From the school bus the blacktop road looked to Bud like a frozen black river between the banks of snow cast aside by the snowplow and he pretended that the poles indicating culverts were channel markers. The Barston farm buildings to the left and a hundred and fifty yards from the highway seemed to him an island in the sea of snow and the Barstons' orchard looked like a great mass of seaweed.
Soon he tired of daydreaming and stared stonily out of the window. When Christmas had still been weeks away, he had been able to tell himself that it might never come. But now that only a few days remained before Christmas, there was no more hope. This was the last trip the school bus would be making until after New Year's, for the Christmas vacation was beginning and in just three days Gram and Gramps' children and grandchildren would arrive and there would be no place for an outsider.
It would have been far better, he thought bleakly, if he had never come to Bennett's Farm and probably it would be better if he left now. But although Bud's imagination could whisk him anywhere at all, the harsh realities of life as he had lived it sobered him. He could dream of the French Foreign Legion, the carefree existence of a cowboy, the adventurous career of a seaman or the unhampered life of a trapper in the arctic north, but he knew in his heart his dreams would never come true. Twelve-year-old boys had run away from the orphanage, but none had stayed away for more than three days before they had returned of their own accord or had been brought back by the police. A youngster traveling alone without resources had less than one chance in a thousand of remaining undetected, and Bud knew it.
Besides, he was stubborn and unwilling to back away from any situation. He would face the assembled Bennetts and do the best he could. In one way or another, he had faced giants before.
To take his mind away from the ordeal ahead of him, Bud turned back to the hunt for Old Yellowfoot and the day Gramps had been stricken in the kitchen.
He had been frightened then, too, but not with the stark fear he had known the day he and Gramps had hunted for grouse and Gramps had become ill while they were in the woods. That day Bud had been alone, but now there was Gram. Things might still go wrong now, but not altogether wrong if she was there.
He remembered how Gram had walked calmly over to Gramps as soon as he was stricken and said quietly,
"You're tired, Delbert. Now you just sit right there and take it easy."
Then she had gone to the telephone and, after she had spoken to Dr. Beardsley, returned to sit beside Gramps. Only her eyes had shown the torment she was enduring. Bud had hovered in the background, not knowing what to do, but ready to do anything. Gramps raised his head again and there was that terrible convulsive cough, but afterward he breathed more easily. The blue color that had invaded his face began to fade. He started to sweat and Gram wiped his face gently.
"Gosh blame nonsense," Gramps gasped.
"Of course," Gram said. "That's just what it is. You sit there anyway."
"Why?"
"Maybe because I like your company and you have been gone all day."
Only later had it occurred to Bud that she was deliberately resorting to subterfuge to make him sit still until Dr. Beardsley arrived. Gramps would never have accepted a doctor otherwise. As it was, he gave an outraged growl when Dr. Beardsley finally came.
"What the blazes do you want?" Gramps grumbled.
Dr. Beardsley said calmly, "To see you, Delbert, and I don't have all night. Open your shirt."
Dr. Beardsley had hung out his shingle in Haleyville when he was twenty-two. He was seventy-two now, and there was little in his half century of practice that he hadn't dealt with. He had learned long ago that he would be obeyed if he expected obedience and tolerated nothing else.
"While you're about it," the doctor said, "roll up your sleeve."
Grumbling, Gramps did as he was told. Dr. Beardsley took his blood pressure and thrust a thermometer between Gramps' lips. When Gramps made a face, he said,
"That's a thermometer, Delbert, not a stick of peppermint. Don't try to bite it in half."
While Gramps mouthed the thermometer, Dr. Beardsley applied a stethoscope to his chest, then to his back. He removed the thermometer and, after he read it, he washed it at the sink and dipped it in a sterile tube before putting it back in its case.
"I suppose you were hunting today?" he asked Gramps.
"You know anybody who wasn't?" Gramps said.
"I know some who shouldn't have been, and I know at least one who isn't going again until next year. His name's Delbert Bennett."
"Blasted nonsense!" Gramps snorted. "You doctors ever talk anything 'cept nonsense?"
"Seldom," Dr. Beardsley admitted cheerfully, "but it just so happens that I'm talking sense at present. It isn't too serious, but it will be if you don't take care. The truth is your heart isn't as young as it used to be. With reasonable luck it will last you another twenty years, and I fully expect you'll grow more cussed every year. But right now it needs rest, which means that you're going to take it easy for the next six months. In addition to your regular night's sleep, lie down for at least three hours every day. We'll see after that."
"I never heard so blame much foolishness!" Gramps tried to roar, but he was too weak and could only blink indignantly at Dr. Beardsley.
Gram said quietly but firmly, "He'll do as you say, Doctor."
"Clobber him if he doesn't."
"I will."
Dr. Beardsley packed his stethoscope and sphygmomanometer back in his bag and wrote a prescription, which he handed to Gram.
"There's no emergency about this; the youngster can bring it when he comes home from school tomorrow. After that, see that he takes his medicine according to the directions that will accompany the prescription and refill it before it runs out."
"Medicine!" Gramps said. "You pill peddlers can't think of anything else when you don't know what to do."
"He'll take the medicine, Doctor," Gram promised.
Dr. Beardsley said, "I leave you in care of your boss, Delbert," and went out into the night.
That had been that; hunting Old Yellowfoot was over for the season. Gramps grumbled and growled, but he took his medicine and accepted his three hours of daily rest. Bud shouldered as many of the chores as he could.
Then the school bus stopped, and as Bud trudged up the drive, he told himself sullenly that at least he was beholden to nobody for he had paid his way. But in his heart he knew it wasn't as simple as that, and that he would gladly work as many hours a day as he could stay awake to help Gram and Gramps.
For the past week the kitchen had been a heaven of tantalizing odors. Bushels of cookies and rows of fruit cakes had emerged from the great oven. Gram and Helen Carruthers had been busy from daylight until after dark. Gram was taking another tray of cookies from the oven when Bud came in and she smiled at him. Helen Carruthers, a tall, graying woman who seldom smiled, was mixing something in a pan. She nodded at Bud and told him to help himself.
