The Corner House Girls Snowbound Part 26

"And the wolf?" asked Agnes, with considerable interest.

"I trapped him. Last winter. He was a tremendous big feller," said M'Graw, heaping a tin plate with johnnycake and pouring bacon grease over it. "There's a small pack living up in the hills, and I'm likely to get more this winter. These heavy snows will no doubt be driving 'em down."

"Oh! Wolves!" gasped the girl.

"They won't bother you none," said M'Graw. "Don't go off by yourself, and if any of your party takes a long tramp, carry a gun. Like enough you'll get a shot at something; but not wolves. They're too sly."

The conversation of the old backwoodsman was both illuminating and amusing. And his hunting trophies were vastly interesting, at least to Neale.

There was a big photograph on the wall of Ike and another man standing on either side of a fallen moose. The great, spoon-shaped horns of the creature were at least six feet across.

"You'll see that head up over the main mantelpiece up to the Lodge,"

said M'Graw. "That's Mr. Birdsall. He an' me shot that moose over the line in Canady. But we brought the head home."

Over his own fireplace was a handsome head--that of a stag of the red deer.

"Got him," Ike vouchsafed between bites, "down in the east swamp, ten year ago come Christmas. Ain't been a bigger shot in this part of the country, I reckon, 'ceptin' the ghost deer Tom Lawrence shot three winters ago over towards Ebettsville."

"Ghost deer!" exclaimed Neale and Agnes together.

"What does that mean?" added the boy.

"Surely you don't believe there are spirits of deer returned to earth, do you, Mr. M'Graw?" asked Agnes, smiling.

M'Graw grinned. "Ain't no tellin'. Mebbe there is. I'm mighty careful what I say about ghosts," he rejoined. "But this here ghost deer, now--"

He had finished breakfast and was filling his pipe. "Lemme tell you about it," he said. "I will say, though, 'twasn't no spirit, for I eat some of the venison from that ghost deer.

"But for two seasons the critter had had the whole of Ebettsville by the ears. The hunters couldn't get a shot, and some folks said 'twas a sure-enough ghost.

"But if 'twas a ghost, it was the fust one that ever left footprints in the snow. That's sure," chuckled M'Graw. "I went over there with Old Betsey once; but never got a shot at it. Jest the same I seen the footprints, and I knowed what it was."

"What was it?"

"Looked like a ghost flying past in the twilight. It was an albino--white deer. I told 'em so. And fin'ly Tom Lawrence, as I said, shot it. Why they hadn't got it before, I guess, was because them that shot at it s.h.i.+vered so for fear 'twas a ghost they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn!" and M'Graw broke into a loud laugh.

"I did not know that deer were ever white," Agnes said.

"One o' the wonders of nature," Ike a.s.sured her. "And not frequent seen. But that critter was one--and a big one. Weighed upwards of two hundred pound. Tom give me a haunch, and when it was seasoned some, 'twasn't much tougher than shoe-leather. _Me_, I kill me a doe when I want tender meat. My teeth is gettin' kind of wore down," chuckled the old man.

"Was it really all white?" asked Neale.

"Well, that buck's horns an' hoofs was considerable lighter in color than ordinary. With them exceptions, and a few hairs on the forehead and a tuft on the hind leg, that critter was perfectly white. Queer.

Jest an albino, as I said," M'Graw concluded between puffs.

Beside the chimney on a big nail driven into a log, hung a string of rusty keys, with one big s.h.i.+ny bra.s.s one by itself. Agnes said:

"I guess you have to lock everything up when you leave home, don't you, Mr. M'Graw?"

"Me? Never lock a thing. We don't have no tramps. And if I leave home I always leave a fire laid and everything so that a visitor can come right in and go to housekeeping. It's a purty mean man that'll lock up his cabin in the woods. No, ma'am. I never lock nothin'."

"But those keys?" the Corner House girl suggested curiously.

"Oh! Them? Just spare keys I picked up. All but this," and he reached for the bra.s.s key briskly. "This is the key to the Lodge padlock, I'm goin' to take it up to that Mr. Howbridge of yours and tell him something about it. I'll walk back with you."

He slipped into his leather jacket and buckled up his leggings. Then banking the fire on the hearth, he said he was ready to go. He put the big bra.s.s key in his pocket, but as he had intimated, he left the cabin door unlocked.

Once outside, they saw that the sun was clouded over again. "That storm is surely a-coming," Ike observed. "I shouldn't wonder, when it does get here, if it turns out to be a humdinger. 'Long threaten, long last,' they say."

When they arrived at the Lodge the old man took a look at the fox Neale had hung up. He examined the small hole under the ear where the bullet had gone into the animal's head.

"Nice shot," he muttered. "Dropped him without a struggle, I reckon.

And you sure are right, boy," he added to Neale. "It was a twenty-two.

Nothin' bigger. Humph! mighty funny, that.

"Well, you let it hang here and I'll skin it for you before I go back home. Fust off I want to see your Mr. Howbridge."

As M'Graw went through the hall to find the lawyer, Neale and Agnes were called by Luke from one of the sheds. His voice and beckoning hand hurried them to the spot.

"What do you know about this?" cried Luke. "Here are two perfectly good sleds--a big one and a smaller. And one of those drivers that have just started back for c.o.xford, told me where there was a dandy slide."

"Crackey, that's fine!" agreed the eager Neale.

Agnes, too, was delighted. The other girls were eager to try the coasting.

"But we must get away without the children. It is too far for them to go," Ruth said. "At least, we must try it out before we let them join us."

"They are all right at the front with their snow man. I just saw them," Agnes said. "Come on!" Agnes was always ready for sport.

They started away from the house, the two boys dragging the bobsled.

There were about four inches of fluffy, dry snow on top, and under that the drifts were almost ice-hard.

"Ought to make the finest kind of sledding," Luke declared.

Meanwhile Ike M'Graw had found Mr. Howbridge reading a book in a corner of one of the comfortable settees in the big living-room. He dropped the book and stood up to greet the woodsman with a smile.

"How are you, this morning, M'Graw?" asked the lawyer. "How about the key?"

"Here 'tis," said the guide. "Found it just where it should be. Looked as though it had never been touched since I was gone. But, of course, as I tell you, anybody might have been in my cabin. I don't lock nothin' up."

"If the key was used, it was by somebody who knew it was the key and where to find it," Mr. Howbridge said reflectively.

"You struck it there," agreed Ike. "And there's only two keys to that big padlock. Unless there's been one made since Mr. Birdsall died," he added.

"If anybody borrowed the key and got in here, they got out again and locked the front door and returned the key."

"So 'twould seem. You say there wasn't no marks in the snow when your folks fust came?"