp. Our morning fire had gone out. Halse
kindled it again, while Addison, Thomas and I tried to get off the
frozen overcoat and long cowhide boots.
The coat was simply a sheet of ice; we could do nothing with it. At last
we took our knives and cut it down the back, and after cutting open both
sleeves, managed to peel it off. We had to cut open his boots in the
same way. His under-coat and all his clothes were frozen. There appeared
to be little warmth left in him; he was speechless.
But just then we heard some one coming in through the outside camp. It
was the old Squire.
Our farmhouse, on the higher ground to the northwest, afforded a view of
the lake; and the old gentleman had been keeping an eye on what went on
down there, for he was quite far-sighted. He saw Sylvester arrive with
his team, and a few minutes later saw us start for the shore, lashing
the horse. He knew that something had gone wrong, and hitching up old
Sol, he had driven down in haste.
"Hot water, quick!" he said. "Make some hot coffee!" And seizing a
towel, he gave Sylvester such a rubbing as it is safe to say he had
never undergone before.
Gradually signs of life and color appeared. The man began to speak,
although rather thickly.
By this time the little camp was like an oven; but the old Squire kept
up the friction. We gave Rufus two or three cups of hot coffee, and in
the course of an hour he was quite himself again.
We kept him at the camp until the afternoon, however, and then started
him home, wrapped in a horse-blanket instead of his army overcoat. He
was none the worse for his misadventure, although he declared we tore
off two inches of his skin!
On Sunday the weather began to moderate, and the last four days of our
ice-cutting were much more comfortable. It had been a severe ordeal,
however; the eighty-one dollars that we collected for it were but scanty
recompense for the misery we had endured.
CHAPTER III
A BEAR'S "PIPE" IN WINTER
After ice-cutting came wood-cutting. It was now the latter part of
January with weather still unusually cold. There were about three feet
of snow on the ground, crusted over from a thaw which had occurred
during the first of the month. In those days we burned from forty to
fifty cords of wood in a year.
There was a wood-lot of a hundred acres along the brook on the east side
of the farm, and other forest lots to the north of it. Only the best
old-growth maple, birch and beech were cut for fuel--great trees two and
three feet in diameter.
The trunks were cut into eight-foot lengths, rolled on the ox-sleds with
levers, and then hauled home to the yard in front of the wood-house,
where they lay in four huge piles till March, when all hands turned to,
with axes and saws, and worked it up.
It was zero weather that week, but bright and clear, with spicules of
frost glistening on every twig; and I recollect how sharply the tree
trunks snapped--those frost snaps which make "shaky" lumber in Maine.
Addison, Halstead and I, with one of the old Squire's hired men, Asa
Doane, went to the wood-lot at eight o'clock that morning and chopped
smartly till near eleven. Indeed, we were obliged to work fast to keep
warm.
Addison and I then stuck our axes in a log and went on the snow crust up
to the foot of a mountain, about half a mile distant, where the hardwood
growth gave place to spruce. We wanted to dig a pocketful of spruce gum.
For several days Ellen and Theodora had been asking us to get them some
nice "purple" gum.
As we were going from one spruce to another, Addison stopped suddenly
and pointed to a little round hole with hard ice about it, near a large,
overhanging rock across which a tree had fallen. "Sh!" he exclaimed. "I
believe that's a bear's breath-hole!"
We reconnoitered the place at a safe distance. "That may be Old Three
Paws himself," Addison said. "If it is, we must put an end to him." For
"Old Three Paws" was a bear that had given trouble in the sheep pastures
for years.
After a good look all round, we went home to dinner, and at table talked
it over. The old Squire was a little incredulous, but admitted that
there might be a bear there. "I will tell you how you can find out," he
said. "Take a small looking-glass with you and hold it to the hole. If
there is a bear down there, you will see just a little film of moisture
on the glass from his breath."
We loaded two guns with buckshot. Our plan was to wake the bear up, and
shoot him when he broke out through the snow. Bears killed a good many
sheep at that time; the farmers did not regard them as desirable
neighbors.
The ruse which Addison hit on for waking the bear was to blow black
pepper down the hole through a hollow sunflower stalk. He had an idea
that this would set the bear sneezing. In view of what happened, I laugh
now when I remember our plans for waking that bear.
Directly after dinner we set off for the wood-lot with our guns and
pepper. Cold as it was, Ellen and Theodora went with us, intending to
stand at a very safe distance. Even grandmother Ruth would have gone, if
it had not been quite so cold and snowy. Although minus one foot, Old
Three Paws was known to be a savage bear, that had had more than one
encounter with mankind.
While the rest stood back, Addison approached on tiptoe with the
looking-glass, and held it to the hole for some moments. Then he
examined it and looked back at us, nodding. There was moisture on it.
The girls climbed upon a large rock among the spruces. The old Squire,
with one of the guns, took up a position beside a tree about fifty feet
from the "hole." He posted Asa, who was a pretty good shot, beside
another tree not far away. Halstead and I had to content ourselves with
axes for weapons, and kept pretty well to the rear.
Addison was now getting his pepper ready. Expectancy ran high when at
last he blew it down the hole and rushed back. We had little doubt that
an angry bear would break out, sneezing and growling.
But nothing of the sort occurred. Some minutes passed. Addison could not
even hear the faintest sneeze from below. He tiptoed up and blew in more
pepper.
No response.
Cutting a pole, Addison then belabored the snow crust about the hole
with resounding whacks--still with no result.
After this we approached less cautiously. Asa broke up the snow about
the hole and cleared it away, uncovering a considerable cavity which
extended back under the partially raised root of the fallen tree.
Halstead brought a shovel from the wood-piles; and Addison and Asa cut
away the roots of the old tree, and cleared out the frozen turf and
leaves to a depth of four or five feet, gradually working down where
they could look back beneath the root. We had begun to doubt whether we
would find anything there larger than a woodchuck.
At last Addison got down on hands and knees, crept in under the root,
and lighted several matches.
"There's something back in there," he said. "Looks black, but I cannot
see that it moves."
Asa crawled in and struck a match or two, then backed out. "I believe
it's a bear!" he exclaimed, and he wanted to creep in with a gun and
fire; but the old Squire advised against that on account of the heavy
charge in so confined a space.
Addison had been peeling dry bark from a birch, and crawling in again,
lighted a roll of it. The smoke drove him out, but he emerged in
excitement. "Bears!" he cried. "Two bears in there! I saw them!"
Asa took a pole and poked the bears cautiously. "Dead, I guess," said
he, at last. "They don't move."
Addison crept in again, and actually passed his hand over the bears,
then backed out, laughing. "No, they are not dead!" he exclaimed. "They
are warm. But they are awfully sound asleep."
"Let's haul them out!" cried Asa; and they now sent me to the wood-sled
for two or three small trace-chains. Asa then crawled in and slipped a
chain about the body of one of the bears. The other two chains were
hooked on; and then they slowly hauled the bear out, the old Squire
standing by with gun cocked--for we expected every moment that the
animal would wake.
But even when out on the snow crust the creature lay as inert as a dead
bear. It was small. "Only a yearling," the old Squire said. None of us
were now much afraid of them, and the other one was drawn out in the
same way. Their hair was glossy and as black as jet. Possibly they would
have weighed seventy-five pounds each. Evidently they were young bears
that had never been separated, and that accounted for their denning up
together; old bears rarely do this.
We put them on the wood-sled and hauled them home. They lay in a pile of
hay on the stable floor all night, without a sign of waking up; and the
next morning we hauled them to the cellar of the west barn. Under this
barn, which was used mainly for sheep and young cattle, there were
several pigsties, now empty. The dormant young bears were rolled into
one of these sties and the sty filled with dry leaves, such as we used
for bedding in the barns.
About a fortnight afterward a young doctor named Truman, from the
village, desired very much to see the bears in their winter sleep. He
got into the sty, uncovered them, and repeatedly pricked one of them
with a needle, or penknife, without fairly waking it. But salts of
ammonia, held to the nostrils of the other one, produced an unexpected
result. The creature struck out spasmodically with one paw and rolled
suddenly over. Doctor Truman jumped out of the sty quite as suddenly.
"He's alive, all right," said the doctor.
The bears were not disturbed again, and remained there so quietly that
we nearly forgot them. It was now the second week of March, and up to
this time the weather had continued cold; but a thaw set in, with rain
for two or three days, the temperature rising to sixty degrees, and even
higher.
On the third night of the thaw, or rather, in the early morning, a great
commotion broke out at the west barn. It waked the girls first, their
room being on that side of the farmhouse. At about two o'clock in the
morning Ellen came to our door to rouse Addison and me.
"There's a fearful racket up at the west barn," she said, in low tones.
"You had better see what's wrong."
Addison and I threw on our clothes, went down quietly, so as not to
disturb the old Squire, and were getting our lanterns ready, when he
came from his room; for he, too, had heard the disturbance. We then
sallied forth and approached the end door of the barn. Inside, the young
cattle were bellowing and bawling. Below, in the barn cellar, sheep were
bleating, and a shoat was adding its raucous voice to the uproar. Above
it all, however, we could hear eight old turkeys and a peacock that were
wintering in the west barn, "quitting" and "quuttering" aloft, where
they roosted on the high beams.
The young cattle, seventeen head, were tied facing the barn floor. All
of them were on their feet, pulling back at their stanchions in a great
state of alarm. But the real trouble seemed now to be aloft in the dark
roof of the barn, among the turkeys. Addison held up the lantern.
Nothing could be seen so far up there in the dark, but feathers came
fluttering down, and the old peacock was squalling, "Tap-pee-yaw!" over
and over.
We fixed a lantern on the end of a long bean-pole and thrust it high up.
Its light revealed those two young bears on one of the high beams of the
barn!
One of them had the head of a turkey in his mouth, and was apparently
trying to bolt it; and we discovered later that they had had trouble
with the shoat down in the cellar. The shoat was somewhat scratched, but
had stood them off.
Several of the sheep had their fleeces torn, particularly one old
Cotswold ram, which also had a bleeding nose. Evidently the barn had
been the scene of a protracted fracas. The bears must have climbed for
the turkeys as a last resort. How they reached the beam we did not know,
unless by swarming up one of the bare posts of the barn.
To drive them down, Addison climbed on a scaffold and thrust the lantern
close up to the one with the turkey's head in its mouth. The bear struck
at the lantern with one paw, started back, but lost its claw-hold on the
beam and fell, turkey and all, eighteen or twenty feet to the barn
floor.
The old Squire and I sprang aside in great haste; but so far as we could
see, the bear never stirred after it struck the floor. Either the fall
broke its neck, or else the turkey's head choked it to death.
When menaced with the lantern, the other bear slid down one of the barn
posts, tail first, and was driven into a horse stall at the far end of
the barn. There we succeeded in shutting it up, and in the morning gave
it a breakfast of corn-meal dough and apples, which it devoured with
great avidity.
We had no particular use for a bear, and a week later sold this
youngster to Doctor Truman. He soon tired of his new pet, however, and
parted with it to a friend who kept a summer hotel in the White
Mountains.
The other bear--the one that fell from the high beam--had the handsomest
black, glossy pelt I have ever seen. Grandmother Ruth insisted on having
it tanned and made into a rug. She declared jocosely that it should be
given to the first one of our girls who married. Ellen finally fell heir
to it, and carried it with her to Dakota.
CHAPTER IV
WHITE MONKEY WEEK
Cutting and drawing the year's supply of firewood to the door occupied
us for a week; and following this we boys had planned to take matters
easy awhile, for the old Squire was to be away from home. Asa Doane had
left us, too, for a visit to his folks. As it chanced, however, a
strenuous emergency arose.
A year previously the old Squire had made an agreement with a New York
factory, to furnish dowels and strips of clear white birch wood, for
piano keys and _passementerie_.
At that time _passementerie_ was coming into use for ladies' dresses.
The fine white-birch dowels were first turned round on small lathes and
afterwards into little bugle and bottle-shaped ornaments, then dyed a
glistening black and strung on linen threads.
On our own forest lots we had no birch which quite met the requirements.
But another lumberman, an acquaintance of the old Squire's, named John
Lurvey (a brother of old Zachary Lurvey), who owned lots north of ours,
had just what we needed to fill the order.
Lumbermen are often "neighborly" with each other in such matters, and
with John Lurvey the old Squire made a kind of running contract for
three hundred cords of white-birch "bolts" from a lakeside lot. Each one
made a memorandum of the agreement in his pocket note-book; and as each
trusted the other, nothing more exact or formal was thought necessary.
The white birch was known to be valuable lumber. We were to pay two
thousand dollars for it on the stump,--one thousand down,--and have two
"winters" in which to get it off and pay the balance of the money. And
here it may be said that in the Maine woods a winter is supposed to mean
the snowy season from November till April.
Meanwhile other ventures were pressing. In company with a Canadian
partner, the old Squire was then getting spruce lumber down the St.
Maurice River at Three Rivers, in the Province of Quebec. This New York
birch contract was deferred a year, the plan being finally to get off
the birch in March of the second winter, when the crews and teams from
two other lumber-camps could conveniently be sent to the lake, and make
a quick job of it.
But in December of that second winter John Lurvey died suddenly of
pneumonia. His property passed into the hands of his wife, who was by no
means easy-going. She overhauled this note-book agreement, took legal
advice of a sharp lawyer, and on February 21st sent us legal
notification that the agreement would expire on February 28th, the last
day of winter, according to the calendar. The notification also demanded
payment of the second thousand dollars. Her scheme, of course, was to
get the money in full and cut us off, in default, from removing the
birch lumber from the lot. The old Squire himself had gone to Canada.
The notification came by letter, and as usual when the old Squire was
away, grandmother Ruth opened his mail to see what demanded our
attention. We were all in the sitting-room, except Halstead, who was
away that evening.
"What can this mean?" grandmother suddenly exclaimed, and handed the
letter to Addison. He saw through it instantly, and jumped up in
excitement.
"We're trapped!" he cried. "If we don't get that birch off next week we
shall lose two thousand dollars!"
Grandmother was dismayed. "Oh, that wicked woman!" she cried. "Why,
winter always means through sledding!"
"I'm afraid not, in law," said Addison, looking puzzled. "Winter ends
either the first or the twenty-first of March. I think a good argument
could be made in court for the twenty-first. But she may be right, and
it's too late to take chances. The only thing to do is to get that
lumber off right away."
Addison and I went out to the stable to talk the matter over; we did not
want to excite grandmother any further. At best, she had a good deal to
worry her that winter.
"Now what can we do?" Addison exclaimed. Five or six days would be
required to get the old Squire home from Canada.
"And what could he do after he got here?" Addison asked. "The teams and
the choppers are all off at the lumber-camps."
"Let's take our axes and go up there and cut what birch we can next
week," said I, in desperation.
"Oh, we boys couldn't do much alone in so short a time," replied
Addison.
Still, we could think of nothing else; and with the loss of two thousand
dollars staring us in the face, we began planning desperately how much
of that birch we could save in a week's time. In fact, we scarcely slept
at all that night, and early the next morning started out to rally what
help we could.
Willis Murch and Thomas Edwards volunteered to work for us, and take
each a yoke of oxen. After much persuasion our neighbor Sylvester
promised to go with a team, and to take his son Rufus, Jr. Going on to
the post-office at the Corners, we succeeded in hiring two other young
men.
But even with the help of these men we could account for scarcely a
seventh part of the contract, since one chopper could cut not more than
a cord and a half of birch bolts in a day; and moreover, the bolts had
to be removed from the lot.
But as we rushed round that forenoon, it occurred to Addison to hire a
horse-power and circular saw that was owned by a man named Morefield,
who lived near the wood-sheds of the railway-station, six miles from the
old Squire's. It was a rig used for sawing wood for the locomotives.
Hurrying home, we hitched up, drove to the station, and succeeded in
engaging Morefield and his saw, with two spans of heavy horses.
But other cares had now loomed up, not the least among them being the
problem of feeding our hastily collected crew of helpers and their teams
sixteen miles off in the woods. Just across the lake from the lot where
the birch grew there was a lumber-camp where we could set up a stove and
do our cooking; and during the afternoon we packed up supplies of pork,
beans and corned beef, while in the house grandmother and the girls were
baking bread. I had also to go to the mill, to get corn ground for the
teams.
Theodora and Ellen were eager to go and do the cooking at the camp; but
grandmother knew that an older woman of greater experience was needed in
such an emergency, and had that morning sent urgent word to Olive
Witham,--"Aunt Olive," as we called her,--who was always our mainstay in
times of trouble at the old farm.
She was about fifty-five years old, tall, austere, not wholly
attractive, but of upright character and undaunted courage.
By nine that evening everything was ready for a start; and sunrise the
next morning saw us on the way up to the birch lot, Aunt Olive riding in
the "horse-power" on a sled, which bore also a firkin of butter, a
cheese, a four-gallon can of milk, a bag of bread and a large basket of
eggs.
One team did not get off so early, neighbor Sylvester's. He was to start
two hours later and draw up to camp the heaviest part of our supplies,
consisting of half a barrel of pork, two bushels of potatoes, a peck of
dry beans, a hundredweight of corned beef and two gallons of molasses.
Twelve miles of our way that morning was by a trodden winter road, but
the last four miles, after crossing Lurvey's Stream, had to be broken
through three feet of snow in the woods, giving us four hours of
tiresome tramping.
We reached the lot at one o'clock, and during the afternoon set up the
horse-power on the lake shore, at the foot of the slope where the white
birch grew. We also contrived a log slide, or slip, down which the long
birch trunks could be slid to the saw and cut up into four-foot bolts.