Bud grabbed a handful of cookies and went to his room to change his clothes. As he went out to the barn, Shep came running to meet him and inside he found Gramps sitting on a bale of hay. The barn had become Gramps' refuge. The old man nodded glumly.
"Dogged if I know how she does it," Gramps said plaintively. "I'm supposed to take that stuff Doc Beardsley gave me, and it's a wonder it don't kill a body, every four hours. So every four hours, no matter how busy she is, Mother's right on deck with it. Pah! A man can't be himself any more."
"You should have your medicine, Gramps."
"Medicine, yes, but that ain't any medicine. Now you take sassafras root and slippery elm bark; that was medicine when they was boiled together by somebody who knew what he was doing." Gramps fell into a glum silence. Then he said, "Anyhow, they didn't get Old Yellowfoot."
"How do you know?"
"Everybody'd know if they got a buck that big. He'll be waiting for us next year."
"That's good!" Bud said with feeling.
"Ain't it," Gramps said sourly. "It'd be a heap better if next deer season wasn't such a passeling ways off. I felt in my bones that this was our year to get Old Yellowfoot, and we'd of had him if it hadn't been for this blasted nonsense. Oh well, we'll be howling a long spell if we howl about it. Want to help me fetch the Christmas tree tomorrow?"
The next day they set off across the snow with Shep frolicking beside them. Bud carried an ax and a rope. Gramps led the way to a young hemlock that, because it grew in the open, was evenly formed on all sides and sloped to a nearly perfect top. Bud felled it, then hitched the rope around its trunk and slid it home across the snow. Under Gramps' direction he sawed the chopped end off squarely and nailed a wooden standard across the trunk. Gram and Helen Carruthers took over as soon as Gramps and Bud had carried the tree into the living room and stood it in a corner. The tree had to be moved this way and that, seldom more than two inches in any direction, until Gram and Helen were finally satisfied and the top could be secured with string.
Even while he was helping with the Christmas preparations, Bud felt detached. He was convinced that they were being made solely for the Bennetts' children and grandchildren, in whose eyes he would be no more than an interloper. And so Bud walked grudgingly forward when the first of the real family arrived, forcing himself not to surrender to an impulse to run. As soon as he had mumbled "Pleased t'meetcha," he fled to the barn.
By Christmas morning the house was filled with Bennett relatives and more would be there in time for dinner. It was still dark when Bud awakened, and he slipped quietly out of bed and into his clothes. Then, shoes in hand, he padded softly down the stairs. He wanted to escape from the house and be out with the stock. Also, Gramps needed rest, and if he were not disturbed, he would sleep late enough so that Bud could finish the chores. Otherwise, Gramps would insist on helping. Bud knew by the light seeping through the crack under the kitchen door that somebody had preceded him. It was Gram.
"Allan," she said, "it's only half-past five."
She must have been up for a very long time. Now she was filling the last of a row of pies. As he watched her, Bud could not help thinking of the feast to come—roast turkey, chicken, duck and goose; sweet and white potatoes; mince, pumpkin and apple pie; salads and cooked vegetables; cake and ice cream. But he refused to look into the dining room, where the big table had been extended to its full length and been flanked by many small tables. There would be more than thirty at Christmas dinner, and there was room and food for all of them.
Bud was just as careful to avoid the parlor where gifts were piled in little mountains beneath the tree. He thought fleetingly of the sewing kit he had put under the tree for Gram and the book calledAfrica's Dangerous Gamefor Gramps. Without resentment, he reflected that there would be nothing for him.
He put on his shoes and took his jacket and cap from the closet, and was about to go out when he saw that he was being rude to Gram. Even if Christmas meant nothing to him, it meant a great deal to her. And so he turned and wished her a Merry Christmas as heartily as he could.
"Why bless you, Allan. And a very Merry Christmas to you," she said, hugging and kissing him. Even though he had no claim on Gram, it looked as if she had not rejected him completely, and he felt a little better.
He left the house and stopped on the back porch to hug Shep, whose warm, wet tongue seemed to wash away some of Bud's loneliness. Together they made their way through the snow to the stable where the four cows, warm in their stanchions, blew softly through their nostrils and turned their gently welcoming eyes on Bud. Some farmers claimed cows were glad to see you only because you gave them food, but Bud knew better, especially on this Christmas morning.
He forked hay into the mangers, measured grain into the feed boxes and drew his stool up beside the fractious Cherub. It seemed a long while ago and scarcely credible that he had once been afraid of her.
Bud milked the four cows deliberately, working as slowly as possible so as to delay his return to the house in which he had become an alien. Then he fed the horses, took care of the chickens and peered out of the barn at the winter landscape which was gradually becoming lighter. Although he had already cleaned it once, he cleaned the cow stable again, carefully sifting anything that even remotely resembled refuse from the fresh straw he had put down and carrying the refuse out to the litter pile behind the barn.
He lingered on in the barn until he knew that if he did not return to the house Gram or Gramps would come out to find out what had happened to him. They would want to know what was the matter, and he was determined not to spoil their happiness at Christmas by letting them know how miserable he was.
As soon as he was inside the kitchen, Bud took off his work shoes and put on the pair he wore to school. It was an involuntary and almost unconscious gesture. He and Gramps always came to the table in the shoes they wore in the barn, and as long as they were clean, neither of them gave it a second thought. But now the house was full of strangers.
Only Gram seemed to notice his entrance and she came into the kitchen from the dining room where the others were and started to cook his bacon and eggs.
"Land sake, Allan, you were a long while at the chores," she said.
Bud stayed in the kitchen with her, hoping that he would be able to eat there alone. But when his breakfast was ready, she carried the plate into the dining room and Bud set his jaw and followed.
He had no sooner sat down than Gramps came in. He nodded at the table in general and then turned to Bud.
"Did you do the morning chores, young feller?"
Bud said, "Yes," in a very small voice.
"Did you get into that little house, too?"
"Little house?"
"The one next the chicken house."
"No."
"You'd best kite along and get it."
Bud left the table, glad to get away, but burning with humiliation. The little house that Munn Mackie had hauled in with his truck had nothing in it. At least Bud thought it had nothing in it. But having been too proud to ask about it in the beginning or since, he wasn't sure now. In spite of all his precautions, he had come close to saddling Gramps with a chore that he, Bud, ought to have done without Gramps' having to ask him.
