A Busy Year at the Old Squire's Part 42

Just as he finished speaking a deep, portentous rumbling began and continued for several seconds. The distant mountain sides seemed to reverberate with it, and at the end the whole forest shook with heavy, jarring sounds. We both leaped out into the rain.

"What is it, Ad?" I cried.

"Earthquake," said Addison at last. "I've heard the old Squire say that one sometimes comes in Maine, when there is a great winter thaw."

The deep jar and tremor gave us a strange sense of insecurity and terror; there seemed to be no telling what might happen next.

Accordingly, we abandoned our moist den and set off in the rain. We went halfway to our knees at every step in the now soft, slushy snow. Addison went ahead with the hatchet, spotting a tree every hundred feet or so, and I followed in his tracks, carrying the basket and the gun. In fifteen minutes we were wet to our skins.

For three or four miles we were uncertain of our course. The forest then lightened ahead, and presently we came out on the sh.o.r.e of a small lake that looked yellow over its whole surface.

"Good!" Addison exclaimed. "This must be Lone Pond, and see, away over there is Birchboard Mountain. Boundary Camp is just this side of it. It can't be more than four or five miles."

Skirting the south sh.o.r.e of the pond, we pushed on through fir and cedar swamps. Worse traveling it would be impossible to imagine. Every hole and hollow was full of yellow slush. Finally, after another two hours or so of hard going, we came out on Lurvey's Stream about half a mile below the camp, which was on the other bank. A foot or more of water was running yellow over the ice; but the ice itself was still firm, and we were able to cross on it.

Even before we came in sight of the camp, we smelled wood smoke.

"Halse is there!" I exclaimed.

"It may be trappers from over the line," Addison said. "Be cautious."

I ran forward, however, and peeped in at the little window. Some one was crawling on the floor, partly behind the old camp stove, and I had to look twice before I could make out that it was really Halstead. Then we burst in upon him, and Addison said rather shortly, "Well, hunter, what are you doing here?"

Halstead raised himself slowly off the floor beside the stove, stared at us for a moment without saying a word, and then suddenly burst into tears!

It was some moments before Halstead could speak, he was so shaken with sobs. We then discovered that his left leg was virtually useless, and that in general he was in a bad plight. He had been there for eight days in that condition, crawling round on one knee and his hands to keep a fire and to cook his food.

"But how did you get hurt?" Addison asked.

"That Alf did it!" Halstead cried; and then, with tears still flowing, he went on to tell the story--his side of it.

While getting their breakfast on the third morning after they had reached the camp, they had had a dispute about making their coffee; hard names had followed, and at last, in high temper, Alfred had sprung up declaring that he would not camp with Halstead another hour. Grabbing the gun, he had started off.

"That's my gun! Leave it here! Drop it!" Halstead had shouted angrily and had run after him.

Down near the bank of the stream, Halstead had overtaken him and had tried to wrest the gun from him. Alfred had turned, struck him, and then given him so hard a push that he had fallen over sidewise with his foot down between two logs. Alfred had run on without even looking back.

The story did not astonish us. For the time being, however, we were chiefly concerned to find out how badly Halstead was injured, with a view to getting him home. His ankle was swollen, sore and painful; he could not touch the foot to the floor, and he howled when we tried to move it.

Evidently he had suffered a good deal, and pity prevented us from freeing our minds to him as fully as we should otherwise have done. The main thing now was to get him home, where a doctor could attend him.

"We shall have to haul him on the hand sled," Addison said to me; and fortunately the sled that Alfred and he had taken was there at the camp.

But first we cooked a meal of some of the beef, corn meal and coffee they had taken from the old Squire's.

It was still raining; and on going out an hour later we found that the stream had risen so high that we could not cross it. The afternoon, too, was waning; and, urgent as Halstead's case appeared, we had to give up the idea of starting that night. During the rest of the afternoon we busied ourselves rigging a rude seat on the sled.

There were good dry bunks at the camp, but little sleep was in store for us. Halstead was in a fevered, querulous mood and kept calling to us for something or other all night long. Whenever he fell asleep he tumbled about and hurt his ankle. That would partly wake him and set him crying, or shouting what he would do to Alfred.

Throughout the night the roar of the stream outside grew louder, and at daybreak it was running feather white. As for the snow, most of it had disappeared; stumps, logs and stones showed through it everywhere; the swamps were flooded, and every hole, hollow and depression was full of water.

That was Wednesday. We made a soup of the beef bone, cooked johnny-cake from the corn meal and kept Halstead as quiet as possible. We had left home early Sunday morning and knew that our folks would be greatly worried about all three of us.

As the day pa.s.sed, the stream rose steadily until the water was nearly up to the camp door.

"If only we had a boat, we could put Halse in it and go home," Addison said.

We discussed making a raft, for if we could navigate the stream we could descend it to within four miles of the old farm. But the roaring yellow torrent was clearly so tumultuous that no raft that we could build would hold together for a minute; and we resigned ourselves to pa.s.s another night in the camp.