For our plan now was to fell the trees and "twitch" them down-hill with
teams to the head of this slip. By rolling the bolts, as they fell from
the saw, down an incline and out on the ice of the lake, we would remove
them from Mrs. Lurvey's land, and thereby comply with the letter of the
law, by aid of which she was endeavoring to rob us and escheat our
rights to the birch.
There were ten of us. Each knew what was at stake, and all worked with
such good-will that by five o'clock we had the saw running. The white
birches there were from a foot up to twenty-two inches in diameter,
having long, straight trunks, clear of limbs from thirty to forty feet
in length. These clear trunks only were used for bolts.
Plying their axes, Halstead, Addison, Thomas and Willis felled upward of
forty trees that night, and these were all sawn by dark. On an average,
five trees were required for a cord of bolts; but with sharp axes such
white-birch trees can be felled fast. Morefield tended the saw and drove
the horses in the horse-power; the rest of us were kept busy sliding the
birch trunks down the slip to the saw, and rolling away the bolts.
By dark we had made a beginning of our hard week's task, and in the
gathering dusk plodded across the lake to the old lumber-camp, expecting
to find Aunt Olive smiling and supper ready.
But here disappointment awaited us. Sylvester, with the sled-load of
supplies, had not come, did not arrive, in fact, till half an hour
later, and then with his oxen only. Disaster had befallen him on the
way. While crossing Lurvey's Stream, the team had broken through the ice
where the current beneath was swift. He had saved the oxen; but the
sled, with our beef pork, beans and potatoes, had been drawn under and
carried away, he knew not how far, under the ice.
A stare of dismay from the entire hungry party followed this
announcement. It looked like no supper--after a hard day's work! Worse
still, to Addison and myself it looked like the crippling of our whole
program for the next five days; for a lumber crew is much like an army;
it lives and works only by virtue of its commissariat.
But now Aunt Olive rose to the emergency. "Don't you be discouraged,
boys!" she exclaimed. "Give me twenty minutes, and you shall have a
supper fit for a king. You shall have _white monkey_ on toast! Toast
thirty or forty slices of this bread, boys," she added, laughing
cheerily. "Toast it good and brown, while I dress the monkey!"
Addison, Thomas and I began toasting bread over the hot stove, but kept
a curious eye out for that "white monkey."
Of course it was figurative monkey. Aunt Olive put six quarts of milk in
a kettle on the stove, and as it warmed, thickened it slightly with
about a pint of corn-meal.
As it grew hotter, she melted into it a square of butter about half the
size of a brick, then chipped up fine as much as a pound of cheese, and
added that slowly, so as to dissolve it.
Last, she rapidly broke, beat and added a dozen eggs, then finished off
with salt and a tiny bit of Cayenne pepper, well stirred in.
For five minutes longer she allowed the kettleful to simmer on the
stove, while we buttered three huge stacks of toast.
The monkey was then ready. All hands gathered round with their plates,
and in turn had four slices of toast, one after another, each slice with
a generous ladleful of white monkey poured over it.
It was delicious, very satisfying, too, and gave one the sense of being
well fed, since it contained all the ingredients of substantial food. As
made by Aunt Olive, this white monkey had the consistency of moderately
thick cream. It slightly resembled Welsh rabbit, but we found it was
much more palatable and whole-some, having more milk and egg in it, and
far less cheese.
We liked it so well that we all wanted it for breakfast the next
morning--and that was fortunate, since we had little else, and were
exceedingly loath to lose a day's time sending teams down home, or
elsewhere, for more meat, beans and potatoes.
There were several families of French-Canadians living at clearings on
Lurvey's Stream, three miles below the lake; and since I was the
youngest and least efficient axman of the party, they sent me down there
every afternoon to buy milk and eggs, for more white monkey. Of cheese
and butter we had a sufficient supply; and the yellow corn-meal which we
had brought for the teams furnished sheetful after sheetful of
johnny-cake, which Aunt Olive split, toasted, and buttered well, as a
groundwork for the white monkey.
And for five days we ate it as we toiled twelve hours to the day,
chopping, hauling and sawing birch!
We had a slight change of diet on the fourth day, when Aunt Olive cooked
two old roosters and a chicken, which I had coaxed away from the
reluctant French settlers down the stream.
But it was chiefly white monkey every day; and the amount of work which
we did on it was a tribute to Aunt Olive's resourcefulness. The older
men of the party declared that they had never slept so well as after
those evening meals of white monkey on johnny-cake toast. Beyond doubt,
it was much better for us than heavier meals of meat and beans after
days of hard labor.
From half an hour before sunrise till an hour after sunset, during those
entire five days, the tall white birches fell fast, the saw hummed, and
the bolts went rolling out on the ice-clad lake.
I never saw a crew work with such good-will or felt such enthusiasm
myself as during those five days. We had the exhilarating sensation that
we were beating a malicious enemy. Every little while a long, cheery
whoop of exultation would be raised and go echoing across the lake; and
that last day of February we worked by the light of little bonfires of
birch bark till near midnight.
Then we stopped--to clear the law. And I may state here, although it
must sound like a large story, that during those five working days the
ten of us felled, sawed and rolled out on the ice two hundred and
eighty-six cords of white-birch bolts. Of course it was the saw and the
two relieving spans of horses which did the greater part of the work,
the four axmen doing little more than fell the tall birch-trees.
The next day, after a final breakfast of white monkey, we went home
triumphant, leaving the bolts on the ice for the time being. All were
tired, but in high spirits, for victory was ours.
Two days later the old Squire came home from Three Rivers, entirely
unaware of what had occurred, having it now in mind to organize and
begin what he supposed would be a month's work up at the birch lot for
the choppers and teams from the two logging-camps farther north.
Neither grandmother Ruth nor the rest of us could resist having a little
fun with him. After supper, when we had gathered in the sitting-room,
grandmother quietly handed him Mrs. Lurvey's letter, with the
notification about the birch.
"This came while you were away, Joseph," she said to him, while the rest
of us, sitting very still, looked on, keenly interested to see how he
would take it.
The old Squire unfolded the letter and began reading it, then started
suddenly, and for some moments sat very still, pondering the
notification. "This bids fair to be a serious matter for us," he said,
at last. "We have lost that birch contract, I fear, and the money that
went into it.
"And I have only my own carelessness to thank for it," he added, looking
distressed.
Theodora could not stand that another minute. She stole round behind the
old Squire's chair, put her arms about his neck, and whispered something
in his ear.
"What!" he exclaimed, incredulously.
"Yes!" she cried to him.
"Impossible, child!" said he.
"No, it isn't!" shouted Addison. "We've got that birch off, sir. It is
all sawn up in bolts and out on the lake!"
"What, in a week?" exclaimed the old Squire.
"All in five days, sir!" cried Addison and I.
The old gentleman sat looking at us in blank surprise. He was an
experienced lumberman, and knew exactly what such a statement as ours
implied.
"Not three hundred cords?" said he, gravely.
"Close on to that, sir!" cried Addison.
Thereupon we all began to tell him about it at once. None of us could
remain quiet. But it was not till we had related the whole story, and
told him who had helped us, along with Addison's scheme of hiring the
horse-power and saw, that he really believed it. He sprang up, walked
twice across the sitting-room, then stopped short and looked at us.
"Boys, I'm proud of you!" he exclaimed. "Proud of you! I couldn't have
done as well myself."
"Yes, Joseph, they're chips off the old block!" grandmother chimed in.
"And we've beaten that wicked woman!"
Mrs. Lurvey, as I may add here, was far from sharing in our exultation.
She was a person of violent temper. It was said that she shook with rage
when she heard what we boys had done. But her lawyer advised her to keep
quiet.
During the next two weeks the birch bolts were drawn to our mill, four
miles down Lurvey's Stream, and sawn into thin strips and dowels, then
shipped in bundles, by rail and schooner from Portland, to New York; and
the contract netted the old Squire about twenty-five hundred dollars
above the cost of the birch.
But as I look back on it, I am inclined to think that Aunt Olive was the
real heroine of that strenuous week.
NOTE. The following recipe will make a sufficient quantity
of "white monkey" for three persons. Put over the fire one pint of
new milk in a double boiler. As soon as the milk is warm, stir in
one teaspoonful of flour mixed with two tablespoonfuls of cold
water. As the milk gets hotter, add slowly, so as to dissolve it,
two ounces of cheese, grated or chipped fine. Then add one ounce of
butter, a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of Cayenne pepper, and one
egg, well beaten and mixed with two tablespoonfuls of cold milk or
water. Let the mixture simmer five minutes, then serve hot on wheat
bread or brown-bread toast, well browned and buttered.
CHAPTER V
WHEN OLD ZACK WENT TO SCHOOL
This same week, I think, there was a commotion throughout the town on
account of exciting incidents in what was known as the "Mills" school
district, four miles from the old Squire's, where a "pupil" nearly sixty
years old was bent on attending school--contrary to law!
For ten or fifteen years Zachary Lurvey had been the old Squire's rival
in the lumber business. We had had more than one distracting contention
with him. Yet we could not but feel a certain sympathy for him when, at
the age of fifty-eight, he set out to get an education.
Old Zack would never tell any one where he came from, though there was a
rumor that he hailed originally from Petitcodiac, New Brunswick. When,
as a boy of about twenty, he had first appeared in our vicinity, he
could neither read nor write; apparently he had never seen a
schoolhouse. He did not even know there was such a place as Boston, or
New York, and had never heard of George Washington!
But he had settled and gone to work at the place that was afterwards
known as Lurvey's Mills; and he soon began to prosper, for he was
possessed of keen mother wit and had energy and resolution enough for
half a dozen ordinary men.
For years and years in all his many business transactions he had to make
a mark for his signature; and he kept all his accounts on the attic
floor of his house with beans and kernels of corn, even after they
represented thousands of dollars. Then at last a disaster befell him;
his house burned while he was away; and from the confusion that resulted
the disadvantages of bookkeeping in cereals was so forcibly borne in
upon him that he suddenly resolved to learn to read, write and reckon.
On the first day of the following winter term he appeared at the
district schoolhouse with a primer, a spelling book, a Greenleaf's
Arithmetic, a copy book, a pen and an ink bottle.
The schoolmaster was a young sophomore from Colby College named Marcus
Cobb, a stranger in the place. When he entered the schoolhouse that
morning he was visibly astonished to see a large, bony,
formidable-looking old man sitting there among the children.
"Don't ye be scairt of me, young feller," old Zack said to him. "I guess
ye can teach me, for I don't know my letters yit!"
Master Cobb called the school to order and proceeded to ask the names
and ages of his pupils. When Zack's turn came, the old fellow replied
promptly:
"Zack Lurvey, fifty-eight years, five months and eighteen days."
"Zack?" the master queried in some perplexity. "Does that stand for
Zachary? How do you spell it?"
"I never spelled it," old Zack replied with a grin. "I'm here to larn
how. Fact is, I'm jest a leetle backward."
The young master began to realize that he was in for something
extraordinary. In truth, he had the time of his life there that winter.
Not that old Zack misbehaved; on the contrary, he was a model of
studiousness and was very anxious to learn. But education went hard with
him at first; he was more than a week in learning his letters and sat by
the hour, making them on a slate, muttering them aloud, sometimes
vehemently, with painful groans. M and W gave him constant trouble; and
so did B and R. He grew so wrathful over his mistakes at times that he
thumped the desk with his fist, and once he hurled his primer at the
stove.
"Why did they make the measly little things look so much alike!" he
cried.
He wished to skip the letters altogether and to learn to read by the
looks of the words; but the master assured him that he must learn the
alphabet first if he wished to learn to write later, and finally he
prevailed with the stubborn old man.
"Well, I do want to larn," old Zack replied. "I'm goin' the whole hog,
ef it kills me!"
And apparently it did pretty near kill him; at any rate he perspired
over his work and at times was near shedding tears.
Certain of the letters he drew on paper with a lead pencil and pasted on
the back of his hands, so as to keep them in sight. One day he tore the
alphabet out of his primer and put it into the crown of his cap--"to see
ef it wouldn't soak in," he said. When, after a hard struggle, he was
able to get three letters together and spell cat, c-a-t, he was so much
pleased that he clapped his hands and shouted, "Scat!" at the top of his
voice.
The effect of such performances on a roomful of small boys and girls was
not conducive to good order. It was only with difficulty that the young
master could hear lessons or induce his pupils to study. Old Zack was
the center of attraction for every juvenile eye.
It was when the old fellow first began to write his name, or try to, in
his copy book, that he caused the greatest commotion. Only with the most
painful efforts did his wholly untrained fingers trace the copy that the
master had set. His mouth, too, followed the struggles of his fingers;
and the facial grimaces that resulted set the school into a gale of
laughter. In fact, the master--a good deal amused himself--was wholly
unable to calm the room so long as old Zack continued his exercise in
writing.
The children of course carried home accounts of what went on at school;
and certain of the parents complained to the school agent that their
children were not learning properly. The complaints continued, and
finally the agent--his name was Moss--visited the schoolroom and
informed old Zack that he must leave.
"I don't think you have any right to be here," Moss said to him. "And
you're giving trouble; you raise such a disturbance that the children
can't attend to their studies."
Old Zack appealed to Master Cobb, "Have I broken any of your rules?" he
asked. The master could not say that he had, intentionally.
"Haven't I studied?" old Zack asked.
"You certainly have," the master admitted, laughing.
But the school agent was firm. "You'll have to leave!" he exclaimed.
"You're too old and too big to come here!"
"All the same, I'm comin' here," said old Zack.
"We'll see about that!" cried Moss angrily. "The law is on my side!"
That was the beginning of what is still remembered as "the war at the
Mills schoolhouse." The agent appealed to the school board of the town,
which consisted of three members,--two clergymen and a lawyer,--and the
following day the board appeared at the schoolhouse. After conferring
with the master, they proceeded formally to expel old Zack Lurvey from
school.
Old Zack, however, hotly defended his right to get an education, and a
wordy combat ensued.
"You're too old to draw school money," the lawyer informed him. "No
money comes to you for schooling after you are twenty-one, and you look
to be three times as old as that!"
Thereupon old Zack drew out his pocketbook and laid down twenty dollars.
"There is your money," said he. "I can pay my way."
"But you are too old to attend a district school," the lawyer insisted.
"You can't go after you are twenty-one."
"But I have never been," old Zack argued. "I never used up my right to
go. I oughter have it now!"
"That isn't the point," declared the lawyer. "You're too old to go.
Besides, we are informed that you are keeping the lawful pupils from
properly attending to their studies. You must pick up your books and
leave the schoolhouse."
Old Zack eyed him in silence. "I'm goin' to school, and I'm goin' here,"
he said at last.
That was defiance of the board's authority, and the lawyer--a young
man--threw off his coat and tried to eject the unruly pupil from the
room; but to his chagrin he was himself ejected, with considerable
damage to his legal raiment. Returning from the door, old Zack offered
opportunity for battle to the reverend gentlemen--which they prudently
declined. The lawyer re-entered, covered with snow, for old Zack had
dropped him into a drift outside.
Summoning his two colleagues and the schoolmaster to assist him in
sustaining the constituted authority, the lawyer once more advanced upon
old Zack, who retreated to the far corner of the room and bade them come
on.
Many of the smaller pupils were now crying from fright; and the two
clergymen, probably feeling that the proceedings had become scandalous,
persuaded their colleague to cease hostilities; and in the end the board
contented itself with putting a formal order of expulsion into writing.
School was then dismissed for that afternoon, and they all went away,
leaving old Zack backed into the corner of the room. But, regardless of
his "expulsion," the next morning he came to school again and resumed
his arduous studies.
The story had gone abroad, and the whole community was waiting to see
what would follow. The school board appealed to the sheriff, who offered
to arrest old Zack if the board would provide him with a warrant. It
seemed simple enough, at first, to draw a warrant for old Zack's arrest,
but legal difficulties arose. He could not well be taken for assault,
for it was the lawyer that had attacked him; or for wanton mischief, for
his intent in going to school was not mischievous; or yet for trespass,
for he had offered to pay for his schooling.
There was no doubt that on account of his age he had no business in the
school and that the board had the right to refuse him schooling; yet it
was not easy to word his offense in such a way that it constituted a
misdemeanor that could properly be stated in a warrant for his arrest.
Several warrants were drawn, all of which, on the ground that they were
legally dubious, the resident justice of the peace refused to sign.
"I am not going to get the town mixed up in a lawsuit for damages," said
the justice. "Lurvey is a doughty fighter at law, as well as physically,
and he has got the money to fight with."
The proceedings hung fire for a week or more. The school board sent an
order to the master not to hear old Zack's lessons or to give him any
instructions whatever. But the old fellow came to school just the same,
and poor Cobb had to get along with him as best he could. The school
board was not eager again to try putting him out by force, and it seemed
that nothing less than the state militia could oust him from the
schoolhouse; and that would need an order from the governor of the
state! On the whole, public opinion rather favored his being allowed to
pay his tuition and to go to school if he felt the need of it.
At any rate, he went to school there all winter and made remarkable
progress. In the course of ten weeks he could read slowly, and he knew
most of the short words in his primer and second reader by sight. Longer
words he would not try to pronounce, but called them, each and all,
"jackass" as fast as he came to them.
In consequence his reading aloud was highly ambiguous. He could write
his name slowly and with many grimaces.
Figures, for some reason, came much easier to him than the alphabet. He
learned the numerals in a few days, and by the fifth or sixth week of
school he could add and subtract on his slate. But the multiplication
table gave him serious trouble. The only way he succeeded in learning it
at all was by singing it. After he began to do sums in multiplication on
his slate, he was likely to burst forth singing in school hours:
"Seven times eight are fifty-six
--and carry five.
Seven times nine are sixty-three
--and carry seven.
No, no, no, no, carry six!"