Bud came to the little house and, seeing a white envelope tied with a red ribbon to the door latch, stood dumfounded. "Merry Christmas" was written across the envelope and the card inside it read:
Merry Christmas to our boy, Bud-Allan.Gram and Gramps
Merry Christmas to our boy, Bud-Allan.Gram and Gramps
Bud opened the door and gasped. Last night after he had gone to bed somebody must have strewn fresh straw on the floor of the little house. There was a drinking fountain, a mash hopper, a grain feeder and a container for oyster shell. A regal young cockerel strutted around six pure-white pullets.
Bud entered the little house and pulled the door shut behind him, latching it so no one could intrude on this wonderful moment. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat and tears had sprung to his eyes. Now for the first time in his life he knew what Christmas could mean.
He caught up the cockerel and, as he stroked it, looked around at the pullets and thought of the flock they would become.
Bud was sure he had always wanted White Wyandottes like these.
Gramps took a turn for the better soon after the Christmas guests departed, but his improvement was not an unmitigated blessing. The better he felt, the more his enforced confinement chafed. Sores that were opened because he had to stop hunting Old Yellowfoot after only one day were rubbed raw because he could not go into the winter woods at all. There was little he could have done there if he had gone, but he still fretted to go.
He read and rereadAfrica's Dangerous Game, the book Bud had given him for Christmas, and criticized each chapter as he read it. The book was the abridged journal of an obscure professional hunter, and Gramps had no sympathy at all for the hardships the author had suffered or the perils he had faced. After all, Gramps said, he didn't have to go looking for rogue elephants, man-killing lions or short-tempered buffalo. And since he had gone after them of his own free will, he should have known about the perils he would have to face before he had ever started out. Of course he could expect trouble—what hunter couldn't?—but the book would have been far more interesting if he had given more space to hunting and less to the unendurable agonies that had beset him. In fact, Gramps thought the long chapter in which the hunter crossed the desert might better have been condensed into a single sentence reading, "Don't cross this desert unless you carry plenty of water."
Although the stature of the hero ofAfrica's Dangerous Gamedwindled with each perusal, reading was a way to help ease the long hours when Gramps could do little. And so Bud brought home books from the school library. Usually he chose books with outdoor themes, and instead of taking them to his room, he purposely left them on the kitchen table where Gramps would see them. Gramps was always volubly critical and often openly scornful of the books Bud brought home for him, but he read them all.
When he was not reading or helping with the chores if Bud had not managed to get them all done, Gramps devised endless cunning schemes for getting the best of Old Yellowfoot next season. For Old Yellowfoot, his one failure, galled Gramps every bit as much as Sir Lancelot would have been galled had he been unhorsed by a downy-cheeked young squire. The fact that illness had given Gramps only one day to hunt Old Yellowfoot did not worry him. All that mattered was that Old Yellowfoot still wore the rack of antlers that Gramps had sworn to hang in the living room.
Although the next deer season was still months away, Gramps gave his campaign all the care and attention an able general would lavish on a crucial battle. He carried a map of Bennett's Woods in his head and time after time his imagination took him through every thicket in which the great buck might hide. He pondered ways to drive him out and the various countermoves Old Yellowfoot might make to try to elude him. Gramps made lists, not only of the ways in which Old Yellowfoot could be expected to behave differently from young and relatively inexperienced deer, but also of his individual traits.
One evening in early April Bud read one of the lists that Gramps had left on the kitchen table:
Old Yellowfoot knows more about hunters than they do about him.He will not be spooked and he cannot be driven.Don't expect to find him where such a buck might logically be found, but don't overlook hunting him there. He does the unexpected.If the weather's mild, look for him in the heights, especially Hagerman's Knob, Eagle Hill and Justin's Bluff.If there's plenty of snow, he'll be in the lowlands. (Though I've yet to find him in Dockerty's Swamp during deer season, Bud and me will look for him there.)Old Yellowfoot's one of the very few deer I've ever run across who's smart enough to work against the wind instead of running before it. I'm sure he does this the better to locate hunters.Hunt thickets close to farms. I've a hunch he's hung out in them more than once while we looked for him in the deep woods.He will never cross an open space if he can help it, and he always can.
Old Yellowfoot knows more about hunters than they do about him.
He will not be spooked and he cannot be driven.
Don't expect to find him where such a buck might logically be found, but don't overlook hunting him there. He does the unexpected.
If the weather's mild, look for him in the heights, especially Hagerman's Knob, Eagle Hill and Justin's Bluff.
If there's plenty of snow, he'll be in the lowlands. (Though I've yet to find him in Dockerty's Swamp during deer season, Bud and me will look for him there.)
Old Yellowfoot's one of the very few deer I've ever run across who's smart enough to work against the wind instead of running before it. I'm sure he does this the better to locate hunters.
Hunt thickets close to farms. I've a hunch he's hung out in them more than once while we looked for him in the deep woods.
He will never cross an open space if he can help it, and he always can.
Then glancing once more at the list, Bud returned to his own figuring. He frowned and nibbled the eraser of his pencil as he looked at the sheets of paper scattered on the table in front of him, and finally arranged them in a neat sheaf and started over them again.
He knew pretty well what Gram and Gramps had paid for his pen of White Wyandottes, and the price was high. They were the best chickens that could be bought and, in terms of what they would bring in the market, the cockerel was worth any two dozen run-of-the-mill chickens and each of the pullets was worth any dozen. But expensive as the White Wyandottes had been, so far they had been anything but a bonanza.
Fed according to a formula worked out by Bud and the agriculture teacher at the Haleyville Consolidated School, the pullets had averaged more eggs for each bird than the pullets in Gramps' flock, and the cost of feeding them had been less. But Bud's pleasure at this proof that scientifically fed chickens did more for less money was somewhat diminished by the fact that until the past few weeks his chickens had produced only undersized pullets' eggs. When he accepted such eggs at all, Pat Haley would never pay more than twenty-seven cents a dozen. Gram used the surplus eggs in cooking, and Bud had taken his pay in feed rather than cash. He still owed Gramps sixty-nine cents for feed, and even though Gramps had told him not to worry, Bud couldn't help it, for after wintering his flock he was sixty-nine cents in debt, and now there were fresh problems.
