The Backwoodsmen Part 11

The old woman gazed down upon her with some surprise, and stroked the fair, fluffy head lovingly as she murmured: "There, there! There's nothing to take on about! Though you be such a little mite of a towhead, you've got the grit, you've got the grit, Melindy Griffis.

It's proud of you I am, and it's proud your father'll be when I tell him about it."

Then, as the girl's weeping continued, and her slender shoulders continued to twist with her sobs, the rugged old face that bent above her grew tenderly solicitous.

"There, there!" she murmured again. "'Tain't good for you to take on so, deary. Hadn't you better finish beating up the pancakes before the batter spiles?"

Thus potently adjured, although she knew as well as her grandmother that there was no immediate danger of the batter spoiling, the girl got up, dashed the back of her hand across her eyes with a little laugh, closed the door, got out another spoon from the table drawer, and cheerfully resumed her interrupted task of mixing pancakes. And the sheep, having slowly extricated themselves from the deep snow behind the well-house, huddled together, with heads down, in the middle of the yard, fearfully eyeing the limp body which lay before the shed.

Mrs. Gammit's Pig

"I've come to borry yer gun!" said Mrs. Gammit, appearing suddenly, a self-reliant figure, at the open door of the barn where Joe Barron sat mending his harness. She wore a short cotton homespun petticoat and a dingy waist; while a limp pink cotton sunbonnet, pushed far back from her perspiring forehead, released unmanageable tufts of her stiff, iron-grey hair.

"What be _you_ awantin' of a gun, Mrs. Gammit?" inquired the backwoodsman, looking up without surprise. He had not seen Mrs.

Gammit, to be sure, for three months; but he had known all the time that she was there, on the other side of the ridge, one of his nearest neighbours, and not more than seven or eight miles away as the crow flies.

"It's the bears!" she explained. "They do be gittin' jest a leetle mite _too_ sa.s.sy, down to my place. There ain't no livin' with 'em.

They come rootin' round in the garden, nights. An' they've et up the white top-knot hen, with the whole settin' of eggs, that was to hev'

hatched out next Monday. An' they've took the duck. An' last night they come after the pig."

"They didn't git _him_, did they?" inquired Joe Barron sympathetically.

"No, siree!" responded Mrs. Gammit with decision. "An' they ain't agoin' to! They scairt him though, snuffin' round outside the pen, trying to find the way in.--I've hearn tell they was powerful fond of pork.--He set up sich a squealin' it woke me; an' I yelled at 'em out of the winder. I seen one big black chap lopin' off behind the barn. I hadn't nothin' but the broom fer a weapon, so he got away from me.

I'll git him to-night, though, I reckon, if I kin have the loan of your gun."

"Sartain," a.s.sented the woodsman, laying down the breech-strap he was mending. "Did you ever fire a gun?" he inquired suddenly, as he was starting across the yard to fetch the weapon from his cabin.

"I can't rightly say I hev'," answered Mrs. Gammit, with a slight note of scorn in her voice. "But from the kind of men I've seen as _kin_, I reckon it ain't no great trick to larn."

Joe Barron laughed, and went for the weapon. He had plenty of confidence in his visitor's ability to look out for herself, and felt reasonably sure that the bears would be sorry for having presumed upon her unprotected state. When he returned with the gun--an old, muzzle-loading duck-gun, with a huge bore--she accepted it with careless ease and held it as if it were a broom. But when he offered her the powder-horn and a little bag of buckshot, she hesitated.

"What be _them_ for?" she inquired.

Joe Barren looked serious.

"Mrs. Gammit," said he, "I know you kin do most anything a man kin do--an' do it better, maybe! A woman like you don't have to apologize for nothin'. But you was not _brung up_ in the woods, an' you can't expect to know all about a gun jest by _heftin'_ it. Folks that's been brung up in town, like you, have to be _told_ how to handle a gun.

This here gun ain't _loaded_. And them 'ere's the powder an' buckshot to load her with. An' here's caps," he added, producing a small, brown tin box of percussion caps from his trousers pocket.

Mrs. Gammit felt abashed at her ignorance, but gratified, at the same time, by the reproach of metropolitanism. This implication of town-bred incompetency was most flattering to the seven frame houses and one corner store of Burd Settlement, whence she hailed.

"I reckon you'd better show me how to load the thing, Mr. Barron," she agreed quite humbly. And her keen grey eyes took in every detail, as the woodsman rammed home the powder hard, wadded down the charge of buckshot lightly, and pointed out where she must put the percussion cap when she should be ready to call upon the weapon for its services.