"But, Mr. Lurvey, you must keep quiet in school!" the afflicted master
remonstrated for the hundredth time. "No one else can study."
"But I can't!" old Zack would reply. "'Twouldn't come to me 'less I sung
it!"
Toward the last weeks of the term he was able to multiply with
considerable accuracy and to divide in short division. Long division he
did not attempt, but he rapidly learned to cast interest at six per
cent. He had had a way of arriving at that with beans, before he came to
school; and no one had ever succeeded in cheating him. He knew about
interest money, he said, by "sense of feeling."
Grammar he saw no use for, and did not bother himself with it; but,
curiously enough, he was delighted with geography and toward the end of
the term bought a copy of Cornell's text-book, which was then used in
Maine schools.
What most interested him was to trace rivers on the maps and to learn
their names. Cities he cared nothing for; but he loved to learn about
the mountain ranges where pine and spruce grew.
"What places them would be for sawmills!" he exclaimed.
Much as he liked his new geography, however, he had grown violently
angry over the first lesson and declared with strong language that it
was all a lie! The master had read aloud to him the first lesson, which
describes the earth as one of the planets that revolve round the sun,
and which says that it is a globe or sphere, turning on its axis once in
twenty-four hours and so causing day and night.
Old Zack listened incredulously. "I don't believe a word of that!" he
declared flatly.
The master labored with him for some time, trying to convince him that
the earth is round and moves, but it was quite in vain.
"No such thing!" old Zack exclaimed. "I know better! That's the biggest
lie that ever was told!"
He quite took it to heart and continued talking about it after school.
He really seemed to believe that a great and dangerous delusion had gone
abroad.
"It's wrong," he said, "puttin' sich stuff as that into young ones'
heads. It didn't oughter be 'lowed!"
What old Zack was saying about the earth spread abroad and caused a
great deal of amusement. Certain waggish persons began to "josh" him and
others tried to argue with him, but all such attempts merely roused his
native obstinacy. One Sunday evening he gave a somewhat wrong direction
to the weekly prayer meeting by rising to warn the people that their
children were being taught a pack of lies; and such was his vehemence
that the regular Sabbath service resolved itself into a heated debate on
the contour of the earth.
Perhaps old Zack believed that, as a recently educated man, it had
become his duty to set things right in the public mind.
The day before school closed he went to his late antagonist, the lawyer
on the school board, and again offered to pay the twenty dollars for his
tuition. After formally expelling him from school, however, the board
did not dare to accept the money, and old Zack gave it to the
long-suffering Master Cobb.
CHAPTER VI
THE SAD ABUSE OF OLD MEHITABLE
About this time there occurred a domestic episode with which Halstead
was imperishably connected in the family annals.
In those days the family butter was churned in the kitchen by hand
power, and often laboriously, in an upright dasher churn which Addison
and Theodora had christened Old Mehitable. The butter had been a long
time coming one morning; but finally the cream which for an hour or more
had been thick, white and mute beneath the dasher strokes began to swash
in a peculiar way, giving forth after each stroke a sound that they
thought resembled, _Mehitable--Mehitable--Mehitable_.
That old churn was said to be sixty-six years old even then. There was
little to wear out in the old-fashioned dasher churns, made as they were
of well-seasoned pine or spruce, with a "butter cup" turned from a solid
block of birch or maple, and the dasher staff of strong white ash. One
of them sometimes outlasted two generations of housewives; they were
simple, durable and easily kept clean, but hard to operate.
Our acquaintance with Mehitable had begun very soon after our arrival at
the old farm. I remember that one of the first things the old Squire
said to us was, "Boys, now that our family is so largely increased, I
think that you will have to assist your grandmother with the dairy work,
particularly the churning, which comes twice a week."
Tuesdays and Fridays were the churning days, and on those mornings I
remember that we were wont to peer into the kitchen as we came to
breakfast and mutter the unwelcome tidings to one another that old
Mehitable was out there waiting--tidings followed immediately by two
gleeful shouts of, "It isn't my turn!"--and glum looks from the one of
us whose unfortunate lot it was to ply the dasher.
Addison, I recollect, used to take his turn without much demur or
complaint, and he had a knack of getting through with it quickly as a
rule, especially in summer. None of us had much trouble during the warm
season. It was in November, December and January, when cold cream did
not properly "ripen" and the cows were long past their freshening, that
those protracted, wearying sessions at the churn began. Then, indeed,
our annual grievance against grandmother Ruth burst forth afresh. For,
like many another veteran housewife, the dear old lady was very "set" on
having her butter come hard, and hence averse to raising the temperature
of the cream above fifty-six degrees. Often that meant two or three
hours of hard, up-and-down work at the churn.
In cold weather, too, the cream sometimes "swelled" in the churn,
becoming so stiff as to render it nearly impossible to force the dasher
through it; and we would lift the entire churn from the floor in our
efforts to work it up and down. At such times our toes suffered, and we
were wont to call loudly for Theodora and Ellen to come and hold the
churn down, a task that they undertook with misgivings.
What exasperated us always was the superb calmness with which
grandmother Ruth viewed those struggles, going placidly on with her
other duties as if our woes were all in the natural order of the
universe. The butter, eggs and poultry were her perquisites in the
matter of farm products, and we were apt to accuse her of
hard-heartedness in her desire to make them yield income.
Addison, I remember, had a prop that he inserted and drove tight with a
mallet between a beam overhead and the top of the churn when the cream
"swelled"; but neither Halstead nor I was ever able to adjust the prop
skillfully enough to keep it from falling down on our heads.
And we suspected Addison of pouring warm water into the churn when
grandmother's back was turned, though we never actually caught him at
it. Sometimes when he churned, the butter "came" suspiciously soft, to
grandmother's great dissatisfaction, since she had special customers for
her butter at the village and was proud of its uniform quality.
With the kindly aid of the girls, especially Ellen, I usually got
through my turn after a fashion. I was crafty enough to keep their
sympathy and good offices enlisted on my side.
But poor Halstead! There was pretty sure to be a rumpus every time his
turn came. Nature, indeed, had but poorly fitted him for churning, or,
in fact, for any form of domestic labor that required sustained effort
and patience. He had a kind heart; but his temper was stormy. When
informed that his turn had come to churn, he almost always disputed it
hotly. Afterwards he was likely to fume a while and finally go about the
task in so sullen a mood that the girls were much inclined to leave him
to his own devices. Looking back at our youthful days, I see plainly now
that we were often uncharitable toward Halstead. He was, I must admit, a
rather difficult boy to get on with, hasty of temper and inclined to act
recklessly. There were no doubt physical causes for those defects; but
Addison and I thought he might do better if he pleased. He and Addison
were about the same age, and I was two and a half years younger.
Halstead, in fact, was slightly taller than Addison, but not so strong.
His complexion was darker and not so clear; and I imagine that he was
not so healthy. Once, I remember, when Dr. Green from the village was at
the house, he cast a professional eye on us three boys and remarked,
"That dark boy's blood isn't so good as that of the other two," a remark
that Halstead appears to have overheard.
None the less, he was strong enough to work when he chose, though he
complained constantly and shirked when he could.
On the Friday morning referred to, it had come Halstead's turn "to stand
up with old Mehitable," as Ellen used to say; and after the usual heated
argument he had set about it out in the kitchen in a particularly wrathy
mood. It was snowing outside. The old Squire had driven to the village;
and, after doing the barn chores, Addison had retired to the
sitting-room to cipher out two or three hard sums in complex fractions
while I had seized the opportunity to read a book of Indian stories that
Tom Edwards had lent me. After starting the churning, grandmother Ruth,
assisted by the girls, was putting in order the bedrooms upstairs.
Through a crack of the unlatched door that led to the kitchen, we heard
Halstead churning casually, muttering to himself and plumping the old
churn about the kitchen floor. Several times he had shouted for the
girls to come and help him hold it down; and presently we heard him
ordering Nell to bid grandmother Ruth pour hot milk into the churn.
"It's as cold as ice!" he cried. "It never will come in the world till
it is warmed up! Here I have churned for two hours, steady, and no signs
of the butter's coming--and it isn't my turn either!"
We had heard Halstead run on so much in that same strain, however, that
neither Addison nor I paid much attention to it.
Every few moments, however, he continued shouting for some one to come
and help; and presently, when grandma Ruth came downstairs for a moment
to see how matters were going on, we heard him pleading angrily with her
to pour in hot milk.
"Make the other boys come and help!" he cried after her as she was
calmly returning upstairs. "Make them come and churn a spell. Their
blood is better'n mine!"
"Oh, I guess your blood is good enough," the old lady replied, laughing.
Silence for a time followed that last appeal. Halstead seemed to have
resigned himself to his task. Addison's pencil ciphered away; and I grew
absorbed in Colter's flight from the Indians.
Before long, however, a pungent odor, as of fat on a hot stove, began to
pervade the house. Addison looked up and sniffed. Just then we heard
Theodora race suddenly down the hall stairs, speed to the other door of
the kitchen, then cry out and go flying back upstairs. An instant later
she and Ellen rushed down, with grandmother Ruth hard after them.
Evidently something was going wrong. Addison and I made for the kitchen
door, for we heard grandmother exclaim in tones of deepest indignation,
"O you Halstead! What have you done!"
Halstead had set the old churn on top of the hot stove, placed a chair
close against it, and was standing on the chair, churning with might and
main.
His head, as he plied the dasher, was almost touching the ceiling; his
face was as red as a beet. He had filled the stove with dry wood, and
the bottom of the churn was smoking; the chimes were warping out of
their grooves, and cream was leaking on the stove. The kitchen reeked
with the smoke and odor.
After one horrified glance, grandmother rushed in, snatched the churn
off the stove and bore it to the sink. Her indignation was too great for
"Christian words," as the old lady sometimes expressed it in moments of
great domestic provocation. "Get the slop pails," she said in low tones
to Ellen and Theodora. "'Tis spoiled. The whole churning is smoked and
spoiled--and the churn, too!"
Halstead, meantime, was getting down from the chair, still very hot and
red. "Well, I warmed the old thing up once!" he muttered defiantly.
"'Twas coming, too. 'Twould have come in one minute more!"
But neither grandmother nor the girls vouchsafed him another look. After
a glance round, Addison drew back, shutting the kitchen door, and
resumed his pencil. He shook his head sapiently to me, but seemed to be
rocked by internal mirth. "Now, wasn't that just like Halse?" he
muttered at length.
"What do you think the old Squire will say to this?" I hazarded.
"Oh, not much, I guess," Addison replied, going on with his problem.
"The old gentleman doesn't think it is of much use to talk to him.
Halse, you know, flies all to pieces if he is reproved."
In point of fact I do not believe the old Squire took the matter up with
Halstead at all. He did not come home until afternoon, and no one said
much to him about what had happened during the morning.
But we had to procure a new churn immediately for the following Tuesday.
Old Mehitable was totally ruined. The bottom and the lower ends of the
chimes were warped and charred beyond repair.
Largely influenced by Addison's advice, grandmother Ruth consented to
the purchase of one of the new crank churns. For a year or more he had
been secretly cogitating a scheme to avoid so much tiresome work when
churning; and a crank churn, he foresaw, would lend itself to such a
project much more readily than a churn with an upright dasher. It was a
plan that finally took the form of a revolving shaft overhead along the
walk from the kitchen to the stable, where it was actuated by a light
horse-power. Little belts descending from this shaft operated not only
the churn but a washing machine, a wringer, a corn shelter, a lathe and
several other machines with so much success and saving of labor that
even grandmother herself smiled approvingly.
"And that's all due to me!" Halstead used to exclaim once in a while.
"If I hadn't burnt up that old churn, we would be tugging away at it to
this day!"
"Yes, Halse, you are a wonderful boy in the kitchen!" Ellen would remark
roguishly.
CHAPTER VII
BEAR-TONE
One day about the first of February, Catherine Edwards made the rounds
of the neighborhood with a subscription paper to get singers for a
singing school. A veteran "singing master"--Seth Clark, well known
throughout the country--had offered to give the young people of the
place a course of twelve evening lessons or sessions in vocal music, at
four dollars per evening; and Catherine was endeavoring to raise the sum
of forty-eight dollars for this purpose.
Master Clark was to meet us at the district schoolhouse for song
sessions of two hours, twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday evenings at
seven o'clock. Among us at the old Squire's we signed eight dollars.
The singing school did not much interest me personally, for the reason
that I did not expect to attend. As the Frenchman said when invited to
join a fox hunt, I had been. Two winters previously there had been a
singing school in an adjoining school district, known as "Bagdad," where
along with others I had presented myself as a candidate for vocal
culture, and had been rejected on the grounds that I lacked both "time"
and "ear." What was even less to my credit, I had been censured as being
concerned in a disturbance outside the schoolhouse. That was my first
winter in Maine, and the teacher at that singing school was not Seth
Clark, but an itinerant singing master widely known as "Bear-Tone."
As opportunities for musical instruction thereabouts were limited, the
old Squire, who loved music and who was himself a fair singer, had
advised us to go. Five of us, together with our two young neighbors,
Kate and Thomas Edwards, drove over to Bagdad in a three-seated pung
sleigh.
The old schoolhouse was crowded with young people when we arrived, and a
babel of voices burst on us as we drew rein at the door. After helping
the girls from the pung, Addison and I put up the horses at a farmer's
barn near by. When we again reached the schoolhouse, a gigantic man in
an immense, shaggy buffalo coat was just coming up. He entered the
building a step behind us.
It was Bear-Tone; and a great hush fell on the young people as he
appeared in the doorway. Squeezing hurriedly into seats with the others,
Addison and I faced round. Bear-Tone stood in front of the teacher's
desk, near the stovepipe, rubbing his huge hands together, for the night
was cold. He was smiling, too--a friendly, genial smile that seemed
actually to brighten the room.
If he had looked gigantic to us in the dim doorway, he now looked
colossal. In fact, he was six feet five inches tall and three feet
across the shoulders. He had legs like mill-posts and arms to match; he
wore big mittens, because he could not buy gloves large enough for his
hands. He was lean and bony rather than fat, and weighed three hundred
and twenty pounds, it was said.
His face was big and broad, simple and yet strong; it was ringed round
from ear to ear with a short but very thick sandy beard. His eyes were
blue, his hair, like his beard, was sandy. He was almost forty years old
and was still a bachelor.
"Wal, young ones," he said at last, "reckonin' trundle-bed trash,
there's a lot of ye, ain't there?"
His voice surprised me. From such a massive man I had expected to hear a
profound bass. Yet his voice was not distinctly bass, it was clear and
flexible. He could sing bass, it is true, but he loved best to sing
tenor, and in that part his voice was wonderfully sweet.
As his speech at once indicated, he was an ignorant man. He had never
had musical instruction; he spoke of soprano as "tribble," of alto as
"counter," and of baritone as "bear-tone"--a mispronunciation that had
given him his nickname.
But he could sing! Melody was born in him, so to speak, full-fledged,
ready to sing. Musical training would have done him no good, and it
might have done him harm. He could not have sung a false note if he had
tried; discord really pained him.
"Wal, we may's well begin," he said when he had thoroughly warmed his
hands. "What ye got for singin' books here? Dulcimers, or Harps of
Judah? All with Harps raise yer right hands. So. Now all with Dulcimers,
left hands. So. Harps have it. Them with Dulcimers better get Harps, if
ye can, 'cause we want to sing together. But to-night we'll try voices.
I wouldn't wonder if there might be some of ye who might just as well go
home and shell corn as try to sing." And he laughed. "So in the first
place we'll see if you can sing, and then what part you can sing,
whether it's tribble, or counter, or bass, or tenor. The best way for us
to find out is to have you sing the scale--the notes of music. Now these
are the notes of music." And without recourse to tuning fork he sang:
"Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do."
The old schoolhouse seemed to swell to the mellow harmony from his big
throat. To me those eight notes, as Bear-Tone sang them, were a sudden
revelation of what music may be.
"I'll try you first, my boy," he then said, pointing to Newman Darnley,
a young fellow about twenty years old who sat at the end of the front
row of seats. "Step right out here."
Greatly embarrassed, Newman shambled forth and, turning, faced us.
"Now, sir," said the master, "catch the key-note from me. Do! Now
re--mi," and so forth.
Bear-Tone had great difficulty in getting Newman through the scale.
"'Fraid you never'll make a great singer, my boy," he said, "but you may
be able to grumble bass a little, if you prove to have an ear that can
follow. Next on that seat."
The pupil so designated was a Bagdad boy named Freeman Knights. He
hoarsely rattled off, "Do, re, mi, fa, sol," all on the same tone. When
Bear-Tone had spent some moments in trying to make him rise and fall on
the notes, he exclaimed:
"My dear boy, you may be able to drive oxen, but you'll never sing. It
wouldn't do you any good to stay here, and as the room is crowded the
best thing you can do is to run home."
Opening the door, he gave Freeman a friendly pat on the shoulder and a
push into better air outside.
Afterwards came Freeman's sister, Nellie Knights; she could discern no
difference between do and la--at which Bear-Tone heaved a sigh.
"Wai, sis, you'll be able to call chickens, I guess, because that's all
on one note, but 'twouldn't be worth while for you to try to sing, or
torment a pianner. There are plenty of girls tormentin' pianners now. I
guess you'd better go home, too; it may come on to snow."
Nellie departed angrily and slammed the door. Bear-Tone looked after
her. "Yes," he said, "'tis kind of hard to say that to a girl. Don't
wonder she's a little mad. And yet, that's the kindest thing I can do.
Even in Scripter there was the sheep and the goats; the goats couldn't
sing, and the sheep could; they had to be separated."
He went on testing voices and sending the "goats" home. Some of the
"goats," however, lingered round outside, made remarks and peeped in at
the windows. In an hour their number had grown to eighteen or twenty.