The end of the thaw was at hand, however; at sunset the sky lightened, and during the evening the stars came out. At midnight, while replenishing the fire, I heard smart gusts of wind blowing from the northwest. It was clearing off cold. Noticing that it seemed very light outside, I went to the door and saw the bright arch of a splendid aurora spanning the whole sky. It was so beautiful that I waked Addison to see it.

By morning winter weather had come again; the snow slush was frozen. The stream, however, was still too high to be crossed, and the swamps and meadows were also impa.s.sable. We now bethought ourselves of another route home, by way of a lumber trail that led southward to Lurvey's Mills, where there was a bridge over the stream.

"It is five miles farther, but it is our only chance of getting home this week," Addison said.

We were busy bundling Halstead up for the sled trip when the door opened and in stepped Asa Doane, one of our hired men at the farm, and a neighbor named Davis.

"Well, well, here you are, then!" Asa exclaimed in a tone of great relief. "Do you know that the old Squire's got ten men out searching the woods for you? Why, the folks at home are scared half to death!"

We were not sorry to see Asa and Davis, and to have help for the long pull homeward. We made a start, and after a very hard tramp we finally reached the old farm, thoroughly tired out, at eight o'clock that evening.

Theodora and grandmother were so affected at seeing us back that they actually shed tears. The old Squire said little; but it was plain to see that he was greatly relieved.

If the day had been a fatiguing one for us, it had been doubly so for poor Halstead. We carried him up to his room, put him to bed and sent for a doctor. He did not leave his room again for three weeks and required no end of care from grandmother and the girls.

Little was ever said among us afterwards of this escapade of Halstead's.

As for Alfred, he came sneaking home about a month later, but had the decency, or perhaps it was the prudence, to keep away from us for nearly a year.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

UNCLE BILLY MURCH'S HAIR-RAISER

At about this time Tom and I were up at the Murches' one evening to see Willis, and persuaded old Uncle Billy, Willis' grandfather, to tell us his panther story again. That panther story was a veritable hair-raiser; and we were never tired of hearing the old man tell it. Owing to our severe climate panthers were never very numerous in northern New England--not nearly so numerous as panther stories, in which the "panther" is usually a Canadian lynx. Even at present we occasionally hear of a catamount or an "Indian devil"; but perhaps the last real panther was trapped and shot in the town of Wardsboro, Vermont, in 1875.

There can be no doubt whatever that it was a genuine panther, for its skin and bones, handsomely mounted, as taxidermists say, can be seen at any time in the Museum of Natural History in Boston. It is a fine specimen of the New England variety of the _Felis concolor_ and would no doubt have proved an ugly customer to meet on a dark night.

No doubt there were panthers larger than that one. According to Uncle Billy the Wardsboro panther was a mere kitten to the one that he once encountered when he was a boy of fourteen. Our old Squire, who then was fifteen years old, was with him and shared the experience. But try as we would, we never could induce him to tell the story. "You get Uncle Billy Murch to tell you about that," he would say and laugh. "That's Uncle Billy's story; he tells it a little better every time, and he has got that catamount so large now that I am beginning to think that it must have been a survival of the cave tiger." Yet when pinned down to it the old Squire admitted that he was with Grandsir Billy on that night and that they did have an alarming experience with an animal that beyond doubt was a large and hungry panther.

I must have heard the story ten or twelve times in all, and I recollect many of Grandsir Billy's words and expressions. But the old man's vocabulary was "picturesque"; when he was describing exciting events he was apt to drift into language that was more forceful than choice. It will be best therefore to give this account substantially as years later--long after Grandsir Billy had pa.s.sed away--the old Squire told it one afternoon when he and I were driving home together from a field day of the grange.

It seems that back in the days when the county was first settled the pioneers found the ponds and streams in peaceful possession of an ancient trapper whom they called Daddy Goss. Trapping was his business; he did nothing else. Every fall and winter while he was tending his trap lines he used to stay for a week or a month at a time at the settlers'

houses. Frequently the wife of a settler at whose house he was staying would have to take drastic measures to get rid of him; no gentler measures than taking his chair and his plate away from the table or putting his bundle of things out on the doorstep would move him. "As slow to take the hint as old Daddy Goss," came to be a local proverb.

One December while he was staying at the Murch farm he fell sick with a heavy cold, and while he lay in bed he fretted constantly about his traps. At last he offered Billy Murch, who was then fourteen years old, half of all the animals that might be in them if he Would go out and fetch them home. The line of traps, he said, began at a large pine-tree near the head of Stoss Pond and thence extended round about through the then unbroken forest for a distance of perhaps fifteen miles to a birch-bark camp on Lurvey's Stream that the old trapper had built to shelter himself from storms two years before.

Billy wanted to go but his mother would not consent to his going alone.