The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales Part 21

In the mean time, Uncle Obed took a pot of black paint, and covered the white face of the heifer, so as to prevent recognition. The neighbor came up at night, and helped despatch his own "critter,"

receiving the horns and hide for his pay, and laughing with Obed to think how cleverly the owner had been "done."

The next day he missed his heifer, and called on Obed to ask if he had seen her.

"I hain't seen her to-day," replied Uncle Obed, "but if you'll go to the tannery, where you sold that hide, and 'll just take the trouble to overhaul it, Mr. Stagg, prehaps you'll find out where your heifer is."

_Pre_haps he did.

On another occasion Uncle Obed appropriated--we scorn to charge him with stealing--a cow which had had the misfortune to lose her tail.

Stepping into a tannery, he cut off a tail, and sewed it on to the fragment which yet decorated the hind quarters of the stolen animal.

He then drove her along towards the next market, and having to cross a ferry, had just got on board the boat with his booty, when down came the owner of the missing cow, "b.l.o.o.d.y with spurring, fiery red with haste," and took pa.s.sage on the same boat.

He eyed his cow very sharply, while Uncle Obed stood quietly by, watching the result of the investigation.

"That's a pretty good cow, ain't it?" said Uncle Obed.

"Yes," replied the owner, "and if her tail was cut off, I could swear it was mine."

Uncle Obed quietly took his knife out of his pocket, and cutting the tail short off _above_ where the false one was joined on, threw it into the river.

"Now, neighbor," said he, triumphantly, "can you swear that's your cow?"

"Of course not," said the owner. "But they look very much alike."

After stealing something or other, we forget what, Uncle Obed was observed, and the sheriff was sent in pursuit of him, in hot haste, mounted on a fine and very fast horse. After a hard run, Uncle Obed halted at the edge of a rough piece of ground, pulled off his coat, and pulled down about a rod of stone wall, then quietly went to work building it up again, as if that was his regular occupation.

Presently the sheriff came riding up on the spur, and reining in, asked Obed if he had seen a fellow running for his life.

"Yes," said Obed, "I see him jest now streakin' it like a quarter hoss in _that_ direction," pointing off. "But he was pretty nigh blown, and I 'xpect you can catch him in about two minnits."

"Well, just hold my horse," said the sheriff, "and I'll overhaul him."

The sheriff scrambled over the stones and through the bushes in the direction indicated, and the moment he was out of sight, Uncle Obed jumped on the horse and rode off at the top of his speed. He rode his prize to a town a good ways off, and sold the horse for a hundred and fifty dollars.

For some similar exploit, he was arrested and committed to jail in Ess.e.x county, to await his trial. But the prison being then in a process of repair, Uncle Obed, with other victims of the law, was incarcerated in the fort in Salem harbor. He made his escape, however, by crawling through the sewer, as Jack Sheppard did from Newgate prison. The sentinel on duty saw a ma.s.s of seaweed floating on the surface of the water. Now, this was nothing extraordinary, but it _was_ extraordinary for seaweed to float _against_ the tide. Uncle Obed's head was in that floating ma.s.s. He was hailed and ordered to swim back. He made no answer. A volley of musketry was discharged at him, but no boat being very handy, he got off and made his escape, very much after the manner of Rob Roy at the ford of Avondow.

Uncle Obed had a famous black Newfoundland dog, worth from sixty to eighty dollars. When hard up, he used to take the dog about fifty or a hundred miles from home, where he was unknown, and sell him. No matter what the distance was, the dog always came back to his old master, who realized several hundred dollars by the repeated sales of him.

Such were a few of the exploits of this departed worthy, actually vouched for by contemporaries. His pa.s.sion for stealing was undoubtedly a monomania, for he was known in many cases to make voluntary rest.i.tution of articles that he had purloined, and his circ.u.mstances did not allow him the plea of necessity which palliates the errors of desperately poor rogues in every eye except that of the law.

THE CASKET OF JEWELS.

Mr. Luke Brandon was a Wall Street broker, of moderate business capacity, little education, and of plain manners, partaking of the rustic simplicity of his original employment--he was, in early life, a farmer in one of the western counties of New York. With less talent and more cunning, he might have become a very rich man, at short notice; but being brought up in an old-fas.h.i.+oned school of morality, he could never learn to dignify swindling by the epithet of smartness, nor consider overreaching his neighbor a "fair business transaction."

Hence he plodded along the even tenor of his way, contented with moderate profits, and satisfied with the prospect of becoming independent by slow degrees.