"Then," said he in conclusion, as he lifted the gun to his shoulder and squinted along the barrel, "of course you know all the rest. Jest shet one eye, an' git the bead on him fair, an' let him have it--a leetle back of the fore-shoulder, fer choice! An' _that_ b'ar ain't agoin' to worry about no more pork, nor garden sa.s.s. An' recollect, Mrs. Gammit, at this time of year, when he's fat on blueberries, he'll make right prime pork himself, ef he ain't _too_ old and rank."

As Mrs. Gammit strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun--still carrying it as if it were a broom--she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself--and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time to indulge in the luxury of a husband; but the honorary t.i.tle of "Mrs." had early been conferred upon her, in recognition of her abundant and confident personality and her all-round capacity for taking care of herself. To have called her "Miss" would have been an insult to the fitness of things. When, at the age of sixty, she inherited from an only, and strictly bachelor, brother a little farm in the heart of the wilderness, some forty miles in from the Settlement, no one doubted her ability to fill the role of backwoodsman and pioneer. It was vaguely felt that if the backwoods and Mrs. Gammit should fail to agree on any important point, so much the worse for the backwoods.

And indeed, for nearly two years and a half everything had gone swimmingly. The solitude had never troubled Mrs. Gammit, to whom her own company was always congenial--and, as she felt, the only company that one could depend upon. Then she had her two young steers, well broken to the yoke; the spotted cow, with one horn turned up and the other down; the grey and yellow cat, with whom she lived on terms of mutual tolerance; a turkey-c.o.c.k and two turkey hens, of whom she expected much; an a.s.sortment of fowls, brown, black, white, red, and speckled; one fat duck, which had so far been nothing but a disappointment to her; and the white pig, which was her pride. No wonder she was never lonely, with all these good acquaintances to talk to. Moreover, the forces of the wild, seeming to recognize that she was a woman who would have her way, had from the first easily deferred to her. The capricious and incomprehensible early frosts of the forest region had spared her precious garden patch; cut-worm and caterpillar had gone by the other way; the pip had overlooked her early chickens; and as for the customary onslaughts of wildcat, weasel, fox, and skunk, she had met them all with such triumphant success that she began to mistake her mere good luck for the quintessence of woodcraft.

In fact, nothing had happened to challenge her infallibility, nothing whatever, until she found that the bears were beginning to concern themselves about her.

To be sure, there was only one bear mixed up in the matter; but he chanced to be so diligent, interested, and resourceful, that it was no wonder he had got himself multiplied many times over in Mrs. Gammit's indignant imagination. When she told Joe Barron "that the bears was gittin' so sa.s.sy there wasn't no livin' with 'em," she had little notion that what she referred to was just one, solitary, rusty, somewhat moth-eaten animal, crafty with experience and years. This bear, as it chanced, had had advantages in the way of education not often shared by his fellow-roamers of the wilderness. He had pa.s.sed several seasons in captivity in one of the settlements far south of the Quah-Davic Valley. Afterwards, he had served an unpleasant term in a flea-ridden travelling menagerie, from which a railway smash-up had given him release at the moderate cost of the loss of one eye. During his captivity he had acquired a profound respect for men, as creatures who had a tendency to beat him over the nose and hurt him terribly if he failed to do as they wished, and who held in eye and voice the uncomprehended but irresistible authority of fate. For women, however, he had learned to entertain a casual scorn. They screamed when he growled, and ran away if he stretched out a paw at them. When, therefore, he had found himself once more in the vast responsible freedom of the forest, and reviving with some difficulty the half-forgotten art of s.h.i.+fting for himself, he had given a wide berth to the hunters' shacks and the cabins of lumbermen and pioneers. But when, on the other hand, he had come upon Mrs. Gammit's clearing, and realized, after long and cautious investigations, that its presiding genius was nothing more formidable than one of those petticoated creatures who trembled at his growl, he had licked his chops with pleasant antic.i.p.ation. Here, at last, was his opportunity,--the flesh-pots of servitude, with freedom.

Nevertheless, the old bear was prudent. He would not presume too quickly, or too far, upon the harmlessness of a petticoat, and--as he had observed from a dense blackberry thicket on the other side of the fence, while she was at work hoeing her potatoes--there was an air about Mrs. Gammit which seemed to give her petticoats the lie. He had watched her for some time before he could quite satisfy himself that she was a mere woman. Then he had tried some nocturnal experiments on the garden, sampling the young squashes which were Mrs. Gammit's peculiar pride, and finding them so good that he had thought surely something would happen. Nothing did happen, however, because Mrs.

Gammit slept heavily; and her indignation in the morning he had not been privileged to view.