Dreading the ordeal, I slunk into a back seat. I saw my cousin, Addison,
who had a fairly good voice, join the "sheep," and then Theodora, Ellen,
Kate and Thomas; but I could not escape the ordeal forever, and at last
my turn came. When Bear-Tone bade me sing the scale, fear so constricted
my vocal cords that I squealed rather than sang.
"Sonny, there's lots of things a boy can do besides sing," Bear-Tone
said as he laughingly consigned me to the outer darkness. "It's no great
blessing, after all." He patted my shoulder. "I can sing a little, but
I've never been good for much else. So don't you feel bad about it."
But I did feel bad, and, joining the "goats" outside, I helped to
organize a hostile demonstration. We began to march round the
schoolhouse, howling Yankee Doodle. Our discordant noise drew a prompt
response. The door opened and Bear-Tone's huge form appeared.
"In about one harf of one minute more I'll be out there and give ye a
lesson in Yankee Doodle!" he cried, laughing. His tone sounded
good-natured; yet for some reason none of us thought it best to renew
the disturbance.
Most of the "goats" dispersed, but, not wishing to walk home alone, I
hung round waiting for the others. One window of the schoolroom had been
raised, and through that I watched proceedings. Bear-Tone had now tested
all the voices except one, and his face showed that he had not been
having a very pleasant time. Up in the back seat there still remained
one girl, Helen Thomas, who had, according to common report, a rather
good voice; yet she was so modest that few had ever heard her either
sing or recite.
I saw her come forward, when the master beckoned, and sing her do, re,
mi. Bear-Tone, who had stood waiting somewhat apathetically, came
suddenly to attention. "Sing that again, little girl," he said.
Encouraged by his kind glance, Helen again sang the scale in her clear
voice. A radiant look overspread Bear-Tone's big face.
"Wal, wal!" he cried. "But you've a voice, little one! Sing that with
me."
Big voice and girl's voice blended and chorded.
"Ah, but you will make a singer, little one!" Bear-Tone exclaimed. "Now
sing Woodland with me. Never mind notes, sing by ear."
A really beautiful volume of sound came through the window at which I
listened. Bear-Tone and his new-found treasure sang The Star-Spangled
Banner and several of the songs of the Civil War, then just
ended--ballads still popular with us and fraught with touching memories:
Tenting To-night on the Old Camp Ground, Dearest Love, Do You Remember?
and Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys Are Marching. Bear-Tone's rich voice
chorded beautifully with Helen's sweet, high notes.
As we were getting into the pung to go home after the meeting, and Helen
and her older sister, Elizabeth, were setting off, Bear-Tone dashed out,
bareheaded, with his big face beaming.
"Be sure you come again," he said to her, in a tone that was almost
imploring. "You can sing! Oh, you can sing! I'll teach you! I'll teach
you!"
The singing school that winter served chiefly as a pretty background for
Bear-Tone's delight in Helen Thomas's voice, the interest he took in it,
and the untiring efforts he made to teach her.
"One of the rarest of voices!" he said to the old Squire one night when
he had come to the farmhouse on one of his frequent visits. "Not once
will you find one in fifty years. It's a deep tribble. Why, Squire, that
girl's voice is a discovery! And it will grow in her, Squire! It is just
starting now, but by the time she's twenty-five it will come out
wonderful."
The soprano of the particular quality that Bear-Tone called "deep
tribble" is that sometimes called a "falcon" soprano, or dramatic
soprano, in distinction from light soprano. It is better known and more
enthusiastically appreciated by those proficient in music than by the
general public. Bear-Tone, however, recognized it in his new pupil, as
if from instinct.
The other pupils were somewhat neglected that winter; but no one
complained, for it was such a pleasure to hear Bear-Tone and Helen sing.
Many visitors came; and once the old Squire attended a meeting, in order
to hear Bear-Tone's remarkable pupil. In Days of Old when Knights were
Bold, dear old Juanita, and Roll on, Silver Moon, were some of their
favorite songs, Still a "goat," and always a "goat," I am not capable of
describing music; but school and visitors sat enchanted when Helen and
Bear-Tone sang.
Helen's parents were opposed to having their daughter become a
professional singer. They were willing that she should sing in church
and at funerals, but not in opera. For a long time Bear-Tone labored to
convince them that a voice like Helen's has a divine mission in the
world, to please, to touch and to ennoble the hearts of the people.
At last he induced them to let him take Helen to Portland, in order that
a well-known teacher there might hear her sing and give an opinion.
Bear-Tone was to pay the expenses of the trip himself.
The city teacher was enthusiastic over the girl and urged that she be
given opportunity for further study; but in view of the opposition at
home that was not easily managed. But Bear-Tone would not be denied. He
sacrificed the scanty earnings of a whole winter's round of singing
schools in country school districts to send her to the city for a course
of lessons.
The next year the question of her studying abroad came up. If Helen were
to make the most of her voice, she must have it trained by masters in
Italy and Paris. Her parents were unwilling to assist her to cross the
ocean.
Bear-Tone was a poor man; his singing schools never brought him more
than a few hundred dollars a year. He owned a little house in a
neighboring village, where he kept "bachelor's hall"; he had a piano, a
cabinet organ, a bugle, a guitar and several other musical instruments,
including one fairly valuable old violin from which he was wont of an
evening to produce wonderfully sweet, sad strains.
No one except the officials of the local savings bank knew how Bear-Tone
raised the money for Helen Thomas's first trip abroad, but he did it.
Long afterwards people learned that he had mortgaged everything he
possessed, even the old violin, in order to provide the necessary money.
Helen went to Europe and studied for two years. She made her début at
Milan, sang in several of the great cities on the Continent, and at
last, with a reputation as a great singer fully established, returned
home four years later to sing in New York.
Bear-Tone meanwhile was teaching his singing schools, as usual, in the
rural districts of Maine. Once or twice during those two years of study
he had managed to send a little money to Helen, to help out with the
expenses. Now he postponed his three bi-weekly schools for one week and
made his first and only trip to New York--the journey of a lifetime.
Perhaps he had at first hoped that he might meet her and be welcomed. If
so, he changed his mind on reaching the metropolis. Aware of his
uncouthness, he resolved not to shame her by claiming recognition. But
he went three times to hear her sing, first in Aïda, then in Faust, and
afterwards in Les Huguenots; heard her magic notes, saw her in all her
queenly beauty--but saw her from the shelter of a pillar in the rear of
the great opera house. On the fifth day he returned home as quietly as
he had gone.
Perhaps a month after he came back, while driving to one of his singing
schools on a bitter night in February, he took a severe cold. For lack
of any proper care at his little lonesome, chilly house, his cold a day
or two later turned into pneumonia, and from that he died.
The savings bank took the house and the musical instruments. The piano,
the organ, the old violin and other things were sold at auction. And
probably Helen Thomas, whose brilliant career he had made possible,
never heard anything about the circumstances of his death.
CHAPTER VIII
WHEN WE HUNTED THE STRIPED CATAMOUNT
The following week Tom Edwards and I had a somewhat exciting adventure
which, however, by no means covered us with glory. During the previous
winter and, indeed, for several winters before that, there had been
rumors current of a strange, fierce animal which came down, from the
"great woods" to devour dead lambs that were cast forth from the
farmers' barns in February and March.
At that time nearly every farmer in the vicinity kept a flock of from
fifty to a hundred sheep. During the warm season the animals got their
own living in the back pastures; in winter they were fed on nothing
better than hay. The animals usually came out in the spring thin and
weak, with the ewes in poor condition to raise their lambs. In
consequence, many of the lambs died soon after birth, and were thrown
out on the snow for the crows and wild animals to dispose of.
The old Squire had begun to feed corn to his flock during the latter
part of the winter, and urged his neighbors to do so; but many of them
did not have the corn and preferred to let nature take its course.
The mysterious animal that the boys were talking about seemed to have
formed the habit of visiting that region every spring. Not even the
older people knew to what species it belonged. It came round the barns
at night, and no one had ever seen it distinctly. Some believed it to be
a catamount or panther; others who had caught glimpses of it said that
it was a black creature with white stripes.
Traps had been set for it, but always without success. Mr. Wilbur, one
of the neighbors, had watched from his barn and fired a charge of
buckshot at it; but immediately the creature had disappeared in the
darkness, carrying off a lamb. It visited one place or another nearly
every night for a month or more--as long, indeed, as the supply of lambs
held out. Then it would vanish until the following spring.
On the day above referred to I saw Tom coming across the snowy fields
that lay between the Edwards' farm and the old Squire's. Guessing that
he had something to tell me, I hastened forth to meet him.
"That old striped catamount has come round again!" Tom exclaimed. "He
was at Batchelder's last night and got two dead lambs. And night before
last he was at Wilbur's. I've got four dead lambs saved up. And old
Hughy Glinds has told me a way to watch for him and shoot him."
Hughy Glinds was a rheumatic old man who lived in a small log house up
in the edge of the great woods and made baskets for a living. In his
younger days he had been a trapper and was therefore a high authority in
such matters among the boys.
"We shall have to have a sleigh or a pung to watch from," Tom explained.
"Old Hughy says to carry out a dead lamb and leave it near the bushes
below our barn, and to haul a sleigh there and leave it a little way
off, and do this for three or four nights till old Striped gets used to
seeing the sleigh. Then, after he has come four nights, we're to go
there early in the evening and hide in the sleigh, with a loaded gun.
Old Striped will be used to seeing the sleigh there, and won't be
suspicious.
"Pa don't want me to take our sleigh so long," Tom went on. "He wants to
use it before we'd be through with it. But"--and I now began to see why
Tom had been so willing to share with me the glory of killing the
marauder--"there's an old sleigh out here behind your barn. Nobody uses
it now. Couldn't we take that?"
I felt sure that the old Squire would not care, but I proposed to ask
the opinion of Addison. Tom opposed our taking Addison into our
confidence.
"He's older, and he'd get all the credit for it," he objected.
Addison, moreover, had driven to the village that morning; and after
some discussion we decided to take the sleigh on our own responsibility.
It was partly buried in a snowdrift; but we dug it out, and then drew it
across the fields on the snow crust--lifting it over three stone
walls--to a little knoll below the Edwards barn.
We concluded to lay the dead lamb on the top of the knoll at a little
distance from the woods; the sleigh we left on the southeast side about
fifteen paces away. Tom thought that he could shoot accurately at that
distance, even at night.
For my own part I thought fifteen paces much too near. Misgivings had
begun to beset me.
"What if you miss him, Tom?" I said.
"I shan't miss him," he declared firmly.
"But, Tom, what if you only wounded him and he came rushing straight at
us?"
"Oh, I'll fix him!" Tom exclaimed. But I had become very apprehensive;
and at last, Tom helped me to bring cedar rails and posts from a fence
near by to construct a kind of fortress round the sleigh. We set the
posts in the hard snow and made a fence, six rails high--to protect
ourselves. Even then I was afraid it might jump the fence.
"He won't jump much with seven buckshot and a ball in him!" said Tom.
We left the empty sleigh there for three nights in succession; and every
morning Tom came over to tell me that the lamb had been taken.
"The plan works just as old Hughy told me it would," he said; "but I've
got only one lamb more, so we'll have to watch to-night. Don't tell
anybody, but about bedtime you come over." Tom was full of eagerness.
I was in a feverish state of mind all day, especially as night drew on.
If I had not been ashamed to fail Tom, I think I should have backed out.
At eight o'clock I pretended to start for bed; then, stealing out at the
back door, I hurried across the fields to the Edwards place. A new moon
was shining faintly over the woods in the west.
Tom was in the wood-house, loading the gun, an old army rifle, bored out
for shot. "I've got in six fingers of powder," he whispered.
We took a buffalo skin and a horse blanket from the stable, and armed
with the gun, and an axe besides, proceeded cautiously out to the
sleigh. Tom had laid the dead lamb on the knoll.
Climbing over the fence, we ensconced ourselves in the old sleigh. It
was a chilly night, with gusts of wind from the northwest. We laid the
axe where it would be at hand in case of need; and Tom trained the gun
across the fence rail in the direction of the knoll.
"Like's not he won't come till toward morning," he whispered; "but we
must stay awake and keep listening for him. Don't you go to sleep."
I thought that sleep was the last thing I was likely to be guilty of. I
wished myself at home. The tales I had heard of the voracity and
fierceness of the striped catamount were made much more terrible by the
darkness. My position was so cramped and the old sleigh so hard that I
had to squirm occasionally; but every time I did so, Tom whispered:
"Sh! Don't rattle round. He may hear us."
An hour or two, which seemed ages long, dragged by; the crescent moon
sank behind the tree-tops and the night darkened. At last, in spite of
myself, I grew drowsy, but every few moments I started broad awake and
clutched the handle of the axe. Several times Tom whispered:
"I believe you're asleep."
"I'm not!" I protested.
"Well, you jump as if you were," he retorted.
By and by Tom himself started spasmodically, and I accused him of having
slept; but he denied it in a most positive whisper. Suddenly, in an
interval between two naps, I heard a sound different from the soughing
of the wind, a sound like claws or toenails scratching on the snow
crust. It came from the direction of the knoll, or beyond it.
"Tom, Tom, he's coming!" I whispered.
Tom, starting up from a nap, gripped the gunstock. "Yes, siree," he
said. "He is." He cocked the gun, and the barrel squeaked faintly on the
rail. "By jinks, I see him!"
I, too, discerned a shadowy, dark object at the top of the snow-crusted
knoll. Tom was twisting round to get aim across the rail--and the next
instant both of us were nearly kicked out of the sleigh by the recoil of
the greatly overloaded gun. We both scrambled to our feet, for we heard
an ugly snarl. I think the animal leaped upward; I was sure I saw
something big and black rise six feet in the air, as if it were coming
straight for the sleigh!
The instinct of self-preservation is a strong one. The first thing I
realized I was over the fence rails, on the side toward the Edwards
barn, running for dear life on the snow crust--and Tom was close behind
me! We never stopped, even to look back, till we were at the barn and
round the farther corner of it. There we pulled up to catch our breath.
Nothing was pursuing us, nor could we hear anything.
After we had listened a while, Tom ran into the house and waked his
father. Mr. Edwards, however, was slow to believe that we had hit the
animal, and refused to dress and go out. It was now about two o'clock. I
did not like to go home alone, and so went to bed with Tom. In
consequence of our vigils we slept till sunrise. Meanwhile, on going out
to milk, Tom's father had had the curiosity to visit the scene of our
adventure. A trail of blood spots leading from the knoll into the woods
convinced him that we had really damaged the prowler; and picking up the
axe that I had dropped, he followed the trail. Large red stains at
intervals showed that the animal had stopped frequently to grovel on the
snow. About half a mile from the knoll, Mr. Edwards came upon the beast,
in a fir thicket, making distressful sounds, and quite helpless to
defend itself. A blow on the head from the poll of the axe finished the
creature; and, taking it by the tail, Mr. Edwards dragged it to the
house. The carcass was lying in the dooryard when Tom's mother waked us.
"Get up and see your striped catamount!" she called up the chamber
stairs.
Hastily donning our clothes we rushed down. Truth to say, the "monster"
of so many startling stories was somewhat disappointing to contemplate.
It was far from being so big as we had thought it in the night--indeed,
it was no larger than a medium-sized dog. It had coarse black hair with
two indistinct, yellowish-white stripes, or bands, along its sides. Its
legs were short, but strong, its claws white, hooked and about an inch
and a quarter long. The head was broad and flat, and the ears were low
and wide apart. It was not in the least like a catamount. In short, it
was, as the reader may have guessed, a wolverene, or glutton, an animal
rarely seen in Maine even by the early settlers, for its habitat is much
farther north.
As Tom and I stood looking the creature over, my cousin Theodora
appeared, coming from the old Squire's to make inquiries for me. They
had missed me and were uneasy about me.
During the day every boy in the neighborhood came to see the animal, and
many of the older people, too. In fact, several people came from a
considerable distance to look at the beast. The "glory" was Tom's for
making so good a shot in the night, yet, in a way, I shared it with him.
"Don't you ever say a word about our running from the sleigh," Tom
cautioned me many times that day, and added that he would never have run
except for my bad example.
I was obliged to put up in silence with that reflection on my bravery.
CHAPTER IX
THE LOST OXEN
It was now approaching time to tap the maples again; but owing to the
disaster which had befallen our effort to make maple syrup for profit
the previous spring, neither Addison nor myself felt much inclination to
undertake it. The matter was talked over at the breakfast table one
morning and noting our lukewarmness on the subject, the old Squire
remarked that as the sugar lot had been tapped steadily every spring for
twenty years or more, it would be quite as well perhaps to give the
maples a rest for one season.
That same morning, too, Tom Edwards came over in haste to tell us, with
a very sober face, that their oxen had disappeared mysteriously, and ask
us to join in the search to find them. They were a yoke of "sparked"
oxen--red and white in contrasting patches. Each had wide-spread horns
and a "star" in his face. Bright and Broad were their names, and they
were eight years old.
Neighbor Jotham Edwards was one of those simpleminded, hard-working
farmers who ought to prosper but who never do. It is not easy to say
just what the reason was for much of his ill fortune. Born under an
unlucky planet, some people said; but that, of course, is childish. The
real reason doubtless was lack of good judgment in his business
enterprises.
Whatever he undertook nearly always turned out badly. His carts and
ploughs broke unaccountably, his horses were strangely prone to run away
and smash things, and something was frequently the matter with his
crops. Twice, I remember, he broke a leg, and each time he had to lie
six weeks on his back for the bone to knit. Felons on his fingers
tormented him; and it was a notable season that he did not have a big,
painful boil or a bad cut from a scythe or from an axe. One mishap
seemed to lead to another.