Since it was unthinkable to let his aristocrats mingle with the farm flock, a run was necessary. Bud could cut the supporting posts in Bennett's Woods, but wire netting cost money. Besides, there would be no more income from egg sales for some time, for now that the six pullets had begun to lay normal-sized eggs, every one of the eggs had to be hoarded against the time when one or more of the six turned broody. To prove that there was more profit in better chickens, Bud had to increase his flock. The arguments for incubators as opposed to the time-honored setting hen were reasonable but it was out of the question for Bud to buy even a small incubator. And so, although he could expect no income from egg sales, at least for a while, he was still faced with the problem of building a run and of feeding his flock.
It was true that the future looked bright. Something like half the chicks hatched would probably be cockerels and the other half pullets. The rooster Bud already had would serve very well for several years more and the little house could comfortably accommodate him and about twenty hens. If the overflow were sold . . .
"What's the matter, Bud?" Gramps interrupted. "You look as though you just dug yourself a fourteen-foot hole, crawled in, and pulled the hole in on top of you."
Bud shook himself out of the reverie into which he had lapsed and looked up to see Gramps standing across the table. Bud grinned. There was something like the old sparkle in Gramps' eye and his chin had its old defiant tilt.
"I owe you sixty-nine cents for chicken feed, Gramps," Bud said, looking back at his figures.
"Serious matter," Gramps said gravely. "But I promise not to have the sheriff attach your flock if you pay in the next day or so. If you're dead set on having that worry off your mind, why don't you sell some eggs?"
"I'm saving them for hatching."
"Can't save your eggs and pay your debts, too," Gramps pointed out. "How many you got laid by?"
"Forty-four."
"Pat Haley'll buy 'em, and now that your hens have started laying something bigger'n robin's eggs, he'll pay better. You can pay me off and still have forty, fifty cents for yourself."
Bud looked at the old man. Sometimes he knew how to take Gramps, but this time he wasn't sure. "I have to save them," he said.
"You don't have to do anything of the kind," Gramps said. "If you're saving eggs it's 'cause you want to, and if you want to, it's 'cause you got something in mind. You aim to hatch those eggs?"
"Yes. I think the little house will hold maybe twenty hens and a rooster."
"'Bout right," Gramps conceded. "So you have seven in there now and forty-four eggs saved. If you get an eighty per cent hatch, and that won't be bad for a rooster as don't yet know too much 'bout his business, you'll have thirty-five more chickens. So that makes forty-two in a twenty-one hen house. It don't add up."
Bud said quickly, "That isn't what I have in mind. I'll keep fourteen of the best pullets and sell all the rest."
"Something in that," Gramps admitted. "Pat Haley'll pay you the going price for both fryers and broilers. Take out the cost of feed, and if you're lucky, come fall you could have ten or fifteen dollars for yourself."
Bud said thoughtfully, "I hadn't meant to sell any for fryers. I'd hoped to sell the surplus as breeding stock."
"Hope is the most stretchable word in the dictionary," Gramps said. "If we didn't have it we'd be better off dead but there's such a thing as having too much. Many a man who's tried to live on hope alone has ended up with both hands full of nothing. Do you think anybody who knows anything about poultry will pay you breeding-stock prices for chickens from an untried pen?"
"But my chickens have the best blood lines there are," Bud said.
"And it don't mean a blasted thing unless they have a lot of what it takes," Gramps said. "Joe Barston paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a four-month-old bull calf whose ancestors had so much blue blood they all but wore monocles. But this calf threw the measliest lot of runts you ever saw and finally Joe sold him for beef. Now if you had a proven pen of chickens, if you could show in black and white that yours produced the most meat and laid the most eggs for the breed, you could sell breeding stock. Otherwise you're out of luck." Gramps shrugged.
Bud stared dully at his papers. Dreaming of getting ten dollars or more for a cockerel that was worth a dollar and thirty-five cents as a broiler had been just another ride on a pink cloud, and his dreams of wealth in the fall evaporated.
"Your chin came close to fracturing your big toe," Gramps said. "Don't be licked before you are. Now you don't want to keep your own pullets 'cause you'll be breeding daughters back to their own father, and that's not for you. At least, it's not until you know more about such things. But you can trade some of yours back to the same farm where your pen came from. He'll probably ask more than bird for bird, but he'll trade and the least you can figure on is starting out this fall with a bigger flock. The rest you'd better figure on selling to Joe Haley. Now how many eggs have you been getting a day?"
"The least I've had since spring weather set in is two. The most is five."
"That's all? You never got six?"
"Not yet."
"Have you tried trap-nesting your hens?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Bud knew that trapping each hen in her nest after she laid and keeping a record of her production was the only way to weed out the drones from the workers. He hadn't tried it, though, because he hadn't wanted to leave any hen trapped away from food and water while he was at school all day. He hadn't wanted to ask Gramps to look after his trap nests for him either, but he only said lamely, "I never thought of it."
"You should have," Gramps said. "If you're going to make out with these hifalutin' chickens of yours you have to think of everything. Looks to me like you got a slacker in your flock and, though maybe she wouldn't be better off in the stew pot, you'd be better off to put her there."
"That's so," Bud conceded, "but how do I know which one?"
"You don't and there's no sense fussing about it now. So what else is bothering you?"
"I haven't got any money," Bud confessed.
"That," Gramps' serious eyes seemed suddenly to twinkle, "puts you in the same boat with forty-nine million and two other people. Why do you need money?"
"I need to build an enclosed run. I can't let my chickens run with the farm flock."
"True," Gramps said. "High society chickens oughtn't mix with ordinary fowl. Why don't you go ahead and build your run?"
"I told you. I haven't any money for netting and staples."
"Go in that little room beside the granary and you'll find a role of netting. Kite yourself down to Pat Haley's during lunch hour tomorrow, get some staples, and tell Pat to charge 'em to me."
"But . . ."
"Will you let me finish?" Gramps said sharply. "I didn't say you were going to get any part of it for free. That roll of netting cost me four dollars and sixty cents. Add to it whatever the staples cost, and since you want to save your eggs for hatching, somebody's got to buy feed for your chickens. I'll take you on until you have fryers to sell, but strictly as a business deal. Just a minute."