After this he had grown bolder--though always under cover of night. He had sampled everything in the garden--the abundance of his foot-prints convincing Mrs. Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could not depart from her custom of sound sleeping. If he had taken the trouble to return in the morning, he might have perceived that the good lady was far from pleased, and that there was likely to be something doing before long if he continued to take such liberties with her. And then, as we have seen, he had found the duck--but _her_ loss Mrs. Gammit had taken calmly enough, declaring it to be nothing more than a good riddance to bad rubbish.

It was not until the return of moonlight nights that the bear had discovered the white pig, and thus come face to face, at last, with a thoroughly aroused Mrs. Gammit. True to his kind, he did like pork; but absorbed in the easier adventures of the garden and the shed, he had not at first noted the rich possibilities of the pig-pen, which occupied one corner of the barn, under the loft. Suspicious of traps, he would not, at first, enter the narrow opening of the stable door, the wide main doors being shut. He had preferred rather to sniff around outside at the corner of the barn, under the ragged birch-tree in which the big turkey-c.o.c.k had his perch. The wakeful and wary old bird, peering down upon him with suspicion, had uttered a sharp _qwit, qwit_, by way of warning to whom it might concern; while the white pig, puzzled and worried, had sat up in the dark interior of the pen and stared out at him in silence through the cracks between the boards. At last, growing impatient, the bear had caught the edge of a board with his claws, and tried to tear it off. Nothing had come except some big splinters; but the effort, and the terrifying sound that accompanied it, had proved too much for the self-control of the white pig. An ear-splitting succession of squeals had issued from the dark interior of the pen, and the bear had backed off in amazement.

Before he could recover himself and renew his a.s.sault, the window of the cabin had gone up with a skittering slam. The white pig's appeal for help had penetrated Mrs. Gammit's solid slumbers, and she had understood the situation. "Scat! you brute!" she had yelled frantically, thrusting head and shoulders so far out through the window that she almost lost her balance in the effort to shake both fists at once.

The bear, not understanding the terms of her invective, had sat up on his haunches and turned his one eye mildly upon the bristling tufts of grey hair which formed a sort of halo around Mrs. Gammit's virginal nightcap. Then Mrs. Gammit, realizing that the time for action was come, had rushed downstairs to the kitchen, seized the first weapon she could lay hands upon--which chanced to be the broom--flung open the kitchen door, and dashed across the yard, screaming with indignation.

It was certainly an unusual figure that she made in the radiant moonlight, her st.u.r.dy, naked legs revolving energetically beneath her spa.r.s.e nightgown, and the broom whirling vehemently around her head.

For a moment the bear had contemplated her with wonder. Then his nerves had failed him. Doubtless, this was a woman--but not quite like the ordinary kind. It was better, perhaps, to be careful. With a reluctant grunt he had turned and fled, indifferent to his dignity.

And he had thought best not to stop until he found himself quite beyond the range of Mrs. Gammit's disconcerting accents, which rang harsh triumph across the solemn, silvered stillness of the forest.

It was, of course, this imminent peril to the pig which had roused Mrs. Gammit to action and sent her on that long tramp over the ridges to borrow Joe Barron's gun. In spite of her easy victory in this particular instance, she had appreciated the inches of that bear, and realized that in case of any further unpleasantnesses with him a broom might not prove to be the most efficient of weapons.

With the gun, however, and her distinct remembrance of Joe Barron's directions for its use, she felt equal to the routing of any number of bears--provided, of course, they would not all come on together.

As the idea flashed across her mind that there might be a pack of bears to face, she felt uneasy for a second, and even thought of bringing the pig into the house for the night, and conducting her campaign from the bedroom window. Then she remembered she had never heard of bears hunting in packs, and her little apprehension vanished.

In fact, she now grew quite eager for night to bring the fray.

It was a favourite saw of Mrs. Gammit's that "a watched pot takes long to bile"; and her experience that night exemplified it. With the kitchen door ajar, she sat a little back from the window. Herself hidden, she had a clear view across the bright yard. Very slowly the round moon climbed the pallid summer sky, changing the patterns of the shadows as she rose. But the bear came not. Mrs. Gammit began to think, even to fear, that her impetuosity of the night before had frightened him away. At last her reveries grew confused. She sat up very straight, and blinked very hard, to make sure that she was quite awake. Just as she had got herself most perfectly rea.s.sured on this point, her head sank gently forward upon the window-sill, and she slept deeply, with her cheek against the cold, brown barrel of the gun.

Yes, the bear had hesitated long that night. And he came late. The moon had swung past her zenith, and was pointing her black shadows across the yard in quite another direction when he came. By this time he had recovered confidence and made up his mind that Mrs. Gammit _was_ only a woman. After sniffing once more at the cracks to a.s.sure himself that the pig was still there, he went around to the stable door and crept cautiously in.

