"Whining hypocrite!" cried Gurley, starting up in rage. "Do you tell that story when you have my last dollar in your pocket? But your pitiful whining shall not avail you. If you leave this room alive, you leave that money behind you."
"Stop, stop!" here interposed one of the company, who had noted what had inadvertently fallen from Elwood, in his warmth, respecting his apprehended bankruptcy; "stop, no such recriminations and threatenings here! I can show Elwood a way to dispose of a part of his money, at least, without bringing onanyone the charge of robbing or being robbed. Here is a note of your signing, Mr. Elwood,—a debt of honor,—for a couple of hundreds, contracted in this very room, you will remember. You may as well pay it."
"I have a similar bit of paper," said another, coming forward and presenting a note for a still larger sum.
"And I, likewise," said a third, joining the group, with an additional piece of evidence of Elwood's folly, in the shape of a gambling note; "and I shall insist on payment with the rest, seeing the money cannot be disposed of between you and Gaut without a quarrel and danger of bloodshed."
With a perplexed and troubled air Elwood paced the room a moment, without uttering a word in reply to the different demands that had so unexpectedly been made upon him. He glanced furtively towards the door, as if calculating the chances of escaping through it before any one could interpose to prevent him. He then glanced inquiringly at the company for such indications of sympathy or forbearance as might warrant the attempt; but in their countenances he read only that which should deter him from resorting to any such means of escaping the dilemma in which he now found himself. And, suddenly stopping short and turning to the new claimants for his money, he said:
"Well, gentlemen, have your way, then. I had hoped to be permitted to carry away money enough to meet my bills and engagements of to-day,—at least, as much as I brought here. But, as I am not to be allowed that privilege, hand on your paper, every scrap of my signing, and you shall have your pay."
A half-dozen notes of hand were instantly produced and thrown upon the table, and the holder of each was paid off in turn; the last of whom drew from Elwood nearly every dollar he had in his possession.
"There, gentlemen," he exclaimed, with a sort of desperate calmness, "in this line of deal, at least, my accounts are all squared. I am quits with you all."
"Not with me, by a d—d sight!" exclaimed Gurley, no longer able to restrain his rage at being thus baulked in his desperate purpose of getting hold of Elwood's money, by fair means or foul, before permitting him to leave the room. "Not with me, sir, till the amount of that last stake, which was just enough to make me whole, is again in my pocket; and I'll follow you to the gates of hell, but I'll have it!"
Cowering and trembling beneath the threats and fiendish glances of the other, Elwood siezed his hat, and rushed from the room.
On escaping from this "den of thieves," and gaining the street below, Elwood's first thought was of home and his shamefully neglected family, and he turned his steps in that direction. But, before proceeding far, he began to hesitate and falter in his course. He became oppressed with the feelings of a criminal. He was ashamed to meet his family; for, fully conscious that his looks must be haggard, his eyes red and bloodshot, and his whole appearance disordered, he knew his return in such a plight, at that hour in the morning, would betray the wretched employments of the night, especially to his keen-sighted brother, on whose assistance he now doubly depended to save him from ruin. He therefore changed his course, and was proceeding towards his store, when he met his confidential clerk, who was out in search of him, and who, in great agitation, informed him that his drafts of yesterday had all been returned dishonored; that bills were pouring in, and the holders clamorous for their pay. Struck dumb by the startling announcement, it was some moments before Elwood could collect his thoughts sufficiently to bid his clerk return, and put off his creditors till the next day, when he would try to satisfy them all. And, having done this, he turned suddenly into another street, wound his way back to the inn he had just left, took a private room, locked himself in, and for a while gave way to alternate paroxysms of grief, remorse, and self-reproaches. After exhausting himself by the violence of his emotions, he threw himself upon a bed, and, thinking an hour's repose might mend his appearance, so as to enable him the better to disguise the cause of his absence, on his return to his family, which he now concluded to defer till towards dinner-time, he fell into a slumber so profound and absorbing, that he did not awake till the shadows of approaching night had begun to darken his room.
Leaping from his couch, in his surprise and vexation at having so overslept himself, he hastily made his toilet, and immediately set out for home,—a home which, for the first time in his life, he now dreaded to enter. To that wretched home we will now repair, preceding his arrival, to relate what had there occurred in his absence.
"Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolishfather, who will no more be admonished."—ECCL.
After the breaking up of the party, as described in the former chapter, Arthur Elwood, on joining the family circle, and not meeting his host and brother there, as he naturally expected, expressed his surprise at the circumstance, and inquired the cause of his absence. But, perceiving that the subject gave pain to Mrs. Elwood, who deemed it prudent but to repeat, as she hesitatingly did, what her husband had told her, that he had gone out, soon to be back, the former forbore any further inquiries or comments, and soon retired to rest, wishing her a good-night and pleasant slumbers.
"Good-night and pleasant slumbers!" slowly and murmuringly repeated the anxious and troubled wife, on whose ear the words, kindly meant as she knew them to be, fell as if in mockery to her feelings. "Pleasant slumbers for me! Heaven grant they may be made so by his speedy coming; but—" and, being now alone, and thus relieved of the restraining presence of others, she burst into tears, and wept long and bitterly.
Woman was not created to act independently. The sphere in which she is formed to move, though different, is yet so immediately connected—with that of man, that her destiny is inseparable from his. Her happiness and prosperity are not in her own keeping. The welfare of the husband is the welfare of the wife; and, if poverty and disgrace, the concomitants of vice, fall on him, she must participate equally in the physical evil, and drink as much deeper of the cup of moral misery as her unblunted sensibilities are more lively, and her sense of right and wrong are more acute, than those of him who has become dead to the one and lost to the other. What wonder, then, that she should so agonize and weep in secret over his moral deviations, and all the more bitterly, because, with the most intense desire to do so, she has no power to remedy the evil? But, for that sorrow and suffering, who before high Heaven will be held responsible? Who, but the doubly-guilty husband whose conduct has caused them?
Through the whole of that, to her, long and dreary night, Mrs. Elwood never once thought of retiring to rest, but kept up her vigils in waiting and watching for her husband: now listening pensively to the wind that seemed to moan round her solitary apartment in unison with her own feelings; now straining her senses to catch some sound of his approach; and now, perhaps, throwing herself upon a sofa, and falling, for a moment, into a troubled slumber, but only to start up at the first sound of the rattling windows, to listen again, and again to be disappointed. In this manner she wore away the lingering hours of the night, till the long prayed-for daylight, which she supposed, at the farthest, would bring back her truant husband, made its welcome appearance. But daylight came not this time to remove the cause of her anxieties. Elwood had several times before staid out nearly through the night, but the approach of daylight had always, till now, brought him home; and, not making his appearance, as she confidently expected, she became, as the morning advanced, really alarmed for his personal safety, and would have immediately sent out for him, but she knew not whom to send. She therefore concluded to put off the already long-delayed breakfast no longer; and, summoning her brother-in-law, who, with herself (her son, whom we have yet more particularly to introduce to the reader, being temporarily absent from town), now constituted all the family remaining to join in the repast. The two then sat down to the table, and partook the meal mostly in gloomy silence, one still hoping all might yet turn out well, and therefore repressing her twofold apprehensions; and the other, out of regard to her feelings, kindly forbearing to pain her with remarks and inquiries on a subject which they mutually felt conscious was oppressing the hearts of both.