Gramps wrote on a sheet of paper, shoved it across the table, and Bud read,
On demand I promise to pay to Delbert J. Bennett the sum of ——. My pen of White Wyandottes plus any increase therefrom shall be security for the payment of this note.
On demand I promise to pay to Delbert J. Bennett the sum of ——. My pen of White Wyandottes plus any increase therefrom shall be security for the payment of this note.
Bud looked inquiringly across the table. Gramps shrugged. "All you have to do is sign it and go ahead; you're in the chicken business if you want in."
"How much will I owe you?"
"I'll fill in the amount when the time comes," Gramps promised. "Do you want to sign or don't you?
"I'll sign," Bud said, and painfully he wroteAllan Wilson Sloanin the proper place and gave the note back to Gramps.
The old man was folding it in his wallet when Gram said, "What nonsense is this?" She had come into the kitchen unnoticed and plainly she had been observing Gramps and Bud for some time. Her face was stormier than Bud had ever seen it and her normally gentle eyes snapped. Nonchalantly Gramps tucked the wallet into his pocket.
"Just a little business deal, Mother. I'm going to finance Bud's chicken business and he's going to pay me back when he sells his broilers and fryers."
"The idea," Gram said. "The very idea. Give that note back at once, Delbert Bennett."
"Now don't get all het up, Mother. A deal's a deal."
Bud saw that Gram's fury was beginning to touch Gramps in a tender spot, and he fidgeted nervously and said,
"I'd rather have it this way, Gram."
Gram answered by glaring at Gramps and flouncing out of the room. Bud looked dismally after her and turned to Gramps with a feeble smile.
"She shouldn't be so upset. I don't want anyone except me to pay for my chickens."
"She'll be a long while mad 'less she gets over it," Gramps said, still smarting. "Anything else, Bud?"
"Yes. How many eggs can you put under a setting hen?"
"Depends on the size of the hen. A small one'll take eleven, a medium-size can handle thirteen and you can put fifteen 'neath a big hen."
"When do you think my hens will turn broody?"
"Hard telling," Gramps growled. "A hen's a female critter and when it comes to doing anything sensible they ain't no different from other female critters. Hell and high water can't make 'em do anything 'thout they put their mind to it, and nine cases of dynamite can't stop 'em once they do."
Two days later, when he had carried five more eggs to his hoard that now numbered forty-seven, Bud found only two eggs left. He was sure that Gram or Gramps had mistakenly sent the eggs he had been saving to Haleyville along with the regular farm shipment. He went sadly out to the barn where Gramps was going over his gardening tools.
"You look like you'd swallowed a quart of vinegar," the old man said as he glanced up.
"It isn't that," Bud said forlornly. "Somebody sent most of my hatching eggs to market."
"No they didn't," Gramps said. "Three of my hens went broody and I took 'em. Put fifteen eggs under each, seeing they were big hens."
"But they're your hens."
"Don't trouble your head," Gramps said. "Setting hen rent'll be on the bill when time comes to settle up."
The following autumn, when Bud had been at Gram and Gramps' for more than a year, he strode down a tote road into Bennett's Woods with Shep tagging at his heels. Bright red and yellow leaves waved on every hardwood and swished underfoot as he plowed through them. The evergreens were ready for the frigid blasts to come, and the laurel and rhododendrons, touched but never daunted by frost, rattled in the sharp north wind.
A gray squirrel, frantically harvesting nuts and seeds before deep snow came, scooted up a tree, flattened himself on a limb and chirred when Bud went past. Three grouse rose on rattling wings. A sleek doe snorted and, curling her white tail over her back, bounded away.
Bud was oblivious, for he had come into Bennett's Woods to try to solve the problems that were bedeviling him.
That summer he had succeeded in hatching seventy-nine chicks. Seventy-four had survived, a far better percentage than was average, because Bud had watched his flock constantly for disease, predators and accidents.
The poultryman from whom Gram and Gramps had bought the original stock had traded fourteen young pullets for fourteen of Bud's pullets and three of Bud's cockerels, with Bud paying express charges both ways. The rest Bud had sold to Pat Haley. After paying Gramps every penny he owed him and interest as well, Bud had $8.97 to show for his summer's toil, and his problems were not yet ended. For even after they started to lay, it would be a long while before his pullets would produce full-sized eggs.
Shep curled up beside him on the bank of Skunk Creek as Bud sat there and stared moodily at the stream wondering how he would see his increased flock through the winter with only $8.97 and perhaps some egg money.
All he wanted from life was to stay on the farm with Gram and Gramps. He knew he would never even be well off if he reckoned success in financial terms alone, but the whirr of a winging grouse, the snort of a deer and the leap of a trout meant more to him than money, and he knew they always would. Still dreams have to have a practical side, too. Even if money is the root of all evil, it is indispensable, and Bud thought again of the $8.97 that he had earned that summer.
Suddenly he froze in his place. Back in the trees across the creek he saw a flicker. Then the black buck appeared. Bud sat spellbound, recalling the day when, heartsick and lonely, he had ventured into the woods and found a brother in the black buck. The buck now came cautiously down to the creek and Bud's eyes widened with delight.
Although this was his first year, the black buck was as big as some of the two- and three-year-old bucks that Bud and Gramps had seen in the woods. And instead of the spikes or fork horn that young bucks usually have, the black buck had a very creditable pair of antlers with three symmetrical tines on each. The buck drank and then, raising his dripping muzzle, caught Bud's scent and raced back into the woods.
Bud rose and started homeward, his depression gone. The black buck had faced his problems, too, and many of them had surely been desperate. But he had triumphed magnificently. This made Bud feel better and to see that his own situation was far brighter than he had thought. For although he had very little cash, he had more than tripled his flock. Moreover, he had the run and he owed nothing. Best of all he had the future.
One winter afternoon during his third year with Gram and Gramps, Bud was waiting in the study hall for Mr. Demarest, who taught agriculture at the Haleyville High School. Bud glanced at the clock on the wall. What seemed an hour ago it had been five minutes past four. Now it was only six minutes after. He sighed and stared out at the snow that was trampled in the yards and left in dirty piles in the street.
