Pocket Island
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Charles Clark Munn >> Pocket Island
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Still the sinister eyes watched him from out the darkness!
Stack after stack he piled till all was counted--eight of one thousand
dollars each, and twelve of five hundred dollars, all in gold; and
twenty of one hundred dollars each in silver.
A tall, swarthy form crept noiselessly toward him!
It was the supreme moment of his life, and as he gloatingly gazed on the
stacks glittering in the dim light before him, a delirium of joy hushed
all thought and deadened all sense, even that of hearing.
Nearer and nearer drew the swarthy form!
And as Wolf tasted the sublime ecstasy of a miser's joy, his heaven, his
God, suddenly two cold, massive hands closed tight about his throat. But
men die hard! Even while unable to breathe, and as he writhed and
twisted beneath the awful menace of death bearing him down, his hand
suddenly touched the pistol in his belt! The next instant it was drawn
and fired full against the Indian's breast! Then a shriek of death
agony, as his swarthy foe leaped upward against the rocky shelf; a crash
of breaking glass; a flash of fierce flame bursting into red billows,
curling and seething all about him and turning the cave into a mimic
hell!
Outside could be heard the sound of a bellowing bull!
CHAPTER IV.
THE BOY.
A boy is an inverted man. Small things seem to him great and great ones
small. Trifling troubles move him to tears and serious ones pass
unnoticed. To snare a few worthless suckers in the meadow brook is to
the country boy of more importance than the gathering of a field of
grain. To play hooky and go nutting is far better than to study and fit
himself for earning a livelihood. He works at his play and makes play of
his work. He disdains boyhood and longs for manhood. In spite of his
inverted position I would rather be a boy than a man, and a country boy
than a city-bred one.
The country boy has so much the greater chance for enjoyment and is not
so soon warped by restrictions and tarnished by the sewers of vice. He
has deep forests, wide meadows and pure brooks to play in; and if his
feet grow broad from lack of shoes, he hears the song of birds, the
whispers of winds in the trees, and knows the scent of new-mown hay and
fresh water lilies, the beauty of flowers, green fields and shady woods.
He learns how apples taste eaten under the tree, nuts cracked in the
woods, sweet cider as it runs from the press, and strawberries picked in
the orchard while moist with dew. All these delights are a closed book
to the city boy. The country boy is surrounded by pure and wholesome
influences and grows to be a better man for it. The wide range of forest
and field, pure air, sweet water, plenty of sun and rain are all his,
and worth ten times the chance for life, health, enjoyment and a good
character than ever comes to the city boy. He may sooner learn to smoke
or gather a choice selection of profane and vulgar words; he may have
smaller feet and better clothes, but he often fails in attaining a
healthy body and pure mind and never knows what a royal, wide-open
chance for enjoying boyhood days he has missed. He never knows the
delight of wading barefoot down a mountain brook where the clear water
leaps over mossy ledges and where he can pull trout from every
foam-flecked pool! He never realizes the charming suspense of lying upon
the grassy bank of a meadow stream and snaring a sucker, or what fun it
is to enter a chestnut grove just after frost and rain have covered the
ground with brown nuts, or setting traps, shaking apple trees, or
gathering wild grapes! He never rode to the cider-mill on a load of
apples and had the chance to shy one at every bird and squirrel on the
way; or when winter came, to slide down hill when the slide was a
half-mile field of crusted snow! All these and many other delights he
never knows; but one thing he does know, and knows it early, and that is
how much smarter, better dressed and better off in every way he is than
the poor, despised greeny of a country boy! He may, it is true, go early
to the theatre and look at half-nude actresses loaded with diamonds, but
he never sees a twenty-acre cedar pasture just after an ice storm when
the morning sun shines fair upon it!
True to his inverted comprehension, the country boy, and our boy
especially, sees and feels all his surroundings and all the voices of
nature from a boy's standpoint. He feels that his hours of work are long
and hard, and that the countless chores are interspersed through his
daily life on the farm for the sole purpose of preventing him from
having a moment he can call his own. He has a great many pleasant hours,
however, and does not realize why they pass so quickly. His little
world seems large to him and all his experiences great in their
importance. A ten-acre meadow appears like a boundless prairie, and a
half-mile wide piece of woods an unbounded forest.