Jotham's constant ill fortune was the more noticeable among his
neighbors because his father, Jonathan, had been a careful, prosperous
farmer who kept his place in excellent order, raised good crops and had
the best cattle of any one thereabouts. Within a few years after the
place had passed under Jotham's control it was mortgaged, the buildings
and the fences were in bad repair, and the fields were weedy. Yet that
man worked summer and winter as hard and as steadily as ever a man did
or could.
Two winters before he had contracted with old Zack Lurvey to cut three
hundred thousand feet of hemlock logs and draw them to the bank of a
small river where in the spring they could be floated down to Lurvey's
Mills. For hauling the logs he had two yokes of oxen, the yoke of large
eight-year-olds that I have already described, and another yoke of
small, white-faced cattle. During the first winter the off ox of the
smaller pair stepped into a hole between two roots, broke its leg and
had to be killed. Afterwards Jotham worked the nigh ox in a crooked yoke
in front of his larger oxen and went on with the job from December until
March.
But, as all teamsters know, oxen that are worked hard all day in winter
weather require corn meal or other equally nourishing provender in
addition to hay. Now, Jotham had nothing for his team except hay of
inferior quality. In consequence, as the winter advanced the cattle lost
flesh and became very weak. By March they could scarcely walk with their
loads, and at last there came a morning when Jotham could not get the
older oxen even to rise to their feet. He was obliged to give up work
with them, and finally came home after turning them loose to help
themselves to what hay was left at the camp.
The old Squire did not often concern himself with the affairs of his
neighbors, but he went up to the logging camp with Jotham; and when he
saw the pitiful condition the cattle were in he remonstrated with him.
"This is too bad," he said. "You have worked these oxen nearly to death,
and you haven't half fed them!"
"Wal, my oxen don't have to work any harder than I do!" Jotham replied
angrily. "I ain't able to buy corn for them. They must work without it."
"You only lose by such a foolish course," the old Squire said to him.
But Jotham was not a man who could easily be convinced of his errors.
All his affairs were going badly; arguing with him only made him
impatient.
The snow was now so soft that the oxen in their emaciated and weakened
condition could not be driven home, and again Jotham left them at the
camp to help themselves to fodder. He promised, however, to send better
hay and some potatoes up to them the next day. But during the following
night a great storm set in that carried off nearly all the snow and
caused such a freshet in the streams and the brooks that it was
impracticable to reach the camp for a week or longer. Then one night the
small, white-faced ox made his appearance at the Edwards barn, having
come home of his own accord.
The next morning Jotham went up on foot to see how his other cattle were
faring. The flood had now largely subsided; but it was plain that during
the storm the water had flowed back round the camp to a depth of several
feet. The oxen were nowhere to be seen, nor could he discern their
tracks round the camp or in the woods that surrounded it. He tried to
track them with a dog, but without success.
Several of Jotham's neighbors assisted him in the search. Where the oxen
had gone or what had become of them was a mystery; the party searched
the forest in vain for a distance of five or six miles on all sides.
Some of the men thought that the oxen had fallen into the stream and had
drowned; it was not likely that they had been stolen. Jotham was at last
obliged to buy another yoke of cattle in order to do his spring work on
the farm.
Two years passed, and Jotham's oxen were almost forgotten. During the
second winter, after school had closed in the old Squire's district,
Willis Murch, a young friend of mine who lived near us, went on a
trapping trip to the headwaters of Lurvey's Stream, where the oxen had
disappeared and where he had a camp. One Saturday he came home for
supplies and invited me to go back with him and spend Sunday. The
distance was perhaps fourteen miles; and we had to travel on snowshoes,
for at the time--it was February--the snow was nearly four feet deep in
the woods. We had a fine time there in camp that night and the next
morning went to look at Willis's traps.
That afternoon, after we had got back to camp and cooked our dinner,
Willis said to me, "Now, if you will promise not to tell, I'll show you
something that will make you laugh."
I promised readily enough, without thinking much about the matter.
"Come on, then," said he; and we put on our snowshoes again and prepared
to start. But, though I questioned him with growing curiosity, he would
not tell me what we were to see. "Oh, you'll find out soon enough," he
said.
Willis led off, and I followed. I should think we went as much as five
miles through the black growth to the north of Willis's camp and came
finally to a frozen brook, which we followed for a mile round to the
northeast.
"I was prospecting up this way a week ago," Willis said. "I had an idea
of setting traps on this brook. It flows into a large pond a little way
ahead of us, but just before we get to the pond it winds through a swamp
of little spotted maple, moose bush and alder."
"I guess it's beaver you're going to show me," I remarked.
"Guess again," said Willis, "But keep still. Step in my tracks and don't
make the brush crack."
The small growth was so thick that we could see only a little way ahead.
Willis pushed slowly through it for some time; then, stopping short, he
motioned to me over his shoulder to come forward. Not twenty yards away
I distinguished the red-and-white hair of a large animal that was
browsing on a clump of bushes. It stood in a pathway trodden so deep
into the snow that its legs were completely hidden. In surprise I saw
that it had broad horns.
"Why, that's an ox!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," said Willis, laughing. "His mate is round here, too."
"Willis," I almost shouted, "they must be the oxen Jotham lost two years
ago!"
"Sure!" said Willis. "But don't make such a noise. There are moose
here."
"Moose!" I whispered.
"There's a cow moose with two moose calves. When I was here last
Thursday afternoon there were three deer with them. The snow's got so
deep they are yarding here together. They get water at the brook, and I
saw where they had dug down through the snow to get to the dry swamp
grass underneath. They won't leave their yard if we don't scare them;
they couldn't run in the deep snow."
We thought that probably the oxen had grown wild from being off in the
woods so long. However, Willis advanced slowly, calling, "Co-boss!"
Seeing us coming and hearing human voices, the old ox lifted his muzzle
toward us and snuffed genially. He did not appear to be afraid, but
behaved as if he were glad to see us. The other one--old Broad--had been
lying down near by out of sight in the deep pathway, but now he suddenly
rose and stood staring at us. We approached to within ten feet of them.
They appeared to be in fairly good flesh, and their hair seemed very
thick. Evidently they had wandered off from the logging camp and had
been living a free, wild life ever since. In the small open meadows
along the upper course of the stream there was plenty of wild grass.
And, like deer, cattle will subsist in winter on the twigs of freshly
grown bushes. Even such food as that, with freedom, was better than the
cruel servitude of Jotham!
On going round to the far side of the yard we spied the three deer, the
cow moose and her two yearling calves. They appeared unwilling to run
away in the deep snow, but would not let us approach near enough to see
them clearly through the bushes.
"You could shoot one of those deer," I said to Willis; but he declared
that he would never shoot a deer or a moose when it was snow-bound in a
yard.
We lingered near the yard for an hour or more. By speaking kindly to the
oxen I found that I could go very close to them; they had by no means
forgotten human beings. On our way back to Willis's camp he reminded me
of my promise. "Now, don't you tell where those oxen are; don't tell
anybody!"
"But, Willis, don't you think Jotham ought to know?" I asked.
"No, I don't!" Willis exclaimed. "He has abused those oxen enough!
They've got away from him, and I'm glad of it! I'll never tell him where
they are!"
We argued the question all the way to camp, and at last Willis said
bluntly that he should not have taken me to see them if he had thought
that I would tell. "You promised not to," said he. That was true, and
there the matter rested overnight.
When I started home the next morning Willis walked with me for two miles
or more. We had not mentioned Jotham's oxen since the previous
afternoon; but I plainly saw that Willis had been thinking the matter
over, for, after we separated and had each gone a few steps on his way,
he called after me:
"Are you going to tell about that?"
"No," said I, and walked on.
"Well, if you're not going to feel right about it, ask the old Squire
what he thinks. If he says that Jotham ought to be told, perhaps you had
better tell him." And Willis hastened away.
But on reaching home I found that the old Squire had set off for
Portland early that morning to see about selling his lumber and was not
to return for a week. So I said nothing to any one. The night after he
got back I watched for a chance to speak with him alone. After supper he
went into the sitting-room to look over his lumber accounts, and I stole
in after him.
"You remember Jotham's oxen, gramp?" I began.
"Why, yes," said he, looking up.
"Well, I know where they are," I continued.
"Where?" he exclaimed in astonishment.
I then told him where Willis had found them and about the yard and the
moose and deer we had seen with the oxen. "Willis doesn't want Jotham
told," I added. "He says Jotham has abused those oxen enough, and that
he is glad they got away from him. He made me promise not to tell any
one at first, but finally he said that I might tell you, and that we
should do as you think best."
The old Squire gave me an odd look. Then he laughed and resumed his
accounts for what seemed to me a long while. I had the feeling that he
wished I had not told him.
At last he looked up. "I suppose, now that we have found this out,
Jotham will have to be told. They are his oxen, of course, and we should
not feel right if we were to keep this from him. It wouldn't be quite
the neighborly thing to do--to conceal it. So you had better go over and
tell him."
Almost every one likes to carry news, whether good or bad; and within
fifteen minutes I had reached the Edwards farmhouse. Jotham, who was
taking a late supper, came to the door.
"What will you give to know where your lost oxen are?" I cried.
"Where are they? Do you know?" he exclaimed. Then I told him where
Willis and I had seen them. "Wal, I vum!" said Jotham. "Left me and took
to the woods! And I've lost two years' work from 'em!"
For a moment I was sorry I had told him.
The next day he journeyed up to Willis's camp with several neighbors;
and from there they all snowshoed to the yard to see the oxen and the
moose. The strangely assorted little herd was still there, and, so far
as could be judged, no one else had discovered them.
Jotham had intended to drive the oxen home; but the party found the snow
so deep that they thought it best to leave them where they were for a
while. Since it was now the first week of March, the snow could be
expected to settle considerably within a fortnight.
I think it was the eighteenth of the month when Jotham and four other
men finally went to get the oxen. They took a gun, with the intention of
shooting one or more of the deer. A disagreeable surprise awaited them
at the yard.
At that time--it was before the days of game wardens--what were known as
"meat-and-hide hunters" often came down over the boundary from Canada
and slaughtered moose and deer while the animals were snow-bound. The
lawless poachers frequently came in parties and sometimes searched the
woods for twenty or thirty miles below the Line in quest of yards.
Apparently such a raiding party had found Willis's yard and had shot not
only the six deer and moose but Jotham's oxen as well. Blood on the snow
and refuse where the animals had been hung up for skinning and dressing,
made what had happened only too plain.
Poor Jotham came home much cast down. "That's just my luck!" he
lamented. "Everything always goes just that way with me!"
CHAPTER X
BETHESDA
If anything was missing at the old farmhouse--clothes-brush, soap, comb
or other articles of daily use--some one almost always would exclaim,
"Look in Bethesda!" or "I left it in Bethesda!" Bethesda was one of
those household words that you use without thought of its original
significance or of the amused query that it raises in the minds of
strangers.
Like most New England houses built seventy-five years ago, the farmhouse
at the old Squire's had been planned without thought of bathing
facilities. The family washtub, brought to the kitchen of a Saturday
night, and filled with well water tempered slightly by a few quarts from
the teakettle, served the purpose. We were not so badly off as our
ancestors had been, however, for in 1865, when we young folks went home
to live at the old Squire's, stoves were fully in vogue and farmhouses
were comfortably warmed. Bathing on winter nights was uncomfortable
enough, we thought, but it was not the desperately chilly business that
it must have been when farmhouses were heated by a single fireplace.
In the sitting-room we had both a fireplace and an "air-tight" for the
coldest weather. In grandmother Ruth's room there was a "fireside
companion," and in the front room a "soapstone comfort," with sides and
top of a certain kind of variegated limestone that held heat through the
winter nights.
So much heat rose from the lower rooms that the bedrooms on the floor
above, where we young folks slept, were by no means uncomfortably cold,
even in zero weather. Grandmother Ruth would open the hall doors an hour
before it was time for us to go to bed, to let the superfluous heat rise
for our benefit.
In the matter of bathing, however, a great deal was left to be desired
at the old house. There were six of us to take turns at that one tub.
Grandmother Ruth took charge: she saw to it that we did not take too
long, and listened to the tearful complaints about the coldness of the
water. On Saturday nights her lot was not a happy one. She used to sit
just outside the kitchen door and call our names when our turns came;
and as each of us went by she would hand us our change of underclothing.
Although the brass kettle was kept heating on the stove all the while,
we had trouble in getting enough warm water to "take the chill off."
More than once--unbeknown to grandmother Ruth--I followed Addison in the
tub without changing the water. He had appreciably warmed it up. One
night Halstead twitted me about it at the supper table, and I recollect
that the lack of proper sensibility that I had shown scandalized the
entire family.
"Oh, Joseph!" grandmother often exclaimed to the old Squire. "We must
have some better way for these children to bathe. They are getting older
and larger, and I certainly cannot manage it much longer."
Things went on in that way for the first two years of our sojourn at the
old place--until after the old Squire had installed a hydraulic ram down
at the brook, which forced plenty of water up to the house and the
barns. Then, in October of the third year, the old gentleman bestirred
himself.
He had been as anxious as any one to improve our bathing facilities, but
it is not an easy job to add a bathroom to a farmhouse. He walked about
at the back of the house for hours, and made several excursions to a
hollow at a distance in the rear of the place, and also climbed to the
attic, all the while whistling softly:
"Roll on, Silver Moon,
Guide the traveler on his way."
That was always a sure sign that he was getting interested in some
scheme.
Then things began to move in earnest. Two carpenters appeared and laid
the sills for an addition to the house, twenty feet long by eighteen
feet wide, just behind the kitchen, which was in the L. The room that
they built had a door opening directly into the kitchen. The floor, I
remember, was of maple and the walls of matched spruce.
Meanwhile the old Squire had had a sewer dug about three hundred feet
long; and to hold the water supply he built a tank of about a thousand
gallons' capacity, made of pine planks; the tank was in the attic
directly over the kitchen stove, so that in winter heat would rise under
it through a little scuttle in the floor and prevent the water from
freezing.
From the tank the pipes that led to the new bathroom ran down close to
the chimney and the stove pipe. Those bathroom pipes gave the old Squire
much anxiety; there was not a plumber in town; the old gentleman had to
do the work himself, with the help of a hardware dealer from the
village, six miles away.
But if the pipe gave him anxiety, the bathtub gave him more. When he
inquired at Portland about their cost, he was somewhat staggered to
learn that the price of a regular tub was fifty-eight dollars.
But the old Squire had an inventive brain. He drove up to the mill,
selected a large, sound pine log about four feet in diameter and set old
Davy Glinds, a brother of Hughy Glinds, to excavate a tub from it with
an adze. In his younger days Davy Glinds had been a ship carpenter, and
was skilled in the use of the broadaxe and the adze. He fashioned a
good-looking tub, five feet long by two and a half wide, smooth hewn
within and without. When painted white the tub presented a very
creditable appearance.
The old Squire was so pleased with it that he had Glinds make another;
and then, discovering how cheaply pine bathtubs could be made, he hit
upon a new notion. The more he studied on a thing like that, the more
the subject unfolded in his dear old head. Why, the old Squire asked
himself, need the Saturday-night bath occupy a whole evening because the
eight or ten members of the family had to take turns in one tub, when we
could just as well have more tubs?
Before grandmother Ruth fairly realized what he was about, the old
gentleman had five of these pine tubs ranged there in the new lean-to.
He had the carpenters inclose each tub within a sealed partition of
spruce boards. There was thus formed a little hall five feet wide in the
center of the new bathroom, from which small doors opened to each tub.
"What do you mean, Joseph, by so many tubs?" grandmother cried in
astonishment, when she discovered what he was doing.
"Well, Ruth," he said, "I thought we'd have a tub for the boys, a tub
for the girls, then tubs for you and me, mother, and one for our hired
help."
"Sakes alive, Joe! All those tubs to keep clean!"
"But didn't you want a large bathroom?" the old Squire rejoined, with
twinkling eyes.
"Yes, yes," cried grandmother, "but I had no idea you were going to make
a regular Bethesda!"
Bethesda! Sure enough, like the pool in Jerusalem, it had five porches!
And that name, born of grandmother Ruth's indignant surprise, stuck to
it ever afterwards.
When the old Squire began work on that bathroom he expected to have
it finished in a month. But one difficulty after another arose: the
tank leaked; the sewer clogged; nothing would work. If the hardware
dealer from the village came once to help, he came fifty times!
His own experience in bathrooms was limited. Then, to have hot
water in abundance, it was necessary to send to Portland for a
seventy-five-gallon copper heater; and six weeks passed before that
order was filled.
November, December and January passed before Bethesda was ready to turn
on the water; and then we found that the kitchen stove would not heat so
large a heater, or at least would not do it and serve as a cook-stove at
the same time. Nor would it sufficiently warm the bathroom in very cold
weather even with the kitchen door open. Then one night in February the
pipes at the far end froze and burst, and the hardware man had to make
us another hasty visit.
To ward off such accidents in the future the old Squire now had recourse
to what is known as the Granger furnace--a convenience that was then
just coming into general favor among farmers. They are cosy,
heat-holding contrivances, made of brick and lined either with fire
brick or iron; they have an iron top with pot holes in which you can set
kettles. The old Squire connected ours with the heater, and he placed it
so that half of it projected into the new bathroom, through the
partition wall of the kitchen. It served its purpose effectively and on
winter nights diffused a genial glow both in the kitchen and in the
bathroom.
But it was the middle of April before the bathroom was completed; and
the cost was actually between eight and nine hundred dollars!
"My sakes, Joseph!" grandmother exclaimed. "Another bathroom like that
would put us in the poor-house. And the neighbors all think we're
crazy!"