After the meal was over, Arthur Elwood arose, and, briefly announcing his intention of going out to look up his brother, who, he said, would be likely soon to be found at his store, left the house. At the usual dinner hour, Arthur Elwood returned to the house, and was met at the door by his anxious hostess, whose countenance quickly fell as she perceived him to be alone.
"Have you not yet seen my husband?" she eagerly demanded.
"No, but have heard of him. He is somewhere in the city, I believe," replied the other.
"In the city and not return?" persisted the surprised and distressed wife."How can this be?—what does it mean?"
"I do not know," replied Arthur, with a thoughtful and perplexed air.
Mrs. Elwood for a moment stood mute as a statue; for, but too well conjecturing what was passing in the mind of the other, she durst not ask his opinion. But, soon regaining her usual composure, she led the way to the dinner-table, where the meal that followed was partaken much as the one that preceded it,—in silence and mutual constraint, which was only relieved by an occasional forced, commonplace remark.
"I shall again go to Mark's store," said Arthur, with stern gravity, as he rose from the table, after he had finished his repast, "and I shall also take the liberty of looking into the condition of his affairs. After that, I may return here again, though to remain only for a short time, as I leave for home in the evening."
Towards night Arthur Elwood returned, and in his usual quiet way entered the room where Mrs. Elwood was sitting; when, shaking his head as if in reply to the question respecting her still absent husband, which he saw, by the painfully inquiring expression of her countenance, was rising to her lips, he took a seat by her side, and, with an air of concern and a slight tremor of voice, commenced:
"I have been debating with myself, sister Alice, whether it were a greater kindness to go away without seeing you, and of course without apprising you of what I may have discovered respecting your husband and his affairs, or come here and tell you truths which would be painful,—too painful, perhaps, for you to bear."
"'Tis better I should know all," rather gasped than uttered Mrs. Elwood."You will tell me the truth,—othersmay not. Go on."
"Your husband," resumed the other, "wrote me for the help of a few thousands, which I would have freely loaned, but for my suspicions that all was not right with him; and, as I plainly told him, I came on to ascertain for myself whether such help would be thrown away, or really relieve him, as he represented, from a mere temporary embarrassment. I have now been into the painful investigation, and find matters, I grieve to say, tenfold worse than I suspected. He is, and must have been for a long time, the companion and the victim of blacklegs and cutthroats, and—"
"I suspected,—I knew it," interrupted the eager and trembling listener; "and O Arthur, how I have tried and wept and prayed to induce him to break off from them; for I felt they would eventually ruin him."
"Eventuallyruin him! Why, Alice, with his own miscalculations in business, folly and extravagance in every thing, they have done so already."
"But the main part of his property," demanded the other, with a startled look, "you don't mean but what the main part of his property is still left?"
"Yes, I do, Alice,—but I see you are not prepared for this. Still, you may as well know it now as ever. Yes, Alice, your husband is irretrievably bankrupt!"
Mrs. Elwood was notindeedprepared for this development. She had foreseen, it was true, the coming evil; but she supposed it was yet in the distance. She knew her husband's property had been a large one; and the announcement, from one she could not disbelieve, that it was all gone, struck her dumb with surprise and consternation. She uttered not a word. She could not speak, but sat pale and trembling, the very picture of distress.
After pacing the room a few moments, with frequent commiserating glances at the face of the other, whose distress evidently deeply moved him, Arthur Elwood stopped short before her and said:
"Sister Alice, my time is about up,—I must go."
"Have you no word to leave for my husband when he comes?" asked Mrs.Elwood, with an effort to appear composed.
"No,—none whatever tohim; but with you, Alice," he added, drawing out a small package of bank notes and dropping them into her lap, "with you, and for you alone, against a day of necessity, I leave that trifle—no hesitation—keep it—put it out of sight—there, that is right. Now only one thing more,—what of your son?"
"Claud?"
"Yes. You know it has happened that I have never seen him."
"I do know it, and have much regretted his absence; for I wished you to see him. But I am now looking for him every hour, and if you could delay—"
"No, no, I must go. Tell him to forget, at once, that he was ever a rich man's only son and heir, and learn to profit by a rich man's errors; for, till he does this, which, if he is like others, will require some time, he will make no real advance in life."
"Your impression may be natural, but it hardly does him justice. He isnotlike most others. Claud is a man now."
"So much the better, then, for you and himself. But you see with a mother's eyes, probably, and speak with a mother's heart. I will inquire about him, however, as indeed I will about you all. Good-by."
Thus did the unimpassioned Arthur Elwood, with a seeming business-like roughness and want of feeling, assume to hide the emotions which he really felt in the discovery of his brother's ruin, and in witnessing the distress he had just caused in communicating it, hurry through the painful interview, and abruptly depart, leaving Mrs. Elwood to struggle in secret with the chaos of thoughts and emotions which Arthur's unexpected revelation had brought over her. She was not left long, however, to struggle with her feelings alone. In a short time the sound of a familiar footstep hastily entering the front hall of the magnificent mansion,—alas! now no longer her own,—suddenly caught her ear; when, with the exclamation, "Claud, O Claud!" she rushed forward to her advancing son, and, to use the expressive language of Scripture, "fell on his neck and wept."
"I heard of father's failure," said the son, a fine looking youth of about twenty, with his mother's cleanly cut features and firm, thoughtful countenance, joined to his father's manly proportions. "I learned, as I came into the city, an hour ago, that father had just failed, his store been shut up, and all his property put into the hands of his creditors; and I hurried home to break the news to you. But I see you know it all."
"Yes, that the blow was impending, but not that it had already fallen, as you now report; but it may as well come to-day as to-morrow or next week. Half my nights, for months, Claud, have been made sleepless by the bodings and fears of the evil day, which, as things were going, I felt must eventually come; but never, till within this very hour, did I dream that our misfortunes were so near. But, though the storm has burst so much sooner than I expected, I could bravely face it, could we say that it was caused by no fault of our own; but to be brought upon us in this manner, my son, it is hard, hard to bear."
"But you have not been to blame, mother; and I did not suppose you thought enough of wealth to grieve so at its loss."
"I do not, Claud. It is not that; still, I could not help thinking of your disappointment, even in that view of the misfortune."
"Mine, mother? Why, I am no worse off than father was when he started in life; no worse off than thousands who begin with no other resources than what lie in clear heads and strong hearts. I can take care of myself; and, what is more, I can take care of you, dear mother. Surely, you won't doubt me?"
"No, Claud, no. You havealwaysbeen my pride, latterly almost my only hope; and I know not now but that you must be my only staff, on which to lean as I pass down the decline of life."
"And I will be one to you, mother; but come, cheer up, and let us go in and talk over these matters more calmly."