On one side of the farm is a clear stream known as Ragged Brook, that,
starting among the foothills of a low mountain range, laughs and
chatters, leaps and tumbles, down the hills, through the gorges and over
the ledges as if endowed with life. Since he is not blessed with
brothers or sisters, this, together with the woods, the birds and
squirrels, becomes his companion. The first trout he ever catches in
this brook seems a monster and never afterward does one pull quite so
hard. Isolated as he is, and having none but his elders for company, he
talks to the creatures of the field and forest as if they could
understand him, and he watches their ways and habits and tries to make
them his friends. He is a lonely boy, and seldom sees others of his age,
so that perhaps when he does they make a more distinct impression on his
mind.
One day he is allowed to go to the mill with his father, and it is an
event in his life he never forgets. The old brown mill with its big
wheel splashing in the clear water; the millstones that rumble so
swiftly; the dusty miller who takes the bags of grain--all interest him,
and especially so does the pond above the mill that is dotted with white
lilies and where there is a boat fastened to a willow by a chain. On the
way back, and a mile from home, his father stops to chat with a man in
front of a large house with tall pillars, and two immense maples on
either side of the gate. Standing beside the man and holding onto one of
his hands with her two small ones is a little girl who looks at the boy
with big, wondrous eyes. He wants to tell her about the mill and ask her
if she ever saw the great wheel go around, but he is afraid to. He hears
the man call her "Liddy," and wonders if she ever caught a fish.
Then his world grows larger as the months pass one by one, until he is
sent to a little brown schoolhouse a mile away and finds a small crowd
of boys and girls, only two or three of whom he ever saw before. One of
them is the girl who looked wonderingly at him a year previous. He tells
her he knows what her name is, and feels a little hurt because that fact
does not seem to interest her. He studies his lessons because he is told
he must, and plays hard because he enjoys it. He feels no special
attraction toward any of his schoolmates until one winter day this same
little blue-eyed girl asks him for a place on his sled. He shares it
with her as a well-behaved boy should, and so begins the first faint
bond of feeling that like a tiny rill on the hillside slowly gathers
power, until at last, a mighty river, it sweeps all other feelings
before it.
How slowly that rippling rill of feeling grew during the next few years
need not be specified. Like other boys of his age, he feels at times
ashamed of caring whether she notices him or not, and again the
incipient pangs of jealousy, because she notices other boys. In a year
he begins to bring her flag-root in summer, or big apples in winter, and
although her way home is different from his, he occasionally feels
called upon to accompany her, heedless of the fact that it costs him an
extra half-mile and fault-finding at being late home. He passes unharmed
through the terrors of speaking pieces on examination day, and when St.
Valentine's day comes he conquers the momentous task of inditing a verse
where "bliss" rhymes with "kiss" upon one of those missives which he has
purchased for five cents at the village store, and timidly leaves it
where this same girl will find it, in her desk at school.
On two occasions during the last summer at the district school,
he--quite a big boy now--joins the older boys and girls under a large
apple tree that grows near the schoolhouse, and plays a silly game, the
principal feature of which consists in his having to choose some girl to
kiss. As he knows very well whom he prefers, and has the courage to kiss
her when his turn comes, that seems a most delightful game; and although
he and other boys who were guilty of this proceeding are jeered at by
the younger ones, the experience makes such an impression on him that he
lies awake half the first night thinking about it.
But all too soon to him comes the end of schooldays and especially the
charming companionship of this particular fair-haired girl. On the last
day she asks him to write in her album, and he again indulges in rhyme
and inscribes therein a melancholy verse, the tenor of which is a hope
that she will see that his grave is kept green, as such an unhappy duty
must, in the near future, devolve upon some one. She in turn writes him
a farewell note of similar tone, and encloses a lock of her hair tied
with a blue ribbon. He has planned to walk home with her when the last
day ends, and perhaps participate in a more tender leave-taking, but she
rides home with her parents, and so that sweet scheme is foiled. With a
heavy heart he watches her out of sight and then, feeling that possibly
he may never see her again, takes his books and turns away from the dear
old brown schoolhouse for the last time. He locks the curl of hair and
her note up in a tin box where he keeps his fish-hooks, and resumes his
unending round of hard work and chores. His horizon has enlarged a good
deal, for he is now twelve years old--but it does not yet include Liddy.
It is over a year before he sees her again, though once, when given a
rainy half-day to fish in Ragged Brook, he, like a silly boy, deserts
that enticing stream for an hour and cuts across lots near her home in
hopes that he may see her again, but fails.