As his clumsy black shape appeared in the bright opening, the pig saw it. It filled his heart with a quite justifiable horror, which found instant poignant expression. Within those four walls the noise was so startlingly loud that, in spite of himself, the bear drew back--not intending to retreat, indeed, but only to consider. As it chanced, however, seeing out of only one eye, he backed upon the handle of a hay rake which was leaning against the wall. The rake very properly resented this. It fell upon him and clutched at his fur like a live thing. Startled quite out of his self-possession, he retreated hurriedly into the moonlight, for further consideration of these unexpected phenomena. And as he did so, across the yard the kitchen door was flung open, and Mrs. Gammit, with the gun, rushed forth.

The bear had intended to retire behind the barn for a few moments, the better to weigh the situation. But at the sight of Mrs. Gammit's fluttering petticoat he began to feel annoyed. It seemed to him that he was being thwarted unnecessarily. At the corner of the barn, just under the jutting limb of the birch-tree, he stopped, turned, and sat up on his haunches with a growl. The old turkey-c.o.c.k, stretching his lean neck, glared down upon him with a terse _qwit! qwit!_ of disapproval.

When the bear stopped, in that resolute and threatening att.i.tude, Mrs.

Gammit instinctively stopped too. Not, as she would have explained had there been any one to explain to, that she was "one mite scairt," but that she wanted to try Joe Barren's gun. Raising the gun to her shoulder, she shut one eye, looked carefully at the point of the barrel with the other, and pulled the trigger. Nothing whatever happened. Lowering the weapon from her shoulder she eyed it severely, and perceived that she had forgotten to c.o.c.k it. At this a shade of embarra.s.sment pa.s.sed over her face, and she glanced sharply at the bear to see if he had noticed her mistake. Apparently, he had not. He was still sitting there, regarding her unpleasantly with his one small eye.

"Ye needn't think ye're agoin to git off, jest because I made a leetle mistake like that!" muttered Mrs. Gammit, shutting her teeth with a snap, and c.o.c.king the gun as she raised it once more to her shoulder.

Now, as it chanced, Joe Barren had neglected to tell her which eye to shut, so, not unnaturally, Mrs. Gammit shut the one nearest to the gun--nearest to the cap which was about to go off. She also neglected to consider the hind-sight. It was enough for her that the muzzle of the gun seemed to cover the bear. Under these conditions she got a very good line on her target, but her elevation was somewhat at fault.

She pulled the trigger.

This time it was all right. There was a terrific, roaring explosion, and she staggered backwards under the savage kick of the recoil.

Recovering herself instantly, and proud of the great noise she had made, she peered through the smoke, expecting to see the bear topple over upon his nose, extinguished. Instead of that, however, she observed a convulsive flopping of wings in the birch-tree above the bear's head. Then, with one reproachful "gobble" which rang loud in Mrs. Gammit's ears, the old turkey-c.o.c.k fell heavily to the ground. He would have fallen straight upon the bear, but that the latter, his nerves completely upset by so much disturbance, was making off at fine speed through the bushes.

The elation on Mrs. Gammit's face gave way to consternation. Then she reddened to the ears with wrath, dashed the offending gun to the ground, and stamped on it. She had done her part, that she knew, but the wretched weapon had played her false. Well, she had never thought much of guns, anyway. Henceforth she would depend on herself.

The unfortunate turkey-c.o.c.k now lay quite still. Mrs. Gammit crossed the yard and bent over the sprawling body in deep regret. She had had a certain affection for the noisy and self-sufficient old bird, who had been "company" for her as he strutted "gobbling" about the yard with stiff-trailed wings while his hens were away brooding their chicks. "Too bad!" she muttered over him, by way of requiem; "too bad ye had to go an' git in the road o' that blame gun!" Then, suddenly bethinking herself that a fowl was more easily plucked while yet warm, she carried the limp corpse, head downward, across the yard, fetched a basket from the kitchen, sat down on the doorstep in the moonlight, and began sadly stripping the victim of his feathers. He was a fine, heavy bird. As she surveyed his ample proportions Mrs. Gammit murmured thoughtfully: "I reckon as how I'm goin' to feel kinder sick o' turkey afore I git this all et up!"

On the following day Mrs. Gammit carefully polished the gun with a duster, removing all trace of the indignities she had put upon it, and stood it away behind the dresser. She had resolved to conduct the rest of the campaign against the bears in her own way and with her own weapons. The way and the weapons she now proceeded to think out with utmost care.