The old Squire, however, rubbed his hands with a smile of satisfaction.
"I call it rather fine. I guess we are going to like it," he said.
Like it we did, certainly. Bathing was no longer an ordeal, but a
delight. There was plenty of warm water; you had only to pick your tub,
enter your cubicle and shut the door. Bethesda, with its Granger furnace
and big water heater, was a veritable household joy.
"Ruth," the old Squire said, "all I'm sorry for is that I didn't do this
thirty years ago. When I reflect on the cold, miserable baths we have
taken and the other privations you and I have endured all these years it
makes me heartsick to think what I've neglected."
"But nine hundred dollars, Joseph!" grandmother interposed with a
scandalized expression. "That's an awful bill!"
"Yes," the old Squire admitted, "but we shall survive it."
Grandmother was right about our neighbors. What they said among
themselves would no doubt have been illuminating if we had heard it; but
they maintained complete silence when we were present. But we noticed
that when they called at the farmhouse they cast curious and perhaps
envious glances at the new lean-to.
Then an amusing thing happened. We had been enjoying Bethesda for a few
weeks, but had not yet got past our daily pride in it, when one hot
evening in the latter part of June who should come driving into the yard
but David Barker, "the Burns of Maine," a poet and humorist of
state-wide renown.
The old Squire had met him several times; but his visit that night was
accidental. He had come into our part of the state to visit a kinsman,
but had got off his proper route and had called at our house to ask how
far away this relative lived.
"It is nine or ten miles up there," the old Squire said when they had
shaken hands. "You are off your route. Better take out your horse and
spend the night with us. You can find your way better by daylight."
After some further conversation Mr. Barker decided to accept the old
Squire's invitation. While grandmother and Ellen got supper for our
guest, the old Squire escorted him to the hand bowl that he had put in
at the end of the bathroom hall. I imagine that the old Squire was just
a little proud of our recent accommodations.
"And, David, if you would like a bath before retiring to-night, just
step in here and make yourself at home," he said and opened several of
the doors to the little cubicles.
David looked the tubs over, first one and then another.
"Wal, Squire," he said at last, in that peculiar voice of his, "I've
sometimes wondered why our Maine folks had so few bathtubs, and
sometimes been a little ashamed on't. But now I see how 'tis. You've got
all the bathtubs there are cornered up here at your place!"
He continued joking about our bathrooms while he was eating supper; and
later, before retiring, he said, "I know you are a neat woman, Aunt
Ruth, and I guess before I go to bed I'll take a turn in your bathroom."
Ellen gave him a lamp; and he went in and shut the door. Fifteen
minutes--half an hour--nearly an hour--passed, and still he was in
there; and we heard him turning on and letting off water, apparently
barrels of it! Occasionally, too, we heard a door open and shut.
At last, when nearly an hour and a half had elapsed, the old Squire,
wondering whether anything were wrong, went to the bathroom door. He
knocked, and on getting a response inquired whether there was any
trouble.
"Doesn't the water run, David?" he asked. "Is it too cold for you? How
are you getting on in there?"
"Getting on beautifully," came the muffled voice of the humorist above
the splashing within. "Doing a great job. Only one tub more! Four off
and one to come."
"But, David!" the old Squire began in considerable astonishment.
"Yes. Sure. It takes time. But I know Aunt Ruth is an awful neat woman,
and I determined to do a full job!"
He had been taking a bath in each of the five tubs in succession. That
was Barker humor.
CHAPTER XI
WHEN WE WALKED THE TOWN LINES
It was some time the following week, I think, that the old Squire looked
across to us at the breakfast table and said, "Boys, don't you want to
walk the town lines for me? I think I shall let you do it this time--and
have the fee," he added, smiling.
The old gentleman was one of the selectmen of the town that year; and an
old law, or municipal regulation, required that one or more of the
selectmen should walk the town lines--follow round the town boundaries
on foot--once a year, to see that the people of adjoining towns, or
others, were not trespassing. The practice of walking the town lines is
now almost or quite obsolete, but it was a needed precaution when
inhabitants were few and when the thirty-six square miles of a township
consisted mostly of forest. At this time the southern half of our town
was already taken up in farms, but the northern part was still in forest
lots. The selectmen usually walked the north lines only.
When the state domain, almost all dense forest, was first surveyed, the
land was laid off in ranges, so-called, and tiers of lots. The various
grants of land to persons for public services were also surveyed in a
similar manner and the corners and lines established by means of stakes
and stones, and of blazed trees. If a large rock happened to lie at the
corner of a range or lot, the surveyor sometimes marked it with a drill.
Such rocks made the best corners.
Usually the four corners of the town were established by means of low,
square granite posts, set in the earth and with the initial letter of
the township cut in it with a drill.
As if it were yesterday I remember that sharp, cold morning. Hard-frozen
snow a foot deep still covered the cleared land, and in the woods it was
much deeper. The first heavy rainstorm of spring had come two days
before, but it had cleared off cold and windy the preceding evening,
with snow squalls and zero weather again. Nevertheless, Addison and I
were delighted at the old Squire's proposal, especially since the old
gentleman had hinted that we could have the fee, which was usually four
dollars when two of the selectmen walked the lines and were out all day.
"Go to the northeast corner of the town first," the old Squire said.
"The corner post is three miles and a half from here; you will find it
in the cleared land a hundred rods northeast of the barn on the Jotham
Silver place. Start from there and go due west till you reach the
wood-lot on the Silver farm. There the blazed trees begin, and you will
have to go from one to another. It is forest nearly all the way after
that for six miles, till you come to the northwest town corner.
"You can take my compass if you like," the old Squire added. "But it
will not be of much use to you, for it will be easier to follow the
blazed trees or corner stakes. Take our lightest axe with you and renew
the old blazes on the trees." He apparently felt some misgivings that we
might get lost, for he added, "If you want to ask Thomas to go with you,
you may."
Tom was more accustomed to being in the woods than either of us; but
Addison hesitated about inviting him, for of course if he went we should
have to divide the fee with him. However, the old Squire seemed to wish
to have him go with us, and at last, while Theodora was putting up a
substantial luncheon for us, Ellen ran over to carry the invitation to
Tom. He was willing enough to go and came back with her, carrying his
shotgun.
"It will be a long jaunt," the old gentleman said as we started off.
"But if you move on briskly and don't stop by the way, you can get back
before dark."
The snow crust was so hard and the walking so good that we struck
directly across the fields and pastures to the northeast and within an
hour reached the town corner on the Silver farm. At that point our tramp
along the north line of the town began, and we went from one blazed tree
to another and freshened the blazes.
We went on rapidly, crossed Hedgehog Ridge and descended to Stoss Pond,
which the town line crossed obliquely. We had expected to cross the pond
on the ice; but the recent great rainstorm and thaw had flooded the ice
to a depth of six or eight inches. New ice was already forming, but it
would not quite bear our weight, and we had to make a detour of a mile
through swamps round the south end of the pond and pick up the line
again on the opposite shore.
Stoss Pond Mountain then confronted us, and it was almost noon when we
neared Wild Brook; we heard it roaring as we approached and feared that
we should find it very high.
"We may have to fell a tree over it to get across," Addison said.
So it seemed, for upon emerging on the bank we saw a yellow torrent
twenty feet or more wide and four or five feet deep rushing tumultuously
down the rocky channel.
Tom, however, who had come out on the bank a little way below, shouted
to us, above the roar, to come that way, and we rejoined him at a bend
where the opposite bank was high. He was in the act of crossing
cautiously on a snow bridge. During the winter a great snowdrift, seven
or eight feet deep, had lodged in the brook; and the recent freshet had
merely cut a channel beneath it, leaving a frozen arch that spanned the
torrent.
"Don't do it!" Addison shouted to him. "It will fall with you!"
But, extending one foot slowly ahead of the other, Tom safely crossed to
the other side.
"Come on!" he shouted. "It will hold."
Addison, however, held back. The bridge looked dangerous; if it broke
down, whoever was on it would be thrown into the water and carried
downstream in the icy torrent.
"Oh, it's strong enough!" Tom exclaimed. "That will hold all right." And
to show how firm it was, he came part way back across the frozen arch
and stood still.
It was an unlucky action. The whole bridge suddenly collapsed under him,
and down went Tom with it into the rushing water, which whirled him
along toward a jam of ice and drift stuff twenty or thirty yards below.
By flinging his arms across one of those great cakes of hard-frozen snow
he managed to keep his head up; and he shouted lustily for us to help
him. He bumped against the jam and hung there, fighting with both arms
to keep from being carried under it.
Addison, who had the axe, ran down the bank and with a few strokes cut a
moosewood sapling, which we thrust out to Tom. He caught hold of it, and
then, by pulling hard, we hauled him to the bank and helped him out.
Oh, but wasn't he a wet boy, and didn't his teeth chatter! In fact, all
three of us were wet, for, in our excitement, Addison and I had gone in
knee-deep, and the water had splashed over us. In that bitter cold wind
we felt it keenly. Tom was nearly torpid; he seemed unable to speak, and
we could hardly make him take a step. His face and hands were blue.
"What shall we do with him?" Addison whispered to me in alarm. "It's
five miles home. I'm afraid he'll freeze."
We then thought of the old Squire's logging camp on Papoose Pond, the
outlet of which entered Wild Brook about half a mile above where we had
tried to cross it. We knew that there was a cooking stove in the camp
and decided that our best plan was to take Tom there and dry his
clothes. Getting him between us, we tried to make him run, but he seemed
unable to move his feet.
"Run, run, Tom!" we shouted to him. "Run, or you'll freeze!"
He seemed not to hear or care. In our desperation we slapped him and
dragged him along between us. Finally his legs moved a little, and he
began to step.
"Run, run with us!" Addison kept urging.
At last we got him going, although he shook so hard that he shook us
with him. The exertion did him good. We hustled him along and, following
the brook, came presently to a disused lumber road that led to the
logging camp in the woods a few hundred yards from the shore of the
pond. All three of us were panting hard when we reached it, but our wet
clothes were frozen stiff.
We rushed Tom into the camp and, finding matches on a shelf behind the
stovepipe, kindled a fire of such dry stuff as we found at hand. Then,
as the place warmed up, we pulled off Tom's frozen outer coat and
waistcoat, got the water out of his boots, and set him behind the stove.
Still he shook and could speak only with difficulty. We kept a hot fire
and finally boiled water in a kettle and, gathering wintergreen leaves
from a knoll outside the camp, made a hot tea for him.
At last we put him into the bunk and covered him as best we could with
our own coats, which we did not miss, since the camp was now as hot as
an oven. For more than an hour longer, however, his tremors continued in
spite of the heat. Addison and I took turns rushing outside to cut wood
from dry spruces to keep the stove hot. A little later, as I came in
with an armful, I found Addison watching Tom.
"Sh!" he said. "He's asleep."
The afternoon was waning; a cold, windy night was coming on.
"What shall we do?" Addison whispered in perplexity. "I don't believe we
ought to take him out; his clothes aren't dry yet. We shall have to stay
here all night with him."
"But what will the folks at home think?" I exclaimed.
"Of course they will worry about us," Addison replied gloomily. "But I'm
afraid Tom will get his death o' cold if we take him out. We ought to
keep him warm."
Our own wet clothes had dried by that time, and, feeling hungry, we ate
a part of our luncheon. Night came on with snow squalls; the wind roared
in the forest. It was so bleak that we gave up all idea of going home;
and, after bringing in ten or a dozen armfuls of wood, we settled down
to spend the night there. Still Tom slept, but he breathed easier and
had ceased to shiver. Suddenly he sat up and cried, "Help!"
"Don't you know where you are?" Addison asked. "Still dreaming?"
He stared round in the feeble light. "Oh, yes!" he said and laughed.
"It's the old camp. I tumbled into the brook. But what makes it so
dark?"
"It's night. You have been asleep two or three hours. We shall have to
stay here till morning."
"With nothing to eat?" Tom exclaimed. "I'm hungry!"
In his haste to set off from home with Ellen he had neglected to take
any luncheon. We divided with him what we had left; and he ate hungrily.
While he was eating, we heard a sound of squalling, indistinct above the
roar of the wind in the woods.
"Bobcat!" Tom exclaimed. Then he added, "But it sounds more like an old
gander."
"May be a flock of wild geese passing over," Addison said. "They
sometimes fly by night."
"Not on such a cold night in such a wind," Tom replied.
Soon we heard the same sounds again.
"That's an old gander, sure," Tom admitted.
"Seems to come from the same place," Addison remarked. "Out on Papoose
Pond, I guess."
"Yes, siree!" Tom exclaimed. "A flock of geese has come down on that
pond. If I had my gun, I could get a goose. But my gun is in Wild
Brook," he added regretfully. "I let go of it when I fell in."
The squalling continued at intervals. The night was so boisterous,
however, that we did not leave the camp and after a time fell asleep in
the old bunk.
The cold waked me soon after daybreak. Tom and Addison were still
asleep, with their coats pulled snugly about their shoulders and their
feet drawn up. I rekindled the fire and clattered round the stove. Still
they snoozed on; and soon afterwards, hearing the same squalling sounds
again, I stole forth in the bleak dawn to see what I could discover.
When I had pushed through the swamp of thick cedar that lay between the
camp and the pond, I beheld a goose flapping its wings and squalling
scarcely more than a stone's throw away. A second glance, in the
increasing light, showed me the forms of other geese, great numbers of
them on the newly formed ice. On this pond, as on the other, water had
gathered over the winter ice and then frozen again.
With the exception of this one gander, the flock was sitting there very
still and quiet. The gander waddled among the others, plucking at them
with his pink beak, as if to stir them up. Now and then he straightened
up, flapped his wings and squalled dolorously. None of the others I
noticed flapped, stirred or made any movement whatever. They looked as
if they were asleep, and many of them had their heads under their wings.
At last I went out toward them on the new ice, which had now frozen
solid enough to bear me. The gander rose in the air and circled
overhead, squalling fearfully. On going nearer, I saw that all those
geese were frozen in, and that they were dead; the entire flock, except
that one powerful old gander, had perished there. They were frozen in
the ice so firmly that I could not pull them out; in fact, I could
scarcely bend the necks of those that had tucked them under their wings.
I counted forty-one of them besides the gander.
While I was looking them over, Tom and Addison appeared on the shore.
They had waked and missed me, but, hearing the gander, had guessed that
I had gone to the pond. Both were astonished and could hardly believe
their eyes till they came out where I stood and tried to lift the geese.
"We shall have to chop them out with the axe!" Tom exclaimed. "By jingo,
boys, here's goose feathers enough to make two feather beds and pillows
to boot."
The gander, still squalling, circled over us again.
"The old fellow feels bad," Addison remarked. "He has lost his whole big
family."
We decided that the geese on their way north had been out in the
rainstorm, and that when the weather cleared and turned cold so
suddenly, with snow squalls, they had become bewildered, perhaps, and
had descended on the pond. The cold wave was so sharp that, being quite
without food, they had frozen into the ice and perished there.
"Well, old boy," Tom said, addressing the gander that now stood flapping
his wings at us a few hundred feet away, "you've lost your women-folks.
We may as well have them as the bobcats."
He fetched the axe, and we cut away the ice round the geese and then
carried six loads of them down to camp.
If we had had any proper means of preparing a goose we should certainly
have put one to bake in the stove oven; for all three of us were hungry.
As it was, Addison said we had better make a scoot, load the geese on
it, and take the nearest way home. We had only the axe and our
jackknives to work with, and it was nine o'clock before we had built a
rude sled and loaded the geese on it.
As we were about to start we heard a familiar voice cry, "Well, well;
there they are!" And who should come through the cedars but the old
Squire! A little behind him was Tom's father.
On account of the severity of the weather both families had been much
alarmed when we failed to come home the night before. Making an early
start that morning, Mr. Edwards and the old Squire had driven to the
Silver farm and, leaving their team there, had followed the town line in
search of us. On reaching Wild Brook they had seen that the snow bridge
had fallen, and at first they had been badly frightened. On looking
round, however, they had found the marks of our boot heels on the frozen
snow, heading up-stream, and had immediately guessed that we had gone to
the old camp. So we had their company on the way home; and much
astonished both of them were at the sight of so many geese.
The two households shared the goose feathers. The meat was in excellent
condition for cooking, and our two families had many a good meal of
roast goose. We sent six of the birds to the town farm, and we heard
afterwards that the seventeen paupers there partook of a grand goose
dinner, garnished with apple sauce. But I have often thought of that old
gander flying north to the breeding grounds alone.
The following week we walked the remaining part of the town line and
received the fee.
CHAPTER XII
THE ROSE-QUARTZ SPRING
Throughout that entire season the old Squire was much interested in a
project for making a fortune from the sale of spring water. The water of
the celebrated Poland Spring, twenty miles from our place--where the
Poland Spring Hotel now stands--was already enjoying an enviable
popularity; and up in our north pasture on the side of Nubble Hill,
there was, and still is, a fine spring, the water of which did not
differ in analysis from that of the Poland Spring. It is the "boiling"
type of spring, and the water, which is stone-cold, bubbles up through
white quartzose sand at the foot of a low granite ledge. It flows
throughout the year at the rate of about eight gallons a minute.
It had always been called the Nubble Spring, but when the old Squire and
Addison made their plans for selling the spring water they rechristened
it the Rose-Quartz Spring on account of an outcrop of rose quartz in the
ledges near by.
They had the water analyzed by a chemist in Boston, who pronounced it as
pure as Poland water, and, indeed, so like it that he could detect no
difference. All of us were soon enthusiastic about the project.
First we set to work to make the spring more attractive. We cleared up
the site and formed a granite basin for the water, sheltered by a little
kiosk with seats where visitors could sit as they drank. We also cleared
up the slope round it and set out borders of young pine and
balm-of-Gilead trees.