Winter always seemed a barren, meaningless season in Haleyville. At Bennett's Farm, however, where the snow covered the fields with an inviting blanket and transformed the woods into another world, winter was a natural and fitting part of things. There the seasons were fully seen and felt, not mere dates on a calendar as they were in town. Spring was the time for new life to be born, summer for spring-born life to attain maturity, autumn for the harvest to be gathered and winter for the land to rest and recuperate for spring.
As he stared out the study-hall window, Bud thought of Bennett's Woods, where Old Yellowfoot still bore his proud rack of antlers as he skulked through the thickets and tested the wind for signs of an enemy. He had been unmolested for the past two seasons, for Gramps had not been well enough to hunt deer and nobody else had a chance of hunting him successfully.
In Bennett's Woods, too, the black buck, now a king in his own right, snorted his challenge from the ridges and put to flight lesser bucks that sought the favor of the does he coveted. Three years had not dimmed Bud's memory of his first meeting with the tiny black fawn or lessened his feeling of bondship with him. Whenever Bud was troubled or faced with problems for which there seemed to be no solution, he still went into Bennett's Woods to seek out the black buck. And always he found there the answer he needed, for seeing the black buck achieve his destiny gave Bud the confidence he needed to work out his own life.
Some of the things that had happened before he came to Bennett's Farm now seemed as remote as if they had taken place during some other life. Bud could hardly believe that he had been the frightened, defiant twelve-year-old boy who had trudged up the Bennetts' driveway three years ago expecting nothing and having received everything. It seemed incredible that three years had elapsed since then and that he had gone on from grammar school into high school. And although his marks were not the highest in his class, they were still a source of pride to Gram and Gramps.
Some of the things that had seemed horribly unreal, Bud now saw in their true perspective. He remembered vividly his first Christmas at the farm, but now he knew and liked the Bennetts' children and grandchildren. And now he appreciated the true measure of his own love for Gram and Gramps. He had been a starved waif, and they had fed his soul as well as his body. More than ever he wanted to be with them always, to live as they had lived and to shape his life by the ideals to which they had clung. But to be as good a farmer as Gramps had been, Bud needed technical knowledge. That was why he was waiting for Mr. Demarest.
Bud thought wistfully of Gramps, who for the past two seasons had been forced to confine his outdoor activities to a little fishing and grouse hunting. But now he was fit again, and when the deer season opened tomorrow, he and Bud would be on the trail of Old Yellowfoot once more. This time they were certain to bag him; Gramps felt it in his bones.
Then the door opened and Mr. Demarest came in. He was a small man, but quick and wiry. He was in his late thirties, but the ordeals of a poverty-stricken boyhood and youth had made him look ten years older than he was. His black hair had gray streaks and he could never manage more than a fleeting smile. The son of a ne'er-do-well tenant farmer, Mr. Demarest had had no formal schooling until he was fifteen. But then he had set doggedly out to educate himself. Once he had done so, he had dedicated himself to teaching future farmers how to succeed, for he could not forget his father's many failures.
"I'm sorry to be late, Allan," he said pleasantly as he came through the study-hall door. "What's on your mind, son?"
"Mr. Demarest," Bud stammered, "I want to be a farmer."
"Is something stopping you?" Mr. Demarest's eyes twinkled.
"No," Bud said. "I'm certain I can throw in with Gramps Bennett and take over from him. I can buy out Gram and Gramps' children. They aren't interested in farming."
"Think it over carefully," Mr. Demarest said seriously. "There are better farms you might have."
"I don't want any other farm," Bud said firmly. "I want that one."
"It's sort of special, eh?"
"It's very special."
"Then what is your problem?"
"I don't know enough," Bud said. "Three years ago, for Christmas, I was given a pen of White Wyandottes. They're the Eichorn strain, about as good as you can get. I built from them and I was able to show Gramps that my purebreds were more profitable than his mongrel flock. We replaced his flock with Eichorn Wyandottes, too, and we're doing all right with them. But I can see where I made a lot of mistakes that needn't have been made if I had known how to avoid them. I want to go to college and study agriculture."
"Do you have any money?"
"No," Bud said. "I'm going to need most of what I have saved for berry plants next spring."
"But why, if you've built up a flock of Eichorn Wyandottes from one single pen, do you have only enough money to buy some berry plants?"
"The chickens have earned money, but I have needed it for day-to-day living," Bud said.
"Can Mr. and Mrs. Bennett help you at all?"
"They have a little more than four thousand dollars in the bank here at Haleyville, but that's all they have. They'll need it if anything goes wrong with either of them and I wondered if I could work my way through agriculture college?"
"You could, but I wouldn't consider earning all your expenses. At least, not at the beginning. Haven't you been able to sell any breeding stock from your Wyandottes?"
"No," Bud said. "That's one reason I want to go to college."
"What's your scholastic average?"
"B plus."
"Good, but not good enough for a scholarship even if there were enough of them for all able youngsters and if Haleyville Consolidated School received its just share. Allan, I don't want to be a killjoy, but you asked for my advice. Don't even think of college until you're able to finance at least your first semester. Then, if you show enough promise, the college will help you find ways to continue."
"How much will I need?" Bud asked.
"If you're careful, you should be able to get by with about seven hundred dollars. Perhaps even less."
"Seven hundred dollars!" Bud gasped.
"It isn't a million."
"It might as well be!"
"You can earn that much on summer jobs."
"Gramps has been sick. He can't spare me in summer."
"What will he do when you go to college?"
"It looks as though I'll be spared that worry," Bud said miserably. "If I need seven hundred dollars, I'm not going."
"You asked for my advice and I gave it, Allan, and I'd have rendered you no service if I hadn't been realistic," Mr. Demarest said gently. "If I had a magic wand to wave you into college with, believe me, I'd wave it. But I have no such thing. All you can do is to keep trying and never abandon hope."
Bud could say nothing, and finally Mr. Demarest said, "The bus has left. How will you get home?"
"I'll walk."
"I'll take you," Mr. Demarest said.