The mother and son accordingly retired to her usual sitting-room; where, since her overcharged bosom had found relief in tears, and her sinking spirits had been raised by the kind and comforting words of her dutiful son, she told him all that had occurred during the two preceding days, which constituted the brief but eventful period of his absence. They then were beginning to counsel together on the prospects and probabilities of their gloomy future; but their conversation was suddenly cut short by the abrupt entrance of the wretched husband and father, who, on his way from the hotel where he had spent the day in sleeping off his debauch in concealment, having received an intimation of what was going on among his creditors, had hurried home, with a confidence and self-possession which he could not summon when he started; for, out of this movement among his creditors, which he still would not believe was any thing more than a sort of practical menace to enforce payment, he saw not only how he could frame a plausible excuse for his guilty absence, but make the circumstance an irresistible plea for forcing from his brother a loan sufficient to enable him to arrest his failure and continue business. On entering the room, therefore, after saluting his wife and son in a sort of brisk, unconcerned manner, and muttering that he "thought they would never let him get home again," he eagerly inquired for Arthur; and, on being informed that his brother had started for his home, without leaving any note or word for him, and especially on being told by his son—as he at length calmly and persistingly was, in despite of his multiplied prevarications and denials, what they all knew, and what he himself should have been the last to be ignorant of—that the question of his failure, for more than he could ever pay, had already been settled against him, he became frantic in the outpourings of his rage, disappointment, and chagrin; sometimes declaring that the world, grown envious of his prosperity, had all suddenly become his enemies, and grossly belied him; sometimes savagely charging his brother, wife, and son with conspiring together against him; and sometimes cursing his own blindness and folly. And thus he continued to rave, and walk the room for hours, till his wife and son, having partaken their evening meal before his unheeding eyes, and become sick and wearied in listening to his insane ravings,—to which they had wholly ceased making any reply,—retired to rest, leaving him to partake such food as was left on the table, to occupy, as he chose to do, the same sofa which his hapless wife had done the night before, to sleep down the wild commotion of his feelings, and awake a calmer and more humbled, but not yet a better or much wiser man.
But we do not propose to describe in detail the rapid descent from opulence and station to poverty and insignificance, which now transpired to mark this era in the singular fortunes of Elwood and his family. Their history, for the next three months, was but the usual painful one which awaits the failed merchant everywhere in the cities. The crushing sense of misfortune which, for the first few days after the unexpected blow has fallen, weighs down the self-deceived or otherwise unprepared victims; the succeeding weeks of dejection and mortified pride; then the painful trial of parting with the showy equipage, the costly furniture, and the cherished mementoes, which had required, perhaps, the care of half a life in gathering; then the compulsory abdication of the great and conspicuous mansion for the small, obscure, hired cottage; then the saddening bodings and deep concern felt in seeing the means of living daily diminishing, with no prospect of ever being replenished; and, finally, the humiliating resort of the wife and children to the needle or menial employments, for the actual necessaries of life,—these, all these, are but the usual graduated vicissitudes of sorrow and trial which are allotted to those whose folly and extravagance have suddenly thrown them on the downward track of fortune, and which the Elwoods, in common with others, were now doomed to experience, and, on the part of Mrs. Elwood, especially, with aggravations not necessarily incident to such reverses. She would have borne all the deprivations and evils incident to her husband's failure without a murmur, could she have seen in him any amendment in those habits and vicious inclinations which had led to his downfall. But she could not. The hopes she had confidently entertained, that his misfortunes would humble and reform him, were doomed to disappointment. He still madly clung to his old associates of the gambling-table; and all the money he could get was lost or squandered among them, till he became too poor and desperate even for them, and they drove him from their society to join another and a lower set, who in turn compelled him to seek other still lower and more degraded associations. And so descended, step by step, along the path of degradation, the once princely merchant, till, despised and shunned by all respectable men, he became the fit companion of the meanest thimble-riggers of the cellars, and the lounging tipplers of the streets.
His case, however, as hopeless as it might appear, was not permitted to become an irretrievable one. Through a seemingly accidental circumstance, a light one day broke on his beclouded and half-maddened brain, that led to a self-redemption as happy for himself and family as it was unexpected by all. A former friend, one morning, moved perhaps by his forlorn appearance, in passing him with a light carriage, invited him to ride a few miles into the country; where, being unexpectedly called off in another direction, he left Elwood to return on foot by a nearer route across the fields to his home. After travelling some distance, he reached an elevation which overlooked the city, and, feeling a little fatigued, he sat down on a mossy hillock to rest and enjoy the prospect. As he cast his eye over that busy haunt of men, with its numerous spires shooting upward, its long lines of princely dwellings, its encircling forest of masts, its lofty warehouses, and other evidences of wealth and business, his own former important participation in its busy scenes, and his present worse than insignificant position there, rose in vivid contrast in his awakening mind; and the thought of his past but squandered wealth came up only to add poignancy to the sense of his present poverty and humiliation, which thus, and for the first time, was brought home to his agitated bosom. Suddenly leaping from his seat, from the torturing force of the reflection, he exclaimed: "Must I bear this? Cannot I still be a man? I will! yes, before Heaven, Iwill!" And, resuming his seat, his mind became intently engaged in studying out ways and means for carrying the sudden but stern resolution into effect; when, after another hour thus employed, he again jumped up, and, with the air of one who has reached some unalterable conclusion, he rapidly made his way homeward.
While the besotted Elwood was undergoing, so unexpectedly, even to himself, such a moral transformation in the solitude of the fields, an event occurred to his sorrowful wife at home, which was equally unexpected toher; which, though of a wholly different character, produced an equally great revulsion in her feelings as the one happening to her husband, about the same hour, was to him, or was producing inhisfeelings, and which, by the singular coincidence, seemed to indicate that the angel of mercy was at length spreading his wings at the same time over both heads of this unfortunate family. She had been having one of her most disconsolate days, and was sitting alone in her little room, gloomily pondering over her disheartening trials, without being able to see one ray of light in the dark future, when she received a call from one of her husband's chief creditors; who announced that those creditors, at a recent meeting, having ascertained her meritorious conduct and needy situation, had voted her the sum of five hundred dollars, which, confiding in her discretion for a judicious outlay of the money, he now, he said, had the pleasure of presenting her. And, having placed the money in her hands, and taken the tear of gratitude—which, preventing the utterance of the word-thanks she attempted, had started to her cheek at the unexpected boon—as a sufficient acknowledgment, he kindly bade her adieu, and departed.
That evening the husband and wife met as they had not for months before: each at first surprised at seeing the unclouded brow and hopeful countenance of the other, but each soon instinctively feeling that something had occurred to both, which was not only of present moment, but the harbinger of happier days to come. When confidence and hope are springing up in doubtful or despairing bosoms, the tongue is soon loosened from the frosts of reserve, however closely they may have before imprisoned it. Elwood, with many expressions of regret at his past conduct, and of wonder at the blindness and folly which had permitted him so long to persevere in it, told his gratified companion all that had that day passed through his mind,—his sudden sense of shame and degradation; his bitter self-reproaches, and succeeding determination to reform; to atone for the past, as far as he could, by future good conduct; to begin, in fine, the world anew, and, after placing himself beyond the reach of those temptations to which he had so fatally yielded, devote the remainder of his days to honest industry. And she, anxious to encourage and strengthen him, and fearing his total want of means might defeat his good resolutions,—she, also, as she believed it would be true wisdom to do, informed him ofhergood fortune, and offered him a portion of her unexpected acquisition, to enable him to engage in such business as he should decide to follow. They then discussed, and soon mutually agreed on, the expediency of leaving the city, where, as they had once there enjoyed wealth and station, they must both ever be subjected to mortifying contrasts,—both constantly doomed
"To see profusion which they must not share,"—
and he be exposed to temptations which he might not always have the firmness to withstand.