We sent samples of the water in bottles and kegs to dealers in spring
waters, along with a descriptive circular--which Addison composed--and
the statement of analysis. Addison embellished the circular with several
pictures of the spring and its surroundings, and cited medical opinions
on the value of pure waters of this class. We also invited our neighbors
and fellow townsmen to come and drink at our spring.
Very soon orders began to come in. The name itself, the Rose-Quartz
Spring, was fortunate, for it conveyed a suggestion of crystal purity;
that with the analysis induced numbers of people in the great cities,
especially in Chicago, to try it.
Less was known in 1868 than now of the precautions that it is necessary
to take in sending spring water to distant places, in order to insure
its keeping pure. Little was known of microbes or antisepsis.
The old Squire and Addison decided that they would have to send the
water to their customers in kegs of various sizes and in barrels; but as
kegs made of oak staves, or of spruce, would impart a woody taste to the
water, they hit upon the expedient of making the staves of sugar-maple
wood. The old Squire had a great quantity of staves sawed at his
hardwood flooring mill, and at the cooper shop had them made into kegs
and barrels of all sizes from five gallons' capacity up to fifty
gallons'. After the kegs were set up we filled them with water and
allowed them to soak for a week to take out all taste of the wood before
we filled them from the spring and sent them away.
We believed that that precaution was sufficient, but now it is known
that spring water can be kept safe only by putting it in glass bottles
and glass carboys. No water will keep sweet in barrels for any great
length of time, particularly when exported to hot climates.
The spring was nearly a mile from the farmhouse; and at a little
distance below it we built a shed and set up a large kettle for boiling
water to scald out the kegs and barrels that came back from customers
and dealers to be refilled. We were careful not only to rinse them but
also to soak them before we cleaned them with scalding water. As the
business of sending off the water grew, the old Squire kept a hired man
at the spring and the shed to look after the kegs and to draw the water.
His name was James Doane. He had been with the old Squire six years and
as a rule was a trustworthy man and a good worker. He had one failing:
occasionally, although not very often, he would get drunk.
So firm was the old Squire's faith in the water that we drew a supply of
it to the house every second morning. Addison fitted up a little "water
room" in the farmhouse, and we kept water there in large bottles,
cooled, for drinking. The water seemed to do us good, for we were all
unusually healthy that summer. "Here's the true elixir of health," the
old Squire often said as he drew a glass of it and sat down in the
pleasant, cool "water room" to enjoy it.
Addison and he had fixed the price of the water at twenty-five cents a
gallon, although we made our neighbors and fellow townsmen welcome to
all they cared to come and get. We first advertised the water in June,
and sales increased slowly throughout the summer and fall. Apparently
the water gave good satisfaction, for the kegs came back to be refilled.
By the following May the success of the venture seemed assured. Those
who were using the water spoke well of it, and the demand was growing.
In April we received orders for more than nine hundred gallons, and in
May for more than thirteen hundred gallons.
The old Squire was very happy over the success of the enterprise. "It's
a fine, clean business," he said. "That water has done us good, and it
will do others good; and if they drink that, they will drink less
whiskey."
Addison spent the evenings in making out bills and attending to the
correspondence; for there were other matters that had to be attended to
besides the Rose-Quartz Spring. Besides the farm work we had to look
after the hardwood flooring mill that summer and the white-birch dowel
mill. For several days toward the end of June we did not even have time
to go up to the spring for our usual supply of water. But we kept Jim
Doane there under instructions to attend carefully to the putting up of
the water. It was his sole business, and he seemed to be attending to it
properly. He was at the spring every day and boarded at the house of a
neighbor, named Murch, who lived nearer to Nubble Hill than we did.
Every day, too, we noticed the smoke of the fire under the kettle in
which he heated water for scalding out the casks.
The first hint we had that things were going wrong was when Willis Murch
told Addison that Doane had been on a spree, and that for several days
he had been so badly under the influence of liquor that he did not know
what he was about.
On hearing that news Addison and the old Squire hastened to the spring.
Jim was there, sober enough now, and working industriously. But he
looked bad, and his account of how he had done his work for the last
week was far from clear. The old Squire gave him another job at the
dowel mill and stationed his brother, Asa Doane, a strictly temperate
man, at the spring. We could not learn just what had happened during the
past ten days, but we hoped that no serious neglect had occurred.
But there had.
Toward the middle of July a letter of complaint came--the first we had
ever received. "This barrel of water from your spring is not keeping
good," were the exact words of it. I remember them well, for we read
them over and over again. Addison replied at once, and sent another
barrel in its place.
Before another week had passed a second complaint came. "This last
barrel of water from your spring is turning 'ropy,'" it said. Another
customer sent his barrel back when half full, with a letter saying, "It
isn't fit to drink. The barrel is slimy inside."
Addison examined the barrel carefully, and found that there was, indeed,
an appreciable film of vegetable growth on the staves inside. The taste
of the water also was quite different.
Within a fortnight four more barrels and kegs were returned to us, in at
least two cases accompanied by sharp words of condemnation. "No better
than pond water," one customer wrote.
We carefully examined the inside of all these barrels and kegs as soon
as they came back. Besides invisible impurities in the water, there was
in every one more or less visible dirt, even bits of grass and slivers
of wood.
There was only one conclusion to reach: Jim Doane had not been careful
in filling the kegs and had not properly cleansed and scalded them. As
nearly as we could discover from bits of information that came out
subsequently, there were days and days when he was too "hazy" to know
whether he had cleansed the barrels or not. He had filled them and sent
them off in foul condition.
Addison wrote more than fifty letters to customers, defending the purity
of Rose-Quartz Spring water, relating the facts of this recent
"accident" and asking for a continued trial of it. I suppose that people
at a distance thought that if there had been carelessness once there
might be again. Very likely, too, they suspected that the water had
never been so pure as we had declared it to be. Owners of other springs
who had put water on the market improved the opportunity to circulate
reports that Rose-Quartz water would not "keep." We got possession of
three circulars in which that damaging statement had been sent
broadcast.
There is probably no commodity in the world that depends so much on a
reputation for purity as spring water. By September the orders for water
had fallen off to a most disheartening extent. Scarcely three hundred
gallons were called for.
In the hope that this was merely a temporary set-back, and knowing that
there was no fault in the water itself, the old Squire spent a thousand
dollars in advertisements to stem the tide of adverse criticism. So far
as we could discover, the effort produced little or no effect on sales.
The opinion had gone abroad that the water would not keep pure for any
great length of time. By the following spring sales had dwindled to such
an extent that it was hardly worth while to continue the business.
Considered as a commercial asset, the Rose-Quartz Spring was dead.
Regretfully we gave up the enterprise and let the spring fall into
disuse. It was then, I remember, that the old Squire said, "It takes us
one lifetime to learn how to do things."
CHAPTER XIII
FOX PILLS
ABOUT this time an affair which had long been worrying Addison and
myself came to a final settlement.
Up in the great woods, three or four miles from the old Squire's farm,
there was a clearing of thirty or forty acres in which stood an old
house and barn, long unoccupied. A lonelier place can hardly be
imagined. Sombre spruce and fir woods inclosed the clearing on all
sides; and over the tree-tops on the east side loomed the three rugged
dark peaks of the Stoss Pond mountains.
Thirty years before, Lumen Bartlett, a young man about twenty years old,
had cleared the land with his own labor, built the house and barn, and a
little later gone to live there with his wife, Althea, who was younger
even than he.
Life in so remote a place must have been somewhat solitary; but they
were very happy, it is said, for a year and a half. Then one morning
they fell to quarreling bitterly over so trifling a thing as a cedar
broom. In the anger of the moment Althea made a bundle of her clothing
and without a word of farewell set off on foot to go home to her
parents, who lived ten miles away.
Lumen, equally stubborn, took his axe and went out to his work of
clearing land for a new field. No one saw him alive afterwards; but two
weeks later some hunters found his body in the woods. Apparently the
tops of several of the trees he had been trying to cut down had lodged
together, and to bring them down he had cut another large tree on which
they hung. This last tree must have started to fall suddenly. Lumen ran
the wrong way and was caught under the top of one of the lodged trees as
it came crashing down. The marks showed that he had tried, probably for
hours, to cut off with his pocket knife one large branch that lay across
his body. They found the knife with the blade broken. He had also tried
to free himself by digging with his bare fingers into the hard, rocky
earth. If Lumen had been to blame for the quarrel, he paid a fearful
penalty.
Afterwards, however, Althea declared that she had been to blame; and if
that were true, she also paid a sad penalty. During the few remaining
years of her life she was never in her right mind. She used to imagine
that she heard Lumen calling to her for help, and several times, eluding
her parents, she made her way back to the clearing. Every time when they
found her she was wandering about the place, stopping now and then as if
to listen, then flitting on again, saying in a sad singsong, "I'm
coming, Lumen! Oh, I'll come back!"
Naturally, persons of a superstitious nature began to imagine that they,
too, heard strange cries at the deserted farm, for no one ever lived
there subsequently. Very likely they did hear cries--the cries of wild
animals; that old clearing in the woods was a great place for bears,
foxes, raccoons and "lucivees."
A year or two before we young folks went home to live on the old farm
the town sold this deserted lot at auction for unpaid taxes. Some years
before, vagrant woodsmen had accidentally burned the old house; but the
barn, a weathered, gray structure, was still intact. Since the land
adjoined other timber lots that the old Squire owned, he bid it off and
let it lie unoccupied except as a pasture where sheep, or young stock
that needed little care, could be put away for the summer. The soil was
good, and the grass was excellent in quality.
One year, in May, after we had repaired the brush fence, we turned into
it our three Morgan colts along with two Percherons from a stock farm
near the village, a Morgan three-year-old belonging to our neighbors,
the Edwardses, three colts owned by other neighbors, and a beautiful
sorrel three-year-old mare, the pet of young Mrs. Kennard, wife of the
principal at the village academy. Her father, who had recently died, had
given her the colt.
All four Morgans were dark-chestnut colts, lithe but strong and
clear-eyed. And what chests and loins they had for their size! They were
not so showy as the larger, dappled Percherons, perhaps, but they were
better all-round horses. Lib, Brown and Joe were the names of our
Morgans; Chet was the name that the Edwards young folks gave theirs. Yet
none of them was so pretty as Mrs. Kennard's Sylph. She was, indeed, a
blonde fairy of a mare, as graceful as a deer.
On the afternoon that we took Sylph up to the clearing, Mrs. Kennard
walked all the way with us, because she wished to see for herself what
the place was like. When she saw what a remote, wild region it was, she
was loath to leave her pet there, and Mr. Kennard had some ado to
reassure her. At last, after giving the colt many farewell pats and
caresses, she came away with us. On the way home she said over and over
to Addison and me, "Be sure to go up often and see that Sylph is all
right." And, laughing a little, we promised that we would, and that we
would also give the colt sugar lumps as well as her weekly salt.
"Salting" the sheep and young cattle that were out at pasture for the
season was one of our weekly duties. When we were very busy we sometimes
put it off until Sunday morning. Sometimes it slipped our minds
altogether for a few days, or even for a week; but Mrs. Kennard's
solicitude for her pet had touched our hearts, and we resolved that we
should always be prompt in performing the task.
The colts had been turned out on Tuesday; and the following Sunday
morning after breakfast Addison and I, with the girls accompanying us,
set off with the salt and the sugar lumps. It was a long walk for the
girls, but an inspiring one on such a bright morning. The songs of birds
and the chatter of squirrels filled the woodland. Fresh green heads of
bosky ferns and wake-robin were pushing up through the old mats of last
year's foliage.
"How jealous the rest of them will be of Sylph!" said Ellen, who had the
sugar lumps. "I believe I shall give each of them a lump, so that they
won't be spiteful and kick her."
As we neared the bars in the brush fence we saw several of the colts at
the upper side of the clearing beyond the old barn. At the first call
from us, up went their pretty heads; there was a general whinny, and
then they came racing to the bars to greet us. Perhaps they had been a
little homesick so far from stables and barns.
"One--two--three--four--why, they are not all here!" Theodora said.
"Here are only seven. Lib isn't here, or Mrs. Kennard's Sylph."
"Oh, I guess they're not far off," Addison said, and began calling, "Co'
jack, co' jack!" He wanted them all there before he dropped the salt in
little piles on the grassy greensward.
But the absent ones did not come. Ellen ventured the opinion that they
might have jumped the fence and wandered off.
"Oh, they wouldn't separate up here in the woods," Addison said. "Colts
keep together when off in a back pasture like this."
But when he went on calling and they still did not come, we began really
to fear that they had got out and strayed.
"Let's go round the fence," Addison said at last, "and see if we find a
gap, or hoofprints on the outside, where they have jumped over."
He and Theodora went one way, Ellen and I the other. We met halfway
round the clearing without having discovered either gaps in the fence or
tracks outside. Remembering that horses, when rolling, sometimes get
cast in hollows between knolls, we searched the entire clearing, and
even looked into the old barn, the door of which stood slightly ajar;
but we found no trace of the missing animals and began to believe that
they really had jumped out.
We gave the seven colts their salt and were about to start home to
report to the old Squire when Ellen remarked that we had not actually
looked among the alders down by the brook, where the colts went for
water.
"Oh, but those colts would not stay down there by themselves all this
time with us calling them!" Addison exclaimed.
"But let's just take a look, to be certain," Ellen replied, and she and
I ran down there.
We had no more than pushed our way through the alder clumps when two
crows rose silently and went flapping away; and then I caught sight of
something that made me stop short: the body of one of the Morgan
colts--our Lib--lying close to the brook!
"Oh!" gasped Ellen. "It's dead!"
Pushing on through the alders, we saw one of the Percherons near the
Morgan. The sight affected Ellen so much that she turned back; but I
went on and a little farther up the brook found the sorrel lying stark
and stiff.
A moment later Ellen returned, with Addison and Theodora. Both girls
were moved to tears as they gazed at poor Sylph; they felt even worse
about her than about our own Morgan.
"Oh, what will Mrs. Kennard say?" Ellen cried. "How dreadfully she will
feel!"
Addison closely examined the bodies of the colts. "I cannot understand
what did it!" he exclaimed. "No marks. No blood. It wasn't wild animals.
It couldn't have been lightning, for there hasn't been a thundershower
this season. Must be something they've eaten."
We looked all along the brook, but could see no Indian poke, the fresh
growths of which will poison stock. Nor had we ever seen ground hemlock
or poisonous ivy there. The clearing was nearly all good, grassy upland
such as farmers consider a safe pasturage. Truly the shadow of tragedy
seemed to hover there.
We bore our sorrowful tidings home, and the old Squire was as much
astonished and mystified as every one else. None of us had the heart
either to carry the sad news or even to send word of it to Mrs. Kennard;
but we notified the owner of the Percherons at once. He came to look
into the matter the next morning.
The affair made an unusual stir, and all that Monday a considerable
number of persons walked up to the clearing to see if they could
determine the cause of the colts' mysterious death. Many and various
were the conjectures. Some professed to believe that the colts had been
wantonly poisoned. "It's a state-prison offense to lay poison for
domestic animals," we overheard several of them say; but no one could
find any motive for such a deed.
The owner of the Percheron brought a horse doctor, who made a careful
examination, but he was unable to determine anything more than that the
horses had died of a virulent poison. We buried them that afternoon.
Before night the news had reached Mrs. Kennard. In her grief she not
only reproached herself bitterly for allowing Sylph to be turned out in
so wild a place but held the old Squire and all of us as somehow to
blame for her pet's death. The owner of the Percherons also intimated
that he should hold us liable for his loss, although when a man turns
his stock out in a neighbor's pasture it is generally on the
understanding that it is at his own risk. He took away his other
Percheron colt; and during the day all the other persons who had colts
up there took their animals home. In all respects the occurrence was
most disagreeable--a truly black Monday with us. The old Squire said
little, except that he wanted the right thing done.
For an hour or more after we went to bed that night Addison and I lay
talking about the affair, but we could think of no explanation of the
strange occurrence and at last fell asleep. The next morning, however,
the solution of the mystery flashed into Addison's mind. As we were
dressing at five o'clock, he suddenly turned to me and exclaimed in a
queer voice:
"I know what killed those colts!"
"What?" I asked.
"That fox bed!"
For a whole minute we stood there, half dressed, looking at each other
in consternation. Without doubt, the blame for the loss of the colts was
on us. What the consequences might be we hardly dared to think.
"What shall we do?" I exclaimed.
Addison looked alarmed as he answered in a low tone, "Keep quiet--till
we think it over."
"We must tell the old Squire," I said.
"But there's Willis," Addison reminded me. "It was Willis who made the
bed, you know."
The old clearing was, as I have said, a great place for foxes; and the
preceding fall Addison and I, wishing to add to the fund we were
accumulating for our expenses when we should go away to college, had
entered into a kind of partnership with Willis Murch to do a little
trapping up there. Addison and I were little more than silent partners,
however; Willis actually tended the traps.
But there are years, as every trapper knows, when you cannot get a fox
into a steel trap by any amount of artfulness. What the reason is, I do
not know, unless some fox that has been trapped and that has escaped
passes the word round among all the other foxes. There were plenty of
foxes coming to the clearing; we never went up there without seeing
fresh signs about the old barn. Yet Willis got no fox.
What is more strange, it was so all over New England that fall; foxes
kept clear of steel traps. As the fur market was quick, certain city
dealers began sending out offers of "fox pills" to trappers whom they
had on their lists. Willis received one of those letters and showed it
to us. The fox pills were, of course, poison and were to be inclosed in
little balls of tallow and laid where foxes were known to come.