Then one summer day a surprise comes to him. Half a mile from his home,
and in the direction his thoughts often turn, is a cedar pasture where
blackberries grow in plenty, and here he is sent to pick them. It is
here, and while unconscious what Fate has in store for him, that he
suddenly hears a scream, and running toward him, down the path comes a
girl in a short dress with a calico sun-bonnet flying behind her, until
almost at his feet she stumbles and falls and there, sprawling on the
grass, is--Liddy.
In an instant he is at her side, and how glad he is of the chance to
help her up and soothe her fears no one but himself ever knows. She,
too, has been picking berries, and has come suddenly upon a monster
snake just gliding from a cedar bough almost over her head. When her
fright subsides he at once hunts for and kills that reptile with far
more satisfaction than he ever felt in killing one before. It is an
ungrateful return, for although the boy knew it not, the snake has done
him a greater kindness than he ever realized. Then when all danger is
removed, how sweet it is to sit beside her in the shade and talk over
schooldays while he looks into her tender blue eyes. And how glad he is
to fill her pail with berries which he has picked, and when the sun is
almost down how charming it is to walk home with her along the
maple-shaded lane! He even hopes that he will see another snake so that
he can kill that also, and show her how brave a boy is. But no more
snakes come to his aid that day and only the gentlest of breezes rustles
the spreading boughs that shade their pathway. When she thanks him at
parting, a little look of gratitude makes her blue eyes seem more
tender than ever to him and her voice sound like sweetest music.
His world has enlarged wonderfully now, for Liddy has entered into it.
CHAPTER V.
THE BOY'S FIRST PARTY.
The Stillman girls were going to give a party, and the boy was invited.
It was the first social recognition he had ever received, and it
disturbed his equilibrium. It also made him feel that he was almost a
man.
He had for some time longed to be a man, and for a year past had felt
hurt when called a boy. When the little note of invitation, requesting
"the pleasure of your company," etc., reached him, he felt he had
suddenly grown taller. He realized it more fully that night when he
tried on his best clothes to see how they would look. The sleeves of his
jacket were too short and his pants missed connections with his boots by
full two inches. The gap seemed to swell the size of his feet, also.
When he looked in his little mirror he noticed a plainly defined growth
of down on his lip, and his hair needed cutting.
Then the invitation filled him with mingled fear, surprise and
pleasure. He hardly knew, after thinking it all over, whether he wanted
to go or not. The one fact that turned the scale was Liddy. He was sure
she would be there. But then, that painful gap between his pants and
boots! He had thought a good deal about her ever since school was over.
Now that he was invited to a party where she would be, he began to feel
just a little afraid of her.
When the important evening came and he presented himself at the
Stillmans' house, and lifted the big iron knocker on the front door, its
clang sounded loud enough to wake the dead, and his heart was going like
a trip-hammer. Mary Stillman met him at the door, and her welcome was so
cordial he couldn't understand it. He wasn't much used to society. All
his schoolmates were there--boys that he had played ball, snared
suckers, and gone in swimming with scores of times, and girls that
seemed a good deal taller than when they went to school. Most of them
were dressed in white, and with their rosy cheeks and bright eyes made a
pretty picture.
They were nearly all in one of the big front rooms, and among them was
Liddy, in pink muslin with a broad sash, and bows of blue ribbon at the
ends of her two braids of hair. She looked so sweet he was more afraid
of her than ever. His first thought was to go into the room where some
of the boys were, but Mary Stillman almost pushed him into the other
room and he felt that he was in for it. When he sat down next to another
boy and looked at the girls whispering and giggling together, he almost
wished he had not come. Then when he thought of that unfriendly
separation of his pants and boots he was sure of it. But he caught a
pleasant smile and nod from Liddy, and that gave him a world of courage.
Then he began to talk to the boy next to him, and was just beginning to
forget that he was at a party, in an exchange of experiences about bee
hunting and finding wild honey, when the oldest Stillman girl proposed
they play button. He had never played button and wasn't anxious to, for
it might necessitate his walking about the room and expose that gap
still more. He preferred to talk bee-hunting with Jim Pratt. He was soon
made to realize, however, that there was a different sort of wild honey
to be gathered at a party, and "Button, button, who's got the button?"
was the method. When it came his turn to pay a forfeit, he was directed
to measure three yards of tape with Liddy. As this consisted in
kneeling face to face with her on a cushion in the center of the room,
joining hands, expanding arms to the limit, and back again, punctuating
each outward stretch with a kiss, it wasn't so bad. He was sorry it
wasn't six yards instead of three. He could stand it if Liddy
could--only he hoped that no one had noticed that gap. On the next
round, Jim Pratt was ordered to stand in a well four feet deep and
choose a girl to pull him out. As four feet meant four kisses, and Jim
knew a good thing when he saw it, he chose Liddy. And then the boy felt
like licking him.