"But I resolved," said Elwood, after a pause, "not only on going to the country, but on to a new lot of land in the very outskirts of civilization. You, however, should I succeed in getting up comfortable quarters, would not be content to make such a place your home?"
"Anywhere, Mark; and the farther from the dangerous influences of this wicked city, the better. Yes, to the very depths of the wilderness, and I will not complain."
"It is settled, then. I was once, in one of my early excursions, along the borders of the wild lakes lying on the northeastern line of New Hampshire, where a living may be obtained from the cultivation of the soil alone; but where more may be made, at particular seasons, in taking the valuable furs that there abound. There I will go, contract for a lot of land, and prepare a home, leaving you, and Claud, if he shall decide for a woodman's life, to come on and join me next summer."
"That Claud will do; for he often declares himself disgusted with the trickery of trade, and to be longing for the country life of his boyhood. But here he comes, and can speak for himself."
The son now joined in the family deliberations, and learning, with surprise and gratification, what had occurred during the eventful day, joyfully fell in with his father's proposition; when it was soon decided that the latter should take half the money that day given to Mrs. Elwood, to lay out in a lot of land and house, and immediately proceed on his journey.
Whatever Mark Elwood had once firmly decided on, he was always prompt and energetic in executing. Before nine o'clock that evening, his knapsack of clothing was made up for a journey on foot, which, contrary to the wishes of his wife and son, he decided should be his mode of travelling. He then went to bed, slept six hours, rose, dressed, bade his family good-by, turned his back on the now loathed city, and, by sunrise next morning, was far on his way towards his designated home among the distant wilds of the North.
"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,There is a rapture in the lonely shore,There is society where none intrudes,—I love not man the less, but nature more."
Once more in the green wilderness! Welcome the wild scenes of our boyhood, which, as the checkered panorama of the past is unrolled at our bidding, rise on the mental vision in all their original freshness and beauty! It was here we first essayed to study the works of nature, and in them trace the Master-hand that moulded and perfected them. It was here we learned to recognize the voice of God in the rolling thunder, and his messengers in the swift-winged lightnings; to mark the forms of beauty and grandeur in every thing, from the humble lichen of the logs and rocks, to the high and towering pine of the plain and the mountain,—from the low murmurings of the quiet rivulet, to the loud thunderings of the headlong cataract,—and from the soft whisperings of the gentle breeze, to the angry roar of the desolating tornado; and, finally, it was here that our first and most enduring lessons of devotion were learned, here that our first and truest conceptions of the grand and beautiful were acquired, and here that the leading tone of our intellectual character, such as it may be, was generated and stamped on us for life.
The second part of our story, to which the preceding chapters should be taken, perhaps, as merely introductory, opens about midsummer, and among that remarkable group of sylvan lakes—nearly a dozen in number—which, commencing on the wild borders of northerly New Hampshire, and shooting off in an irregular line some fifty miles northeasterly into the dark and unbroken forests of Maine, appear on the map, in their strangely shapeless forms and scattered locations, as if they must have been hurled, by the hand of some Borean giant, down from the North Pole in a volley of huge ice-blocks, which fell and melted where they now lie, sparkling, like rough gems, on the shaggy bosom of the wilderness.
Near the centre of an opening of perhaps a dozen acres, about a mile from where the sinuous Androscoggin debouches full grown, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, from its parent reservoir, the picturesque Umbagog, stood a newly rigged log house, of dimensions and finish which indicated more taste and enterprise than is usually exhibited in the rude habitations of the first settlers. It was a story and a half high, and the walls were built of solid pine timber, originally roughly hewed, but recently dressed down with broad axe over the whole outward and inner surfaces so smoothly that, at a little distance, they presented, with their still visible seams, more the appearance of the wainscoting of some costly cottage than the humble log cabin. The building had also been newly shingled, new doors supplied, the windows enlarged, the yard around leveled off, with other improvements, of a late date, betokening considerable ambition for appearance, and considerable outlay of means, for so new a place, to fit up a tidy and comfortable abode for the occupants. In the surrounding field were patches of growing maize, wheat, potatoes, and some of the common table vegetables; the hay crop for the winter sustenance of the only cow and yoke of oxen, the best friends of the new settler, having been just cut and stored in an adjoining log-building, as was evident from the fresh look of the stubble, and the stray straws hanging to the slivered stumps or bushes in the field, and from the fragrant and far-scenting locks protruding from the upper and lower windows of the well-crammed receptacle passing under the name of barn. Beyond this little opening, and bounding it on every side, stood the encircling wall of woods, through and over which gleamed the bright waters of the far-spreading Umbagog on the north; while all around, towering up in their green glories, rose, one above another, the amphitheatric hills, till their lessening individual forms were lost, or mingled in the vision with the lofty summits of the distant White Mountains in the south and west, and of the bold detached eminences which shot up from the dark wilderness and studded the horizon in all other directions.
Such, and in such a locality, was, as the reader probably has already inferred, the residence which Mark Elwood had pitched upon for beginning life anew. On leaving the city, as represented in the last chapter, he had, under the goading remembrance of follies left behind, and the incitements of hope-constructed prospects before, perseveringly pushed on, till he reached this lone and wild terminus of civilized life; when, finding, a mile beyond the last of the scattered settlements of the vicinity, a place on which an opening had been made and the walls and roof of a spacious log house erected, the year before, he had succeeded in purchasing it, for ready money, at a price which was much below its value, and which left him nearly half his little fund to be expended in more thoroughly clearing the land, getting in crops, making the house habitable, and felling an additional tract of forest. And with so much energy and resolution had he pursued his object of seeing himself and family once more united at a comfortable home, that, within three months from the time he commenced operations, which was in the first of the spring months, he had accomplished it all; for his wife and son, rejoicing in the knowledge of his success which he had communicated to them, and promptly responding to his invitation to join him, had come on, with their little all of goods and money, in teams hired for the purpose; and they were now all together fully installed in their new home, pleased with the novelty and freshness of every thing around them, proud and secure in their conscious independence and exemption from the dangers and trials they had recently passed through, and contented and happy in their situation.