Bud rode in heartbroken silence up the snow-bordered highway. Mr. Demarest, who knew so much about so many things that Bud had almost believed he knew all about everything, hadn't been able to tell him how to get a college education. And so it was hopeless. Mr. Demarest drew up at the foot of the Bennetts' drive and put out his hand.
Mr. Demarest drove off and Bud tried to put a spring in his step and a tilt to his chin as he walked up the drive. The whole world, after all, had not fallen apart—just half of it. And Gramps was not only better but excited as a six-year-old over the prospect of hunting Old Yellowfoot tomorrow. Bud took off his overshoes, patted Shep and went into the kitchen.
Gram had just taken a tray of ginger cookies from the oven and put them on the table. Their odor permeated the whole kitchen. Gramps sat against the far wall happily oiling his rifle. Since Dr. Beardsley had given Gramps permission to go deer hunting this season, Gramps had been inspecting his rifle ten times a day. By now he had sighted it in so finely that he could almost drive nails with it at a hundred yards.
"Tomorrow's the day," Gramps said as Bud came in, "and I'm betting Old Yellowfoot will be hanging out in Dockerty's Swamp. You'd best get your own rifle in working order."
Bud said, "I already have."
Gram was more observant. "You're late, Allan," she said.
"I stayed to talk with Mr. Demarest," Bud said, in what he hoped was a casual tone. "He brought me home."
"What's the trouble?" she said, and Gramps looked up sharply.
"There's no trouble," Bud said.
"You can tell me, Allan. We're here to help you."
"If you're in a jam, Bud, we're on your side," Gramps said. "What'd you do? Sock the principal?"
"Honestly there's no trouble," Bud said. "Mr. Demarest and I talked about agriculture college."
"How nice," Gram said. "Every one of our boys and girls has gone to college. Now the twelfth will go, too."
"No he won't," Bud said. "Mr. Demarest said I hardly need a degree in agriculture if I'm going to stay here and take over Bennett's Farm. He said I can learn what I must know about poultry husbandry and berry culture as I go along."
"You're a right handy young feller at a lot of things," Gramps said. "But you're 'bout the poorest liar I ever laid eyes on. Joe Demarest never told you that."
"Well," Bud stammered, "not exactly. We had quite a talk."
"About what?"
"College."
"You make nine times as many circles as Old Yellowfoot with fifteen hunters hot on his tail," Gramps said. "He told you to go to college, didn't he?"
"Yes," Bud admitted. "But I'm not going."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to waste that much time. I can pick up what I must know as I go along."
"That is about the foolishest notion I ever heard," Gramps declared. "In my time I've met lots of men who didn't know enough, but offhand I can't remember any who knew too much. Sure you're going. May be you can't live like a millionaire's son on what we got in the bank, but you can get through."
"I can't take your money!" Bud blurted.
"Pooh," Gram sniffed. "What's money for? Of course you'll take it and we'll be mighty proud to have a college graduate running Bennett's Farm. Won't we, Delbert?"
"Yeah," said Gramps who had begun to oil his rifle again. "Now you'd best get out of your school duds. I fed and bedded your hifalutin' chickens though I'm sort of uneasy around that one high-steppin' rooster. He's got so much blue blood that most any time at all I expect him to whip out one of those fancy glasses on sticks. That rooster sure ought to have one. He figures I'm not fit to be in the same chicken house with him. You beat it along now, Bud. I didn't milk the cows."
"Take a couple of cookies with you," Gram said.
Bud grabbed a handful of cookies and went up to his room. As he went about changing into work clothes, Bud kept his jaws clamped tightly. Gram and Gramps were wonderful, but they were so hopelessly out of touch with the world that they understood neither the value of money nor why Bud couldn't take the savings they had accumulated almost penny by penny over nearly half a century. They still added to it, but still almost penny by penny, and there was not even a possibility of sudden wealth. Anyway, Bud said to himself, he had another year of high school before he could even hope to enter college. Perhaps something would turn up before then. But in his heart he knew nothing would and he decided to say no more about college. There was no point in arguing with Gram and Gramps.
As Bud milked the cows, took care of the stock and ate the evening meal with Gram and Gramps, he all but forgot his lost hope for a college education. Tomorrow's hunt for Old Yellowfoot was too exciting for him to brood over what could not be helped.
The tinny clatter of his alarm clock jarred him out of deep sleep the next morning well before the usual time. Bud shut the alarm off, leaped to the floor, and padded across it to revel for a moment in the frigid blast that blew in his open window. With snow on the ground and weather cold enough to keep it from melting without being too cold for comfort, it was a perfect day for hunting deer.
When he returned to the kitchen after doing the morning chores, Gram was making pancakes and cooking sausage and Gramps was sitting in a chair. "Why didn't you call me?" he growled. "We'd have been in the woods sooner if I'd helped with the chores."
"Now don't be grouchy," Gram said. "Old Yellowfoot's been roaming about Bennett's Woods for a good many years. I think he'll last another fifteen minutes."
"A body would figure I'm a crippled old woman," Gramps said. "Maybe you should ought to wrap me up in cotton and put me to bed so I won't get scratched or something. Pah! I never did see the beat of such a business!"
"If you're feeling as mad as all that," Gram said sharply, "you won't have to shoot Old Yellowfoot. Just bite him and he'll die from hydrophobia."
Bud giggled and Gramps couldn't help chuckling.
"Of all the dang fools in the world, people are the dangdest," he said. "I put myself in mind of Charley Holan, who said he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he just had a good brood sow. He got the sow and then he needed a place to keep it. So he said he'd be the happiest man ever if he had a place to keep it. He got one and found he needed a boar. Charley got the boar and first thing you know he was overrun with pigs. They did poorly that year, it didn't even pay to haul 'em to market. So Charley says he'd be the happiest man in Dishnoe County if he'd never even seen a pig. And this is the first season in the past three I've ever been able to hunt Old Yellowfoot. We'll tag him 'fore the season ends, Bud."
"I hope so, Gramps," Bud said.
"Dig in. It takes a pile of Mother's pancakes and a heap of sausage to see a man through a day in the deer woods."
After breakfast they stepped into the cold predawn blackness. Shep, tied as usual while deer season was in swing, came to the end of his rope, whined, pressed his nose against their hands and pleaded as usual to be taken along.