After button came post office, and the boy had a letter from Nellie
Barnes, with five cents postage due, which called for his catching
Nellie and kissing her five times. By this time he had forgotten he was
at a party with abbreviated pants, and was having no end of a good time.
Then some one started the good old frolic of run 'round chimney, and as
the Stillman house was admirably adapted for that, the fun waxed fast
and furious. It was catch any girl you wanted to, and kiss her if you
did. In the romp the boy's collar came off, and he asked Liddy to pin it
on, and when she purposely pricked him a little, he grabbed her and
kissed her a few times extra, just for luck. He was rapidly realizing
why he was there, and what for. And that gap had passed entirely out of
his mind.
Then the boys, all rather warm and excited, were requested to go into
the kitchen and carry refreshments to the girls, and our boy and Liddy
were soon ensconced in a cosy corner with two plates filled with a
medley of frosted cake, mince pie, tarts and the like, and as happy as
two birds in a nest. It was the first time he had ever eaten with her,
and an event in his life of no small importance. They also talked as
fast as they ate. She told him all her little plans about going to the
village academy the next term, and what she liked to study, and all
about a little white rabbit that her father had given her on her last
birthday and how cunning it was. The boy decided at once that he would
have a white rabbit if he had to steal one. He also told her that he had
found a nest of young foxes that summer and had kept them ever since in
a pen, and he offered to give her one. He also assured her he, too,
meant to go to the academy if his parents would let him. It was a
charming visit, and the boy's heart warmed in a wonderful way, and
Liddy's blue eyes looked into his brown ones so sweetly that he felt as
if heaven was just ahead. Like a wise boy he asked her then and there if
he could go home with her, which, of course, he could, and so all was
well. Almost before any one realized it, the time for the party to break
up came, and with a chorus of "good-nights" the happy gathering ended.
When the boy, with Liddy's soft hand curled confidingly around his arm,
started for her home, a mile away, he was proud as a king, and far
happier. And that long walk in the moonlight, while
"On his arm a soft hand rested; rested light as ocean's foam,"--
could he, or would he, ever forget it? I think not. It was a poem of
blue eyes like spring violets, of tender, loving words, of mellow
moonlight on the fields where the corn-shocks stood in spectral rows,
and the brook they crossed looked like a rippling stream of silver;
where the maples along the lane, still clad in yellow foliage, cast
mottled shadows in their pathway, and the fallen leaves rustled beneath
their feet. They did not talk much--their hearts were too full of love's
young dream--although he told her of his visit to a deserted house a
year before, and how he heard ghostly footsteps in the house, and saw a
closet door swing half open in a shadowy room, and he was sure there was
a ghost in that closet; at which Liddy's arm clasped his a little
closer. Maybe he enlarged a trifle upon that spook. Almost any boy with
a fertile imagination and his sweetheart clinging to his arm, on a
moonlit maple lane, with no one near, would. I am sure I would if I were
a boy.
When her home was reached he was revolving a serious problem in his
mind. To kiss Liddy in the games at the party was easy enough. It was a
part of the play, and expected. He had even ventured a few independent
ones when she pricked him, and though he got his ears boxed, she didn't
seem angry. But to deliberately kiss her now at parting was an entirely
different matter. No doubt Liddy knew what he was thinking about, for
when the gate was reached she paused and did not enter. She thanked him
sweetly for his company home, and declared she had had a delightful
time. He assured her he had, and then there was a pause. It was a
critical moment. He looked at the moon, high overhead. The man in it--as
all men would--seemed to say: "Now's your chance, my boy; kiss her
quick!" And yet he hesitated. Then he looked at the near-by brook where
the ripples were like dancing silver coin, and then at Liddy. Maybe the
laughter of those ripples gave him courage, for he hesitated no longer,
but full upon her rosy lips he kissed her. Then he walked home, and all
the long mile, though his feet trod the earth, he knew it not. Rather
was he floating on ripples of moonlight, with a fairy-like face and
tender blue eyes ever hovering over him, and a soft white hand clinging
to his arm.