The particular time we have taken for the reappearance of the family on this, their new stage of action, was a warm but breezy afternoon, on one of the last days of July. Elwood was engaged in his new-mown field, in cutting and grubbing up the bushes and sprouts which had sprung up during the season around the log-heaps and stumps, and could not easily or conveniently be cut by the common scythe while mowing the grass. He was no longer robed in the broadcloth and fine linen, in which, as the rich merchant, he might have been seen, perhaps, one year ago that day, sauntering about "on 'change" among the solid men of Boston. These had been mostly worn out or sold during the changing fortunes of the year, and their place was now wisely supplied by the long tow-frock and the other coarse garments in common use among the settlers. Nor had his physical appearance undergone a much less change. Instead of the pallid brow, leaden eye, fleshly look, and the red cheek of the wine-bibber and luxurist of the cities, he exhibited the embrowned, thin, but firm and healthy face, and the clear and cheerful complexion of the contented laborer of the country,—tell-tale looks both, which we always encounter with as much secret disgust in the former as we do with involuntary respect in the latter. He now paused in his labors, and stood for some time looking about the horizon, as if watching the signs of the weather; now noting the progress of the haze gathering in the south, and now turning his cheek first one way and then another, apparently to ascertain the doubtful direction of the wind, which, from a lively western breeze, had within the last hour lulled down into those small, fluctuating puffs usually observable when counter-currents are springing up, balancing, and beginning to strive for the mastery. After a while he moved slowly towards the house, continuing his observations as he went, till he came near the open window at which Mrs. Elwood was sitting at her needle-work, from which she occasionally lifted her eyes, and glanced somewhat anxiously along the path leading down through the woods to a landing-place on the lake; when, looking round and observing her husband standing near, giving token of being about to speak, she interposed and said:
"You have seen nothing of Claud, I suppose? What can be the reason why he does not return? He was to have been at home long before this, was he not?"
"Yes," carelessly replied Elwood, "unless he concluded to take a bout in the woods. He took his fowling-piece with him, to use in case the trout wouldn't bite, you know. Phillips, the old hunter, came into the field where we were last night, and said he was out of meat, and must skirt the lake to-day for a buck. I presume Claud may have joined him. There! hark! that sounded like Claud's piece," he added, as the distant report of a gun rose from the woods westward of the lake and died away in swelling echoes on the opposite shore. "And there, again!" he continued, as another and sharper report burst, the next moment, from the same locality,—"there goes another, but not his, as he could not have loaded so quick. That must have been Phillips' long rifle. They are doubtless together somewhere near the Magalloway,—some three miles distant, I should judge,—and are probably having fine sport with something."
"That may be the case, perhaps," responded Mrs. Elwood. "I wish, however, he would come; for I cannot yet quite divest myself of the idea that there may be danger in these wild scenes of the lakes and the woods. But what was you about to say when I first spoke? You were going to say something, I thought."
"O—yes—why, I was about to say that I had made up my mind to set fire to theslash. It is dry enough now to get a good burn; and it looks to me a good deal like rain. I wish to get the land cleared and ready to sow with winter wheat by the first of September; and I don't like to risk the chance of finding every thing in so good order again."
"There is no danger that the fire will spread, or be blown to the buildings, is there?"
"No, the wind is springing up in the south now, and will drive the fire only towards the lake in the direction of the landing."
"But Claud may be there."
"Well, if he should be, the fire won't burn up the lake, I think; and, if it besets the path in the woods, he can come round some other way," jocosely said Elwood, moving away to carry his purpose into execution.
Having procured a parcel of splinters split from the dry and resinous roots of some old pine stub,—that never-failing and by no means contemptible substitute for lamp or candle among the pioneers of a pine-growing country,—he proceeded rapidly to the edge of theslash, as a tract of felled forest is generally denominated by the first settlers, especially of the northern States. Here, pausing a moment to mark with his eye the most favorable places to communicate the fire, he picked his way along the southern end to the farthest side of the tangled mass of trees of every description composing the slash, which was a piece of some four or five acres, lying on the western border and extending north and south the whole length of the opening. And, having reached his destination, and kindled all his splinters into a blaze, he threw one of them into the thickest nest of pine or other evergreen boughs at hand, and darted back to his next marked station, where he threw in another of his blazing torches, and so on till he reached the cleared ground, which was not one moment too soon for his safety. For so dry and inflammable had every thing there become, under the scorching sun of the preceding fortnight, which had been relieved by neither rain nor cloud, that, the instant the fire touched the tinder-like leaves, it flashed up as from a parcel of scattered gunpowder; and, bursting with almost explosive quickness all around, and swiftly leaping from bough to bough and treetop to treetop, it spread with such astonishing celerity that he found it hard on his heels, or whirling in a hot cloud over his head, at every pause he made to throw in a new but now unnecessary torch, in his rapid and constantly quickened run through the slash. And when, after running some distance into the open field, to escape the stifling smoke and heat by which he was even there assailed, he turned round to note more fully the surprising progress that the terrible element he had thus let loose was making, he beheld all that part of the slash which he had a moment before passed through already enveloped, from side to side, in a continuous blaze, whose red, curling crest, mounting every instant higher and higher, was advancing with the seeming speed of a race-horse on its fiery destination. Half-appalled by the sight of such a sudden and unexpected outburst of the fire he had kindled, Elwood hurried on to his house, and joined his startled wife in the yard; when the two took station on an adjoining knoll, and looked down upon the conflagration in progress with increasing wonder and uneasiness,—so comparatively new was the scene to them both, and so far did it promise to exceed all their previous conceptions, in magnitude and grandeur, of any thing of the kind to be met with in the new settlements. And it was, indeed, a grand and fearful spectacle: For, with constantly increasing fury, and with the rapidity of the wind before which it was driving, still raged and rolled on the red tempest of fire. Now surging aloft, and streaking with its winding jets of flame the fiercely whirling clouds of smoke that marked its advance, and now dying away in hoarse murmurs, as if to gather strength for the new and more furious outburst that the next moment followed, it kept on its terrific march till it reached the central elevation, which embraced the most tangled, densely covered, and combustible part of the slash, and on which had been left standing an enormous dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the woods or over the lake. Here the fiery billow, as if governed by the human tactics of a military assault, paused, parted, and swept by on either side, till it had inclosed the elevation; when suddenly it shot up from every side in an hundred converging tongues of flame, which, soon meeting and expanding into one, quickly enveloped the whole hill in one broad, unbroken robe of sheeted fire, encompassed and mounted the veteran pine, and around its colossal trunk formed a huge, whirling pyramid of mingling smoke and flame that rose to the mid-heavens, shedding, in place of the darkened sun, a lurid glare over the forest, and sending forth the stormy roar of a belching volcano. The next moment a shower of cinders and the burning fragments of twigs, bark, and boughs which had been carried high up by the force of the ascending currents, fell hot and hissing to the earth over every part of the adjoining fields, to and even far beyond the spot where Elwood and his wife were standing.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Elwood, aroused from the mute amazement with which he and his more terrified companion had been beholding the scene, as soon as these indications of danger were thus brought to his very feet. "Good Heavens! this is more than I bargained for. See,—the fire is catching on the stumps all over the field!"
"The house!" half-screamed Mrs. Elwood. "What is that rising from the shingles up there near the top of the roof?"
"Smoke, as I am alive!" cried the other, in serious alarm, as he glanced up to the roof, where several slender threads of smoke were beginning to steal along the shingles. "Run, Alice, run with the pails for the brook, while I throw up the ladder against the gable. We must be lively, or within one hour we shall be as houseless as beggars."
"O, where is Claud? where is Claud?" exclaimed the distressed wife and mother, as she flew to the house to do her husband's bidding.
Yes, where was Claud? At the risk of the charge of purposely tantalizing the reader, we must break off here, to follow the young man just named, in the unexpected adventures which he also had experienced during that eventful day. But for this we will take a new chapter.
"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,And mortal foot hath ne'er, or rarely, been;To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,With the wild flock that never needs a fold;Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean,—This is not Solitude: 't is but to holdConverse with nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd."