Gramps stopped just inside Bennett's Woods, almost in sight of the barn. It was still too dark to shoot, but they often saw deer from the barn and they could expect to see deer from now on. It was true that Old Yellowfoot had never been seen so near the farm but that was no sign he never would be.
They went on as soon as they were able to sight clearly on a target a hundred yards away. Their jackets were tightly buttoned and their earmuffs pulled down against the frosty air. A doe faded across the trail like a gray ghost, leaving sharply imprinted tracks in the snow. A little farther on they saw a small buck. Then a doe and fawn ran wildly through the woods, and Gramps halted in his tracks.
Bud stared. Since he had come to Bennett's Farm he had seen many deer, and many of them had been running. But he had never seen any of them run like this.
"That pair's scared," Gramps said. "In all my born days I haven't seen ten deer run that fast, and the last one had wolves on its trail."
"Could wolves be chasing these?" Bud asked.
Gramps shook his head. "As far as I know, there hasn't been a wolf in Bennett's Woods for twenty-six years. Me and Eli Dockstader got the last one, and there's nothing else I can recall offhand that could start a couple of deer running that way and keep 'em running. Still, it has to be something."
Off in the distance, rifles began to crack as hunters started sighting and shooting at deer. Gramps and Bud paid no attention, for if other hunters could see them, they must be ordinary deer.
When they reached Dockerty's Swamp, where Gramps thought they might find Old Yellowfoot, Bud said, "Let me go down and track him through, Gramps, and you take it easy."
"Poof!" the old man said. "If Old Yellowfoot's in there, there's just one man got a chance of putting him out and that's me. Doc Beardsley said I could come deer hunting, didn't he? 'Sides, did you ever know a deer hunter—I'm talking of deer hunters and not deer chasers—who took it anything 'cept easy? The slower you go, the more deer you see."
"That's so," Bud admitted.
"Kite round and get on your stand," Gramps ordered. "I'll be through by and by."
He disappeared and Bud circled the swamp to the brush-grown knoll that deer chose as an escape route when they were driven out of Dockety's Swamp. Rifles, some of them close and some distant, cracked at sporadic intervals as other hunters continued to find and shoot at deer. Bud waited quietly, with a couple of chickadees that were sitting nearby on a sprig of rhododendron for company.
Before long he saw something move down the slope. Bud stiffened, ready to shoot. It could only be a deer. But at the moment it was too far away and too well hidden by brush for him to tell what kind of a deer. Then it came on up the slope and Bud saw that it was a very good ten-point buck, but he refrained from shooting. The ten point was a nice trophy but he was not Old Yellowfoot.
Then nine does came by in no hurry, but without lingering as they walked through the sheltering brush into the forest beyond. They were followed by two smaller bucks, and then by another doe. Two and a half hours after Bud had taken up his stand, Gramps reappeared. Bud saw with relief that the old man did not look tired or even winded. Doc Beardsley had known what he was talking about when he had said Gramps was able to hunt deer this season.
"There were plenty of deer in the swamp, but Old Yellowfoot wasn't among 'em," Gramps said. "We'll try Dozey Thicket."
But Old Yellowfoot was not in Dozey Thicket or Hooper Valley or Cutter's Slashing or Wakefoot Hollow. Nor did they find Old Yellowfoot the next day, although they saw at least three bucks with imposing racks of antlers.
On Monday Bud had to return to school and Gramps hunted alone. All week long he had no success, but when Bud came home Friday, Gramps was waiting for him in the kitchen. There was an air of triumph about him and a hunter's gleam in his eye.
"Found him, Bud," he said as soon as Bud came through the door.
"No!"
"Sure 'nough did! He's gone plumb out of Bennett's Woods into that footy little thicket above Joe Crozier's place. I saw his track where he came to the top of the hill and went back again, but I didn't hunt him 'cause I was afraid I might spook him. But two of us can get him right where he is."
Saturday morning, Bud and Gramps waited for dawn on the ridge overlooking Joe Crozier's thicket. When daylight came, they sighted their rifles on a rock about a hundred yards away, and for a moment neither spoke.
Crozier's thicket had at one time been a fine stand of hardwoods. Joe Crozier's father had cut the larger trees and buzzed them up for firewood, and the thicket had grown back to spindly young saplings. It was just the place a wise buck like Old Yellowfoot would choose as a refuge during hunting season, for nobody would ever think of looking for him there. But it was also a place where experienced hunters who did stumble onto his refuge would surely kill him.
"Let's go down," Gramps said softly.
Side by side they descended the hill, but when they were still forty yards from Crozier's thicket, they stopped. There was a patch of dark gray there that might have been a protruding knob of a tree or a boulder, but it wasn't. Old Yellowfoot, who knew the odds but was not about to give up, began to try to sneak away.
He was as huge as ever and he had lost none of his cunning. But his left antler was now only a single straight spike and his right one a snarled welter of many points.
Bud almost cried with disappointment, for he knew how Gramps had dreamed of the royal trophy Old Yellowfoot's antlers would make. And now he had overtaken Old Yellowfoot only to find him in his decadence. Never again would Old Yellowfoot be a worth-while trophy for anyone. He had succumbed to age.
As Bud was about to speak to Gramps, the old man said serenely, "Nature got to him before we could and I reckon that's as it should be. He was just a little too good to hang on anybody's wall. Let's go see Mother."
A week later, Bud and Gramps went into Bennett's Woods to bring out a load of firewood. Bud drove the team, Gramps sat on the bobsled seat beside him and Shep tagged amiably behind. They were half a mile from the farmhouse when the horses stopped of their own accord and raised their heads to stare. Looking in the same direction, Bud saw the black buck.
More darkly colored than any other deer Bud had ever seen, the buck was standing rigidly still in a little opening between two clusters of stunted hemlocks. His antlers had become magnificent. The black buck's head was high, and his eyes wary and his nostrils questing. A second later he glided out of sight into the nearest hemlocks.
For a moment Bud and Gramps sat enthralled, scarcely believing what they had seen. Then Gramps sighed and said, "Nothing's ever really lost, Bud. That's as good a head as Old Yellowfoot ever carried. Next year we'll hunt the black buck."