And so ended the boy's first party.
CHAPTER VI.
SERIOUS THOUGHTS.
When the boy reached home a new and surprising change had come to him.
For the first time in his life he began to think--and what was more to
the point, to faintly see himself as he was, and the picture was not
pleasant. He had longed to be a man. He began to feel that he was almost
one, and a poorly clad and ignorant one at that. He lay awake nearly all
that night, and not only lived the party over, but more especially the
walk home with Liddy.
All he had cared for before was boyish sports, to do his work, and
escape wearing his best clothes. Now he began to think about those same
clothes and how ill they fitted him and how awkward they made him look,
and the more he thought about it the more he wondered how Liddy could
have been so nice to him. He vowed he would never be seen in public
again with them on. He had seen boys in the village who wore neat and
well-fitting garments, a starched shirt and collar that buttoned to it,
instead of being pinned to the top of a roundabout, as his was, and
thinking of them made him ashamed of himself. And then that awful gap
between his pants and boots! Then he thought of how the girls were
laughing when he came into the room at the party, and now he felt sure
they must have been making fun of him, and that made him feel worse than
ever. His coarse boots, in comparison with the nice, thin ones worn by
some of the other boys there, also haunted him. In short, he took a
mental inventory of himself, and the sum total was not pleasing.
All the next day he was glum and thoughtful and for a week he acted the
same. It was the birth of the man in him; the step from the happy,
care-free boy to young manhood. It was also, be it said, the beginning
of a woman's refining influence that has slowly and for countless ages
gradually lifted man from savagery to enlightenment. An evolution of
good conduct, garb and cleanliness made necessary by woman's favor, and
to win her admiration. The cynics call it vanity. So then, must they
call the evolution of the species vanity. It may be so, but call it what
you will, it's the influence that has wrought the naked savage,
decorated with paint and feathers, and courting his wife by knocking her
senseless with a club and carrying her to a cave, into the well-dressed,
gallant, kindly, thoughtful and refined gentleman of to-day.
Just a little of this realizing sense of what he should be, and why,
came to the boy, and as ever will be it was a woman's face and a woman's
smiles, albeit a very young and blue-eyed one, that inspired the
thought. His parents rallied him a little about the party, but to him it
was--especially its ending, a sacred secret. Then one day he astonished
them by asking if he might have a new suit and go to the academy that
coming winter. He had never before shown any unusual eagerness for
study, and this request was surprising. For several weeks the question
was held in abeyance, though duly considered in the family councils; and
then one day at the supper-table the answer came.
"If the boy wants more learnin'," his father said, "by gosh, he can have
it. I never had much chance at books myself, but that ain't no reason
why he shouldn't. We'll fix ye up," he said cheerfully, with a twinkle
in his eye, "so ye won't be ashamed to go to a party again;" from which
it may be inferred that the old gentleman had divined some things which
the boy little suspected he had.
When the winter term at the village academy opened, the boy was there,
his courage a good deal strengthened by a new suit that fitted and a
pair of boots that did not give the impression that he was falling
downstairs at every step. But his entry into the new school was not a
thornless path. Most of the faces were new to him, and many a good deal
older. He still felt himself what he was--a big, awkward boy, though a
boy with a determined will to study hard and make the most of his
opportunity.
He soon learned a good many things; one of which was that earnestness in
study did not always win the favor of either teacher or schoolmates;
that in school, as in the world, pleasant manners and flattering words
counted for more than devotion to duty. He also learned that such a
thing as favoritism between master and pupil existed, and that the
poorest scholar often stood nearest the teacher's heart. The master, Mr.
Webber, he discovered, had a monstrous bump of self-esteem. He was a
small man, not larger than the boy, who was sixteen, and large for his
age, and who, as big boys will, cherished a sort of contempt for small
men. It is possible that the boy was entirely wrong in his estimate of
the principal. No doubt that worthy, judged from an adult standpoint,
was the most courtly and diplomatic pedagogue that ever let his favorite
pupils whisper all they pleased, and banged the floor with the other
sinners; but, to the boy, he seemed a little, arrogant bit of
bumptiousness, who strutted about the schoolroom and was especially fond
of hearing himself read aloud. "The Raven" was his favorite selection,
and he read it no less than thirteen times during one term.
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