It was about the middle of the forenoon, on the day marked by the incidents narrated in the preceding chapter, when Claud Elwood, who had become pretty well initiated into the sports of the locality, entered his light canoe, with his fishing-tackle and fowling-piece, and pushed out upon the broad bosom of the forest-girt Umbagog. Having had the best success, when up on the lake the last time, on the western margin, he pulled away in that direction, and, after rowing a couple of miles up the lake, he laid down his oar, unrolled his elm-bark cable, and let down his stone anchor, at a station a furlong or so from the shore.
It was a beautiful spot, and a beautiful day to enjoy it in. From the water's edge rose, deeply enshrouded in their bright green, flowing, and furbelowed robes of thickly interwoven pines, the undulating hills, back to the summit level of that long, narrow tongue of forest land, which, for many miles, only separates the Umbagog from the parallel Magalloway, the noble stream that here comes rushing down from the British highlands, to join the scarcely larger Androscoggin, almost at the very outset of its "varied journey to the deep." Turning from this magnificent swell on the west, the eye, as it wandered to the right over the bright expanse of intervening waters, next rested on the long, crescent-shaped mountain ridge, behind which slept, in their still deeper and wilder seclusion, the broad Mooseeluk-maguntic and the Molechunk-a-munk, which, with the Umbagog, make up the three principal links in this remarkable chain of lakes. Still farther to the right lay the seemingly boundless, rolling forests, forming the eastern and southern rim of this basin of the lakes; whose gradually sloping sides, like some old pinnacled city, were everywhere bristling with the giant forms of the heaven-aspiring pine, and whose nearer recesses were pierced, in the midst, by the long, lessening line of the gleaming Umbagog; while around the whole circle of the horizon, scattered here and there far back into the blue distance, rose mountain after mountain in misty grandeur to the heavens.
After thus slowly sweeping the horizon, to note, for the tenth time, perhaps, the impressive character of the scenery, whose everywhere intermingling beauty and grandeur he was never tired of contemplating, Claud withdrew his gaze, and turned his attention to, the more immediate object of his excursion. After a few moments spent in regulating his hook and line, he strung his angle-rod, and threw out to see whether he could succeed in tempting, at that unfavorable hour, the fickle trout from their watery recesses. But all in vain the attempt. Not a trout was seen stirring the water at the surface, or manifesting his presence around the hook beneath; and all the endeavors which the tantalized angler made, by changing the bait, and throwing the line in different directions around him, proved, for the next hour, equally fruitless. While he was thus engaged, intently watching his line, each moment expecting that the next must bring him a bite, one of those peculiar, subdued, but far-reaching sounds, which are made by the grazing of the oar against the side of the boat in rowing, occasionally greeted his ear from some point to the south of him; though, for a while, nothing was to be seen to indicate by whom the sounds were produced. Soon, however, a man in a canoe, who had been coasting, unseen, along the indentures of the shore, and whom Claud instantly recognized as Phillips, the hunter already named, shot round a neighboring point, and, in a few minutes more, was at his side.
"Well, what luck?" cheerily exclaimed Phillips, a keen, hawk-eyed, self-possessed looking man, with a round, compact, and sinewy frame. "What luck to-day, young man?"
"None whatever," replied Claud, with an air of disappointment.
"I suppose so, unless you began before ten o'clock."
"But why did you suppose so?"
"O, I knew it from my knowledge of human nature," said the hunter, humorously. "Trout are very much like other folks, only a great deal more sensitive to heat. Now, you don't see men, who are well fixed under a cool shade in a sweltering hot day, very anxious to run out bare-headed in the sun, when there is no call for it; much less, then, the trout, that can't bear the sun and heat at all. Though there are, probably, a ton of them within a stone's throw of us, not one will come out with this bright sun; they are lying behind the rocks and old logs at the bottom, and won't begin to circulate these three hours."
"And are you not a-going to try them?"
"I? No; I would as soon think of fishing now on the top of these hills. Besides this, I have a different object. I am bound to carry home something that will pass for fresh meat, if it is nothing but a coon. I shall haul up my canoe somewhere about here; follow up the lake-shore a mile or so, with the idea of catching a deer in the edge of the water, come there to keep off the flies; then, perhaps, cross over to the Magalloway, down that, and over to this place; when, by way of topping off, I will show you, by that time, if you are about here so long, how trout are taken."
So saying, the hunter dipped his springy oar into the water, and, with a few vigorous strokes, sent his canoe to the shore, and, having moored it to a root, he glided into the thickets, and disappeared with a tread so noiseless as to leave Claud, for many minutes, wholly in doubt whether the man was standing still in the bushes or proceeding on his excursion.
It was now noon, and Claud, seeing no prospect of any immediate success in his piscatory employment, which had been made to appear to him, by the remarks of the hunter, more discouraging than ever, drew up his anchor, and rowed to a point of the shore which was embowered by a group of magnificent pines. Here, finding a cool spring, as well as a refreshing shade, he drew out his lunch, and very leisurely proceeded to discuss it, with the ice-cold water of the spring by which he had seated himself for the purpose. His fare was coarse; but it was partaken with a relish of which those who have never experienced the effects of the air and exercise, incident to a life in the woods, can have no just conception; and to which the palled appetite of the
"vain lords of luxury and ease, Whom slumber soothes not, pleasure cannot please,"
is poor in comparison, though all the king's banquets and metropolitan feasts in the world should vie together to make good the substitute. Claud's life had thus far been, in the main, a quiet and commonplace one; nothing having occurred to him to arouse those strong and over-mastering passions to which it is the lot of most of us, at some period of our lives, to become subjected. It had been checkered, however, by one bit of romance, which, to say the least, had greatly excited his imagination. About a year previous to the time of which we are now writing, and one day while he was walking the streets of Boston, a small, closely-enwrapped package was put in his hand by an unknown boy, who, with the simple announcement, "For you, Sir," turned quickly away, and made off with the air of one who has completed his mission, and would avoid being questioned. Glancing within the wrapper, and perceiving it inclosed a small encased picture, or likeness, of some female, which he thought must have been delivered to him through mistake, Claud looked hastily round for the messenger, and, not seeing him, he walked backward and forward along the street, and lingered some time in the vicinity, still expecting the boy would soon return to claim the package. But, being disappointed in this, he went home, and, retiring to his room, undid the wrapper, which he carefully but vainly examined for some name, mark, or other clue to the mystery; and then, with much interest, fell to inspecting the picture. It was, obviously, a well-painted miniature likeness of a fair, dark-eyed girl, but representing no remembered face, except in the peculiar expression of the strong and commanding countenance; which, he thought, either in man or woman, he must have somewhere before encountered. The whole likeness, indeed, together with the circumstances under which it came into his hands, made, at the time, a lively impression on his mind; and, keeping the affair wholly to himself, he often contemplated that fair face in private; and, for months afterwards, he never was in a public assembly, where the sex were present, without running his eye over it in search of the original. But, as he never found it, the impression gradually wore away, and, in the exciting changes that had occurred in the fortunes of his family, it had been nearly obliterated from his mind; when, that morning, while searching his trunk for some implement belonging to his gun, he came across the miniature, and put it in his pocket. And now, in the leisure that followed his repast, he bethought him of it; and, laying it before him on the bed of moss on which he was reclining, he contemplated it with renewed interest, and that sort of dreamy enthusiasm which the sudden revival of old associations in such solitudes is apt to awaken in the mind, especially when those associations are connected, as now, with a matter of mystery and romance.