Trappers were advised to use them but were properly cautioned how and
where to expose them. After picking up one of the pills, a fox would
make for the nearest running water as fast as he could go; and that was
the place for the trapper to look for him, for, after drinking, the fox
soon expired. It has been argued that poison is more humane than the
steel trap, since it brings a quick death; but both are cruel. There are
also other considerations that weigh against the use of poison; but at
that time there was no law against it.
The furrier who wrote to Willis offered to send him a box of those pills
for seventy-five cents. We talked it over and agreed to try it, and
Addison and I contributed the money.
A few days later Willis received the pills and proceeded to lay them out
after a plan of his own. He cut several tallow candles into pieces about
an inch long, and embedded a pill in each. When he had prepared twenty
or more of those pieces of poisoned tallow, he put them in what he
called a fox bed, of oat chaff, behind that old barn. The bed was about
as large as the floor of a small room. At that time of year farmers were
killing poultry, and Willis collected a basketful of chickens' and
turkeys' heads to put into the bed along with the pieces of tallow. He
thought that the foxes would smell the heads and dig the bed over.
We had said nothing to any one about it. The old Squire was away from
home; but we knew pretty well that he would not approve of that method
of getting foxes. Indeed, he had little sympathy with the use of traps.
Willis was the only one who looked after the bed, or, indeed, who went
up to the clearing at all.
During the next three or four weeks Willis gathered in not less than ten
pelts, I think. They were mostly red foxes, but one was a large "crossed
gray," the skin of which brought twenty-two dollars. After every few
days Willis "doctored" the bed with more pills; he probably used more
than a hundred.
What had happened to the colts was now clear. They had nuzzled that
chaff for the oat grains that were left in it and had picked up some of
those little balls of tallow. We wondered now that we had not at once
guessed the cause of their death, and we wondered, too, that we had not
thought of the fox bed and the danger from it when we first turned the
colts into the pasture. The fact remains, however, that it had never
occurred to us that fox pills would poison colts as well as foxes.
All that day as we worked we brooded over it; and that evening, when we
had done the chores, we stole off to the Murches' and, calling Willis
out, told him about it and asked him what he thought we had better do.
At first he was incredulous, then thoroughly alarmed. It was not so much
the thought of having to settle for the loss of the horses that
terrified him as it was the dread that he might be imprisoned for
exposing poison to domestic animals.
"Don't say a word!" he exclaimed. "Nobody knows about that fox bed. If
we keep still, it will never come out."
Addison and I both felt that such secrecy would leave us with a mighty
mean feeling in our hearts; but Willis begged us never to say a word
about it to any one. He was as penitent as we were, I think; but the
thought that he might have to go to jail filled him with panic.
We went home in a very uncomfortable frame of mind, without having
reached any decision.
"We've got to square this somehow," Addison said. "If I had the money,
I'd settle for the colts and say nothing more to Willis about it."
"Money wouldn't make Mrs. Kennard feel much better," I said.
"That's so; but we might find a pretty sorrel colt somewhere, and make
her a present of it in place, of Sylph--if we only had the money."
If it had not been for Willis, I rather think that we should have gone
to the old Squire that very evening and told him the whole story; but
the legal consequences of the affair troubled us, and since they
affected Willis more than they affected us we did not like to say
anything.
Week after week went by without our being able to bring ourselves to
confess. The concealment was a source of daily uneasiness to us;
although we rarely spoke of the affair to each other, it was always on
our minds. Whenever we did speak of it together, Addison would say,
"We've got to straighten that out," or, "I hate to have that colt scrape
hanging on us in this way." We tried several times to get Willis's
consent to our telling the old Squire; but he had brooded over the thing
so long that he had convinced himself that if his act became known he
would surely be sent to the penitentiary.
So there the matter lay covered up all summer until one afternoon in
September, when the old Squire drove to the village to contract for his
apple barrels, and I went with him to get a pair of boots. Just as we
were starting for home we met Mrs. Kennard. Previously she had often
visited us at the farm, but since the death of Sylph she had not come
near us. The old Squire tried to-day to be more cordial than ever, but
Mrs. Kennard answered him rather coldly. She started on, but turned
suddenly and asked whether we had learned anything more about the death
of those colts.
"And, oh, do you think that poor Sylph lay there, suffering, a long
time?" she exclaimed, with tears in her eyes. "I keep thinking of it."
"No, we have learned nothing more," the old Squire said gently. "It was
a mysterious affair; but I think all three of the colts died suddenly,
within a few minutes."
That was all he could say to comfort her, and Mrs. Kennard walked slowly
away with her handkerchief at her eyes. It was painful, and I sat there
in the wagon feeling like a mean little malefactor.
"Very singular about those colts," the old Squire remarked partly to me,
partly to himself, as we drove on. "A strange thing."
Sudden resolution nerved me. I was sick of skulking. "Sir," said I,
swallowing hard several times, "I know what killed those colts!"
The old Squire glanced quickly at me, started to speak, but, seeing how
greatly agitated I was, kindly refrained from questioning me.
"It was fox pills!" I blurted out. "Willis Murch and Ad and I had a fox
bed up there last winter. We never thought of it when the colts were put
in. They ate the poison pills."
The old Squire made no comment, and I plunged into further details.
"That accounts for it, then," he said at last.
I had expected him to speak plainly to me about those fox pills, but he
merely asked me what I thought of using poison in trapping.
"I never would use it again!" I exclaimed hotly. "I've had enough of
it!"
"I am glad you see it so," he remarked. "It is a bad method. You never
know what may come of it. Hounds or deer may get it, or sheep, or young
cattle, or even children."
We drove on in silence for some minutes. Clearly the old Squire was
having me do my own thinking; for he now asked me what I thought should
be done next.
"Ad thinks we ought to square it up somehow," I replied.
The old Squire nodded. "I am glad to hear that," he said. "What does
Addison think we ought to do?"
"Pay Mr. Cutter for that Percheron colt."
"Yes, and Mrs. Kennard?"
"He thinks we could find another sorrel colt somewhere and make her a
present of it."
The old Squire nodded again. "I see. Perhaps we can." Then, after a
minute, "And what about letting this be known?"
"Willis is scared," I said. "Addison thinks it would be about as well
now to settle up if we can and say nothing."
The old Squire did not reply to that for some moments. I thought he was
not so well pleased. "I do not believe that, in the circumstances,
Willis need fear being imprisoned," he said finally, "and I see no
reason for further concealment. True, several months have passed and
people have mostly forgotten it; perhaps not much good would come from
publishing the facts abroad. We'll think it over."
After a minute he said, "I'm glad you told me this," and, turning, shook
hands with me gravely.
"Ad and I don't want you to think that we expect you to square this up
for us!" I exclaimed. "We want to do something to pay the bill
ourselves, and to pay you for Lib, too."
The old Squire laughed. "Yes, I see how you feel," he said. "Would you
like me to give you and Addison a job on shares this fall or winter, so
that you could straighten this out?"
"Yes, sir, we would," said I earnestly. "And make Willis help, too!"
"Yes, yes," the old Squire said and laughed again. "I agree with you
that Willis should do his part. Nothing like square dealing, is there,
my son?" he went on. "It makes us all feel better, doesn't it?"
And he gave me a brisk little pat on the shoulder that made me feel
quite like a man.
How much better I felt after that talk with the old Squire! I felt as
blithe as a bird; and when we got home I ran and frisked and whistled
all the way to the pasture, where I went to drive home the Jersey herd.
The only qualm I felt was that I had acted without Addison's consent;
but his first words when I had told him relieved me on that score.
"I'm glad of it!" he said. "We've been in that fox bed long enough. Now
let Willis squirm." And when I told him of the old Squire's arrangement
for our paying off the debt, he said, "That suits me. But we'll make
Willis work!"
We went over to tell Willis that evening. He was, I think, even more
relieved than we were; in the weeks of anxiety that he had passed he had
determined that nothing would ever induce him to use poison again for
trapping animals.
At that time many new telegraph lines were being put up in Maine; and
the old Squire had recently accepted a contract for three thousand cedar
poles, twenty feet long, at the rate of twenty-five cents a pole. Up in
lot "No. 5," near Lurvey's Stream, there was plenty of cedar suitable
for the purpose; the poles could be floated down to the point of
delivery. The old Squire let us furnish a thousand of those poles,
putting in our own labor at cutting and hauling. And in that way we
earned the money to pay for the damage done by our fox pills.
Mr. Cutter, the owner of the Percheron, was willing to settle his loss
for one hundred dollars; and during the winter, by dint of many
inquiries, we heard of another sorrel, a three-year-old, which we
purchased for a hundred and fifteen dollars. We took Mr. Kennard into
our confidence and with his connivance planned a pleasant surprise for
his wife. While Theodora and Ellen, who had accompanied us to the
village, were entertaining Mrs. Kennard indoors, the old Squire and
Addison and I smuggled the colt into the little stable and put her in
the same stall where Sylph had once stood. When all was ready, Mr.
Kennard went in and said:
"Louise, Sylph's got back! Come out to the stable!"
Wonderingly Mrs. Kennard followed him out to the stable. For a moment
she gazed, astonished; then, of course, she guessed the ruse. "Oh, but
it isn't Sylph!" she cried. "It isn't half so pretty!" And out came her
pocket handkerchief again.
The old Squire took her gently by the hand. "It's the best we could do,"
he said. "We hope you will accept her with our best wishes."
Truth to say, Mrs. Kennard's tears were soon dried; and before long the
new colt became almost as great a pet as the lost Sylph.
"Don't you ever forget, and don't you ever let me forget, how the old
Squire has helped us out of this scrape," Ad said to me that night after
we had gone upstairs. "He's an old Christian. If he ever needs a friend
in his old age and I fail him, let my name be Ichabod!"
CHAPTER XIV
THE UNPARDONABLE SIN
During the first week in May the old Squire and grandmother Ruth made a
trip to Portland, and when they came back, they brought, among other
presents to us young folks at home, a glass jar of goldfish for Ellen.
In Ellen's early home, before the Civil War and before she came to the
old Squire's to live, there had always been a jar of goldfish in the
window, and afterwards at the old farm the girl had often remarked that
she missed it. Well I remember the cry of joy she gave that day when
grandmother stepped down from the wagon at the farmhouse door and,
turning, took a glass jar of goldfish from under the seat.
"O grandmother!" she cried and fairly flew to take it from the old
lady's hands.
Ellen had eyes for nothing else that evening, and as it grew dark she
went time and again with a lamp to look at the fish and to drop in
crumbs of cracker.
During the four days the old folks were away we had run free; games and
jokes had been in full swing. There was still mischief in us, for the
next morning when we came down to do the chores before any one else was
up, Addison said:
"Let's have some fun with Nell; she'll be down here pretty quick. Get
some fish poles and strings and bend up some pins for hooks and we'll
pretend to be fishing in the jar!"
In a few minutes we each had rigged up a semblance of fishing tackle and
were ready. When Ellen opened the sitting-room door a little later the
sight that met her astonished eyes took her breath away. Addison was
calmly fishing in the jar!
"What are you doing?" she cried. "My goldfish!"
Addison fled out of the room with Ellen in hot pursuit; she finally
caught him, seized the rod and broke it. But when she turned back to see
what damages her adored fish had suffered, she beheld Halstead, perched
over the jar, also fishing in it.
"My senses! You here, too!" she cried. "Can't a boy see a fish without
wanting to catch it?"
When she hurried back in a flurry of anxiety after chasing him to the
carriage house, she found me there, too, pretending to yank one out. But
by this time she saw that it was a joke, and the box on the ear that she
gave me was not a very hard one.
"Seems to me, young folks, I heard quite too much noise down here for
Sunday morning," grandmother said severely when she appeared a little
later. "Such racing and running! You really must have better regard for
the day."
Preparations for breakfast went on in a subdued manner, and we were
sitting at table rather quietly when a caller appeared at the door--Mrs.
Rufus Sylvester, who lived about a mile from us. Her face wore a look of
anxiety.
"Squire," she exclaimed, "I implore you to come over and say something
to Rufus! He's terrible downcast this morning. He went out to the barn,
but he hasn't milked, nor done his chores. He's settin' out there with
his face in his hands, groanin'. I'm afraid, Squire, he may try to take
his own life!"
The old Squire rose from the table and led Mrs. Sylvester into the
sitting-room; grandmother followed them and carefully shut the door
behind her. We heard them speaking in low tones for some moments; then
they came out, and both the old Squire and grandmother Ruth set off with
Mrs. Sylvester.
"Is he ill?" Theodora whispered to grandmother as the old lady passed
her.
"No, child; he is melancholy this spring," the old lady replied. "He is
afraid he has committed the unpardonable sin."
The old folks and our caller left us finishing our breakfast, and I
recollect that for some time none of us spoke. Our recent unseemly
hilarity had vanished.
"What do you suppose Sylvester's done?" Halstead asked at last, with a
glance at Theodora; then, as she did not seem inclined to hazard
conjectures on that subject, he addressed himself to Addison, who was
trying to extract a second cup of coffee from the big coffeepot.
"You know everything, Addison, or think you do. What is this
unpardonable sin?"
"Cousin Halstead," Addison replied, not relishing the manner in which he
had put the question, "you are likely enough to find that out for
yourself if you don't mend some of your bad ways here."
Halstead flamed up and muttered something about the self-righteousness
of a certain member of the family; but Theodora then remarked tactfully
that, as nearly as she could understand it, the unpardonable sin is
something we do that can never be forgiven.
Some months before Elder Witham had preached a sermon in which he had
set forth the doctrine of predestination and the unpardonable sin, but I
have to confess that none of us could remember what he had said.
"I think it's in the Bible," Theodora added, and, going into the
sitting-room, she fetched forth grandmother Ruth's concordance Bible and
asked Addison to help her find the references. Turning first to one
text, then to another, for some minutes they read the passages aloud,
but did not find anything conclusive. The discussion had put me in a
rather disturbed state of mind in regard to several things I had done at
one time and another, and I suppose I looked sober, for I saw Addison
regarding me curiously. He continued to glance at me, clearly with
intention, and shook his head gloomily several times until Ellen noticed
it and exclaimed in my behalf, "Well, I guess he stands as good a chance
as you do!"
Two hours or so later the old Squire and grandmother returned,
thoughtfully silent; they did not tell us what had occurred, and it was
not until a good many years later, when Theodora, Halstead and Addison
had left the old farm, that I learned what had happened that morning at
the Sylvester place. The old Squire and I were driving home from the
village when something brought the incident to his mind, and, since I
was now old enough to understand, he related what had occurred.
When they reached the Sylvester farm that morning grandmother went
indoors with Mrs. Sylvester, and the old Squire proceeded to the barn.
All was very dark and still there, and it was some moments before he
discovered Rufus; the man was sitting on a heckling block at the far
dark end of the barn, huddled down, with his head bowed in his hands.
"Good morning, neighbor!" the old Squire said cheerily. "A fine Sabbath
morning. Spring never looked more promising for us."
Rufus neither stirred nor answered. The old Squire drew near and laid
his hand gently on his shoulder.
"Is it something you could tell me about?" he asked.
Rufus groaned and raised two dreary eyes from his hands. "Oh, I can't!
I'm 'shamed. It's nothin' I can tell!" he cried out miserably and then
burst into fearful sobs.
"Don't let me ask, then, unless you think it might do you good," the old
Squire said.
"Nothin'll ever do me any good again!" Rufus cried. "I'm beyond it,
Squire. I'm a lost soul. The door of mercy is closed on me, Squire. I've
committed the unpardonable sin!"
The old Squire saw that no effort to cheer Rufus that did not go to the
root of his misery would avail. Sitting down beside him, he said:
"A great many of us sometimes fear that we have committed the
unpardonable sin. But there is one sure way of knowing whether a person
has committed it or not. I once knew a man who in a drunken brawl had
killed another. He was convicted of manslaughter, served his term in
prison, then went back to his farm and worked hard and well for ten
years. One spring that former crime began to weigh on his mind. He
brooded on it and finally became convinced that he had committed the sin
for which there can be no forgiveness. He wanted desperately to atone
for what he had done, and the idea got possession of his mind that since
he had taken a human life the only way for him was to take his own
life--a life for a life. The next morning they found that he had hanged
himself in his barn.
"The young minister who was asked to officiate at the funeral declined
to do so on doctrinal grounds; and the burial was about to take place
without even a prayer at the grave when a stranger hurriedly approached.
He was a celebrated divine who had heard the circumstances of the man's
death and who had journeyed a hundred miles to offer his services at the
burial.
"'My good friends,' the stranger began, 'I have come to rectify a great
mistake. This poor fellow mortal whose body you are committing to its
last resting place mistook the full measure of God's compassion. He
believed that he had committed that sin for which there is no
forgiveness. In his extreme anxiety to atone for his former crime, he
was led to commit another, for God requires no man to commit suicide,
and his Word expressly forbids it. My friends, I am here to-day to tell
you that there is _only one sin for which there is no forgiveness, and
that is the sin which we do not repent. That alone is the unpardonable
sin._ This man was sincerely sorry for his sin, and I am as certain that
God has forgiven him as I am that I am standing here by his grave.'"
As the old Squire spoke, Rufus raised his head, and a ray of hope broke
across his woebegone face.
"Now the question is," the old Squire continued, "are you sorry for what
you did?"
"Oh, yes, Squire, yes! I'm terribly sorry!" he cried eagerly. "I do
repent of it! I never in the world would do such a thing again!"
"Then what you have done was not the unpardonable sin at all!" the old
Squire exclaimed confidently.
"Do you think so?" Rufus cried imploringly.
"I know so!" the old Squire declared authoritatively. "Now let's feed
those cows and your horse. Then we will go out and take a look at the
fields where you are
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