But in an evil hour, during a fortnight's relaxation at the Catskill Mountain House, this steady and respectable gentleman, at the mature age of thirty-five, quite an old bachelor indeed, fell desperately in love with a das.h.i.+ng girl of twenty, the orphan daughter of a bankrupt s.h.i.+p chandler. Miss Maria Manners was highly educated; that is, she could write short notes on perfumed billet paper, without making any orthographical or grammatical mistakes, had taken three quarters'

lessons of a French barber, could work worsted lapdogs and embroider slippers, danced like a sylph, and played on the piano indifferently well. She had visited the Catskills on a matrimonial speculation, and made a dead set at poor Brandon. Of course with his experience in the ways of women, he fell a ready dupe to the fascinating wiles of Miss Manners. She kept him in an agony of suspense for a week, during every evening of which she waltzed with a young lieutenant of dragoons, who was playing billiards and drinking champagne on a sick leave, until she could hear from a fabulous guardian at Philadelphia, and obtain his consent to a sacrifice of her brilliant prospects--nothing a year and a very suspicious account at a fas.h.i.+onable milliner's.

Mr. Brandon went down to the city, purchased a snug house, furnished it modestly, gave a liberal order on his tailor, and one memorable morning, might have been seen looking very uncomfortable, in a white satin stock and kids, beside a lady elegantly dressed in satin and blonde lace, while a portly clergyman p.r.o.nounced his sentence in the shape of a marriage benediction.

There was a snug wedding breakfast in the new house, at which were present several eminent apple speculators from Fulton market, two or three bank clerks, and a reporter for a weekly newspaper, who consumed a ruinous amount of sandwiches and bottled ale.

Before the honeymoon was over, the bride began to display some of the less amiable features of her character. She sneered at the situation and simplicity of the establishment, and protested she was unaccustomed to that sort of style. She was perfectly sincere in this, for the defunct s.h.i.+p chandler had lived in a bas.e.m.e.nt and two attic chambers.

By dint of repeated persecutions, she induced her husband to move into a larger house; and finally, after the expiration of many years, we find them established in the upper part of the city, in a splendid mansion, looking out upon a fas.h.i.+onable square, with a little marble boy in front sitting on a brick, and spouting a stream of Croton through a clam sh.e.l.l.

One morning, Mr. Brandon came home about eleven o'clock. On entering his front door, he beheld, lounging on a sofa, with the _Courrier des Etats Unis_ in his hand, Claude, the handsome French page of Mrs. B.

"Where is Mrs. B.?" asked the elderly broker.

"Madame is in her boudoir," replied the page; "but," he added, seeing his master move in that direction, "I do not know whether she is visible."

"That I will ascertain myself, young gentleman," replied the broker, with a slight shade of irony in his tone. "But tell me, is there any one with her?"

"Only M. Auguste Charmant," said the page.

"That confounded Frenchman!" muttered the plebeian broker. "My Yankee house is turned topsyturvy by these foreigners. There's a French cook, and a French chambermaid, and the friend of the family is a Frenchman.

I don't know what I'm eating, and I hardly understand a word that's said at my table. Sometimes, by way of change, they talk Italian instead of French. One might as well a.s.sociate with a stack of monkeys. Out of the way, jackanapes."

"Monsieur," said the page, with true Gallic dignity, "I was about to proceed to announce monsieur."

"Monsieur can announce himself," replied Brandon, with the grin of a hyena; and proceeding up stairs, he entered the boudoir without knocking.

Mrs. Brandon was lounging on a _fauteuil_, in an elegant morning toilet--literally plunged and embowered in costly Brussels lace. Her delicate, bejewelled fingers were playing with the petals of an exquisite bouquet. Thanks to a good const.i.tution, a life of ease, an accomplished milliner and an incomparable dentist, the fair Maria, though the mother of a marriageable girl, was still a lovely and fascinating woman, and Brandon, as he gazed on her superb figure, almost forgave her absurd ambition and her ruinous extravagance.

Still, when he glanced at his own anxious, emaciated, and careworn features, in the splendid Versailles mirror that hung opposite, his transitory pleasure gave way to stern and bitter feelings. He merely nodded to his wife, and bowed coldly to her companion, a young man attired in the height of fas.h.i.+on, with dark eyes and hair, and the most superb mustache imaginable.

"Ah! my dear Meestare Brandon," said the dandy, "give me your hand. I congratulate you on such a _bonne fortune_--such good luck as has befallen you."

"Explain yourself, sir," said the broker.

"_Avec plaisir._ I have secured for you a box at the opera for the whole season--and for only five hundred dollars."

The broker whistled.

"Really nothing," said Mrs. Brandon; "only think--the best troupe we have yet had--a new _prima donna_ and a new _ba.s.so_."

"Fiddlestick!" said the matter-of-fact husband. "What does it amount to?"

"Brandon," said the lady with a true maternal dignity, "reflect upon the importance of the opera to the education of your daughter."

"Nonsense!" said the broker, angrily. "My daughter Julia would please me much better if she cultivated a little common sense, and adopted the plain, republican manners fitted to the eventualities of her future life, instead of aping foreign fas.h.i.+ons, and doing her best to denationalize her character."

Monsieur Auguste Charmant shrugged his shoulders, Mrs. Brandon clasped her hands, and the former, rising said,--