After indulging in his reveries a while, he put up his miniature, aroused himself from his day-dream, and rose to his feet when, feeling inclined for some kind of action, he decided on a short excursion in the woods, in the direction of the Magalloway, where probably he would fall in with Phillips, and return with him to the lake. Accordingly, after loading his gun with ball and buckshot, so as to be prepared for any large wild animals he might chance to encounter, he leisurely took his way through the heavy, ascending forest that lay in his course; here pausing to note the last night's bed of some solitary bear, and there to trace the marks of the death-struggle of a victim deer, that, with all its vigilance and wondrous agility, had been surprised and brought down by the stealthy and far-leaping catamount. The ever-varying tenants of the forest, also, were constantly presenting as he passed on, some novelty to attract his unaccustomed eye; now in the smooth, tall shaft of the fusiform fir—the dandy of the forest—standing up with its beautiful cone-shaped top among its rougher neighbors, trim and straight as the bonneted cavalier of the old pictures, among the slouchy forms of his homelier but worthier opponents; now in the low and stocky birch standing on its broad, staunch pedestal of strongly-braced roots below, and throwing out widely above its giant arms, as if striving to shoulder and stay up the weight of the superincumbent forest; and now in the imperial pine, proudly lifting its tall form an hundred feet over the tops of the plebeian trees around, to revel in the upper currents of the air, or bathe its crowning plumes of living green in the clouds of heaven.
Proceeding in this manner, he at length found himself gradually descending the western slope of the hill; when he soon arrived in the vicinity of the river, a glimpse of which, together with a small clearing and a tidy-looking cottage on its banks, he now caught through the tops of the intervening trees. While still walking on, his attention was attracted to a comparatively open place in the woods, where, at some previous period, a severe fire had killed all the smaller trees, and consumed the underbrush, which had been replaced by scattering shrubs of the white poplar intermingled with a plentiful growth of the black-raspberry, whose luscious fruit—the first to reward the pioneer, and for which he has to contend sharply with the birds and bears to obtain his share—was now beginning to ripen. As he was entering this open space, which appeared to extend some distance round the point of a screening knoll, he was suddenly brought to a stand by a noise somewhere in the bushes or woods ahead, such as had never before saluted his ears. It was like nothing else, orif anything else, like the wild snorting of a frightened horse prolonged into the dying note of the steam whistle. Claud recoiled a step before the unaccustomed sound, and involuntarily cocked and raised his gun to his shoulder. But he was allowed no time to speculate. The next instant, the loud and piercing shriek of a female, nearer but in the same direction, rose and rang through the forest. With a speed quickened at every step by the rapidly repeated cry of distress, he bounded towards the spot, when, turning the point of the knoll, he suddenly found himself in full view of the object of his solicitude,—a girl, in the full bloom of youthful beauty, who, with bonnet thrown back and her loosened hair streaming in wild disorder over her shoulders, instantly rushed forward for his protection. Claud stopped short, in mute surprise at the unexpected apparition; for the first glance at her face told him that the original of his mysterious miniature was before him,—before him, here in the woods! Breathless and speechless in her wild affright, she pointed, with a glance over her shoulder, to a thick, high tangle of large, strongly limbed, knotty, windfallen trees, a short distance behind her, and fled past him to the rear. Looking in the indicated direction, the startled and perplexed young man distinguished the outlines of a monstrous moose madly plunging at the woody barrier, and trying to force his enormous antlers through the unyielding limbs preparatory to leaping it in pursuit of his victim, who had eluded the infuriated animal, and barely escaped the fatal blows of his uplifted hoofs, by creeping under the providentially placed obstruction. Claud instantly raised his piece, when, feeling uncertain of his aim, he withheld his fire, and stood waiting for a fairer view. But, before he could obtain it, the moose, tired of vain attempts to force his passage through the bristling barricade of logs and limbs before him, disappeared for one moment, but the next came crashing round the nearest end of it, and, with renewed demonstrations of rage and hostility, made directly for the new opponent he beheld in his way. Still unalarmed for his own safety, Claud waited with levelled gun till his formidable assailant was within forty yards of him, when he took a quick aim and fired. Reeling under the discharge of his heavily loaded piece, and blinded by the smoke, he could not, at first, see the effect of his fire; but when he did so, the next instant, it was only to behold the monster brute, maddened, not stopped, by the flesh wounds inflicted, rushing on him with a force and fury which compelled him to leap suddenly aside, to avoid being beat into the earth by those terrible hoofs, which he saw lifted higher and higher, at each approaching step, for his destruction. Mindful, in his peril, of the precautions already learned from the hunters, Claude, while the moose, whose tremendous impetus was driving him straight ahead, could break up, so as to turn in the pursuit,—Claud made, with all the speed of which he was master, for a huge hemlock, luckily standing at no great distance on his right; a course which he thought would divert the monster from pursuit of the maiden, and, at the same time, best insure his own safety. But, so prodigious was the rushing speed of the foiled and now doubly exasperated moose, that the imperilled huntsman had barely time to reach the sheltering tree and dodge behind it, before the hotly pursuing foe was at his heels, rasping and tearing with his spiked antlers the rough bark of the tree, in his attempts to follow round it near and fast enough to overtake and strike down his intended victim. Round and round then sped both pursuer and pursued, as fast as the frantic rage of the one, and the keen instinct of self-preservation in the other, could impel them. Although the moose, from the great width of his interfering horns, was compelled to sweep round the tree in a circle requiring him to go over double the distance travelled by Claude, yet so much greater was his speed, that it called for the utmost exertions of the latter to keep clear of the battle-axe blows which he heard falling every instant with fatal force behind him. His gun had already been struck, shivered, and beat from his hand; and, as he glanced over his shoulder and saw the fierce and glaring eyes of his ruthless pursuer, and his uplifted and forward-thrown hoofs striking closer and closer to his heels at every bound, a sense of his deadly peril flashed over his mind with that strange and paralyzing effect which the first full conviction of impending death often produces on the stoutest hearts. He felt his strength giving way, his brain beginning to whirl, and he was on the point of yielding himself to his fate; when a stream of smoke and flame accompanied the startling report of a rifle, shot out from the edge of a neighboring thicket. The moose gave a convulsive start, floundered forward on his knees, swayed backward and forward an instant, then fell over broad-side into the bushes with a heavy crash, straightened out, gasped, and died.
"Dunno but you'll think I waited too long, young man," cried Phillips, now advancing with a quick, leaping step from his covert. "The fact was, I felt, on seeing you getting into such close quarters, that I had better be rather particular about my aim, so as to stop him at once; besides that, I was at first a little out of breath. I had heard the fellow blow when an hundred rods off,—then the woman scream,—then your gun; and, thinking like enough there would be trouble, I legged it for the spot, and got to my stand just as he treed you."
"I feel very grateful to you, Mr. Phillips, for this timely rescue," responded Claud, recovering his composure. "This, I suppose, is the far-famed moose?"
"Yes, and a bouncer at that," replied the hunter, going up and, placing his foot on the broad and still quivering flank of the huge animal. "Good twenty hands high, and weighs, well, not much short of fifteen hundred, I should say."
"But are they often thus dangerous?" asked Claud.
"Not very often, perhaps," rejoined the hunter. "But still the bull moose, at this season of the year, is sometimes, when wounded, about as ugly a customer as you meet with in the woods. This fellow I judge to have beenoncommonvicious, as he begun his tantrums before he was touched at all, it seems. I dunno but 'twas the woman put the devil into him, as women do into two-legged animals sometimes,—don't they, young man?"
"The woman? O yes, the young lady," said Claud, reminded of his duty as a gallant by the remark, though unwilling to appropriate to himself the prophetic joke with which it was coupled. "Where is she? I must go and see to her."
"She has already seen to herself, I guess," said the hunter. "As I was coming up, I glimpsed her cutting round and running, like a wild turkey, for the clearing, to which the moose had cut off her retreat. She has reached the house by this time, doubtless; for it is hard by, down on the river here, a hundred rods or such a matter."
"Who is she? Do you know the family?" eagerly inquired the young man.
"No," answered the hunter. "They are new-comers in these parts."
"What could have brought her here so far into the woods?" persisted Claud.
"The raspberries, very likely," said the other, indifferently, while taking out and examining the edge of his knife. "But come, we must get this moose into some condition, so that he will keep; then be off to let the settlers know of our luck. And early to-morrow morning, we will, all hands, come up the river in boats, and distribute him. He will make fresh meat enough to supply the whole settlement."
The hunter now, with the assistance of his new pupil in the craft, proceeded to dressing the moose, the process of which, bleeding, disemboweling, and partially skinning, was soon completed; when, cutting some stout green skids with the hatchet he ever carried in his belt, and inserting the ends under the bulky carcass, the two contrived to raise it, by means of old logs rolled up for the purpose, several feet from the ground, so as to insure a free circulation of air beneath it. This being done, the hunter kindled two log fires, one on each side, to keep off, he said, the wolves and other carnivorous animals. They then, after cutting out the tongue and lip, which are esteemed the tidbits of this animal, took up their line of march for the lake, which, with the long, rapid lope of the woodsman, measured off, as usual, in Indian file, and with little or no interrupting conversation, they reached in a short time, and without further adventure.
"Now," said the hunter, as he reached the spot where his canoe was tied, and turned round towards his lagging companion,—"now, sir, what say you to taking a five-pound trout?"
"Perfectly willing," replied Claud, smiling; "and I would even take up with a smaller one."
"Well, I won't,—that is, not much smaller; and I think I'll have one of at least the size I named."
"What makes you so confident?"
"Because, it being a hot, shiny morning, they took to their coverts early, and must be sharp-set, by this time. Besides that, it is just about the best time for them that could be got up: a deep cloud, as you see, is coming over the sun, and this wind is moving the water to the bottom. All sizes will now be coming out, and the big ones, like big folks, will make all the little ones stand back till their betters are served."
Each now taking to his canoe, they pushed out some twenty or thirty rods into the lake, cast anchor, and threw out their lines. Claud, who baited with grubs, soon had drawn in two, weighing as many pounds a piece, and began to feel disposed to banter the hunter, who had baited with a flap of moose-skin, which he had brought along with him, and which, to Claud, seemed little likely to attract the fishes to his hook. But he soon found himself mistaken; for, turning to give utterance to what was passing in his mind, he beheld the other dallying with a trout, which he had hooked, and now held flapping on the surface of the water, evidently much larger than either of his own.
"That is a fine one!" cried Claud. "Why don't you pull him in?"
"Not big enough," said the hunter, in reply to the question; while he turned to the fish with an impatient "Pshaw! what work the cretur makes of it! Hop off, hop off, you fool! There," he added, as the trout at length broke away and disappeared, "there, that is right. Now be off with yourself till you grow bigger, and give me a chance at the fine fellow whose tail I saw swashing up round here just now."
The hunter then carefully adjusted his bait, and threw out the whole lingth of his line. After alternately sinking his hook, and then drawing it to the surface, for two or three throws, the line suddenly straightened, moved slowly backward at first, then swept rapidly round and round, or darted off in sharp short angles, with downward and forward plunges so quick and powerful as to make the stout sapling pole sway and bend, like a whipstock, in the steadying hands of the hunter. For four or five minutes he made no attempt to draw in his prize, but let the fish have full play to the length of its tether, till its efforts had become comparatively feeble; when, slowly bringing it alongside, he took the line in his hand, and, with a quick jerk, landed the noble fellow safely on the bottom of the canoe.
"There, sir!" exclaimed the hunter, seizing the trout by the gills, and triumphantly holding it up to view, "there is about what I bargained for: two feet long, not an inch shorter,—seven pounds weight, and not an ounce lighter! Now, being satisfied, I am done."
"What, leave off with such luck?" asked Claud in surprise.
"Yes, young man," said the other, "I hold it all but a downright sin to draw from God's storehouse a single pound more than is really needed. This will last my family as long as it will keep, this warm weather, with the plenty of moose-meat we shall have. Any thing more is a waste, whichIwill not commit. Andyou, sir, who have just hauled in your third and largest one, I perceive, and have now nearly as many pounds as I have,—what canyouwant of more? Come, let us pull up and off for our homes. It is nearly time, any way."
Although loth to break off his sport, yet inwardly acknowledging the justness of the hunter's philosophy, Claud reluctantly drew in and wound up his line, hauled in his anchor, and, handling his oar, shot out abreast of the other, who had already got under way, into the heaving waters of the now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the view of the lower end of the lake.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Claud, starting back, with suspended oar, as now, coming out in view of the lake, his eye fell on the huge pillar of smoke, which, deeply enshrouding that part of the distant forest lying east of the outlet of the lake with its expanded base, was rolling upward its thousand dark, doubling folds; "good Heavens, Phillips, look yonder! Where and what is it? It looks like a burning city."
"It is a fire, of course, and no small one, either; but where, I can't exactly make out," slowly responded the hunter, intently fixing his keen eyes on the magnificent spectacle which had thus unexpectedly burst on their view in the distance. "Let me see," he continued, running his eye along the border of the lake in search of his old landmarks: "there is the tall stub that stands half a mile down on the west bank of the river, and is now just visible in the edge of the smoke; but where is the king pine, that stands nearly against it, over in your slash? Young man," he added, with a startled air, "was your father calculating to burn that slash to-day?"
"No, unless it looked likely to rain."
"Well itdoeslook likely to rain, in the shape of a shower gathering yonder, which has already given out one or two grumbles of distant thunder, if my ears served me as well as usual."
"Yes; but such a smoke and fire can't come from our slash. It must be a larger and more distant one."
"So I thought at first; but I begin to think different. Do you see that perpendicular, broken line of light, occasionally flashing out from the smoke, and extending upward to a height that no ground fire ever reached? That is your king pine in a blaze from bottom to top. Hark! why, I can hear it roaring clear here, like a distant hurricane. It must be a prodigious hot fire to make all that show and noise."
"Can it endanger our buildings?" asked Claud, in alarm.
"I am afraid so," replied the other, with a dubious shake of the head. "But hark again! 'tis your father's horn blowing for help."