That evening as soon as the old folks had retired and the house had become quiet, Addison and I cleared out the Old Squire"s preserve; and, meantime, Ellen and Theodora had slipped down-stairs into the sitting-room and emptied Gram"s h.o.a.rd in the yarn cupboard. We met out in the garden and divided the spoils; then not liking to trust each other to go directly to our respective h.o.a.rds, we deposited our shares of the plunder in three different boxes in the wagon-house, and looked forward with no little zest to the fun next morning at the breakfast-table.
But on visiting the boxes next morning, they were all empty! Some one had made a clean sweep. Not an apple was left in them! Addison and I were astounded when we compared notes a few minutes before breakfast.
"Who on earth could have done it?" he whispered, after he found out that I was not the traitor.
We hurried to the wood-house and peeped into the Old Squire"s h.o.a.rding-place. It was brimful of apples! A light began to dawn upon us.
Had the old gentleman watched our performance on the previous evening and outwitted us all? It looked so, for on going in to breakfast, there beside the plates of each of the old folks stood a great nappy dish, heaped full of choice Pippins and Sweets! Addison stole a look around and then dropped his eyes; I did the same, while Ellen looked equally amazed and disconcerted. Theodora, too, remained very quiet.
We concluded that our elders had completely outdone us, and that they were enjoying their victory in a manner intended to convey their ironical appreciation of our small effort to rob them. The more we considered the matter, the more sheepish we felt.
"These are charming good pippins, aren"t they, Ruth?" said the old gentleman to Gram.
"Charming," answered she.
Addison gave me a punch under the table, as if to say, "Now they are giving us the laugh."
"And I"m sure we"re much obliged for them," the Old Squire continued.
"Indeed, we are obliged," said Gram.
Their remarks seemed to me a little odd, but I didn"t look up.
Not another word was spoken at the table, but afterwards Addison and Ellen and I got together in the garden and mutually agreed that we had been badly beaten at our own game.
"They are too old and long-headed for us to meddle with," said Addison.
"I cannot even imagine how they did it. I guess we had better let their h.o.a.rds alone in the future." None the less we could not help thinking that there had been something a little queer about our defeat.
It was nearly two years later before the truth about that night"s frolic came to light. Theodora did it. She could not bear to have the old folks beaten and humiliated by us, for whom they were doing so much. After we had robbed their h.o.a.rding-places, she sallied forth again and took all of our shares as well as her own, and then having replenished the looted h.o.a.rding-places, she filled the two nappy dishes from her own h.o.a.rd and set them beside their plates.
The best part of the joke was that the Old Squire and Gram never knew that they had been robbed, and thought only that we had made them a present of some excellent apples. When Theodora saw how chagrined the rest of us were, she kept the whole matter a secret.
CHAPTER XIX
DOG DAYS, GRAIN HARVEST, AND A TRULY LUCRETIAN TEMPEST
After haying came grain harvest. There were three acres of wheat, four of oats, an acre of barley, an acre of buckwheat and an acre and three-fourths of rye to get in. The rye, however, had been harvested during the last week of haying. It ripened early, for it was the Old Squire"s custom to sow his rye very early in the spring. The first work which we did on the land, after the snow melted, was to plough and harrow for rye. With the rye we always sowed clover and herdsgra.s.s seed for a hay crop the following year. This we termed "seeding down;" and the Old Squire liked rye the best of all grain crops for this purpose.
"Gra.s.s seed "catches" better with rye than oats, or barley, or even wheat," he was accustomed to say.
When we harvested the grain, he would be seen peering into the stubble with an observant eye, and would then be heard to say, "A pretty good "catch" this year," or, "It hasn"t "caught" worth a cent."
It was not on more than half the years that we secured a fair wheat crop. Maine is not a State wholly favorable for wheat; yet the Old Squire persisted in sowing it, year by year, although Addison often demonstrated to him that oats were more profitable and could be exchanged for flour. "But a farmer ought to raise his bread-stuff," the old gentleman would rejoin stoutly. "How do we know, too, that some calamity may not cut off the Western wheat crop; then where should we be?"
It is a pity, perhaps, that Eastern farmers do not generally display the same independent spirit.
But the Old Squire himself finally gave up wheat raising. Gram and the girls found fault with our Maine grown wheat flour, because the bread from it was not very white and did not "rise" well. The neighbors had Western flour and their bread was white and light, while ours was darker colored and sometimes heavy, in spite of their best efforts.
No farmer can hold out long against such indoor repinings, but the Old Squire never came to look with favor on Western flour; he admitted that it made whiter bread, but he always declared that it was not as wholesome! The fact was that it seemed to him to be an unfarmerlike proceeding, to buy his flour. For the same reason he would never buy Western corn for his cattle.
"When I cannot raise fodder enough for my stock, I"ll quit farming," he would exclaim, when his neighbors told him of the corn they were buying.
As a matter of fact, the old gentleman lived to see a good many of his neighbors" farms under mortgage, and held a number of these papers himself. It was not a wholly propitious day for New England farmers when they began buying Western corn, on the theory that they could buy it cheaper than they could raise it themselves. The net result has been that their profits have often gone West, or into the pockets of the railway companies which draw the corn to them.
Another drawback to wheat raising in Maine is the uncertain weather at harvest time. Despite our shrewdest inspection of the weather signs, the wheat as well as the other grain would often get wet in the field, and sometimes it would lie wet so long as to sprout. Sprouted wheat flour makes a kind of bread which drives the housewife to despair.
"Oh, this dog-days weather!" the Old Squire would exclaim, as the grain lay wet in the field, day after day, or when an August shower came rumbling over the mountains just as we were raking it up into windrows and tumbles.
I had never heard of "dog days" before and was curious to know what sort of days they were. "They set in," the Old Squire informed me, "on the twenty-fifth of July and last till the fifth of September. Then is when the Dog-star rages, and it is apt to be "catching" weather. Dogs are more liable to run mad at this time of year, and snakes are most venomous then." Such is the olden lore, and I gained an impression that those forty-two days were after a manner unhealthy for man and beast.
Near the middle of August that summer there came the most terrific thunder shower which I had ever witnessed. Halse, Addison and Asa Doane had mowed the acre of barley that morning, and after dinner we three boys went out into the field to turn the swaths, for the sun had been very hot all day. It was while thus employed that we saw the shower rising over the mountains to the westward and soon heard the thunder. It rose rapidly, and the clouds took on, as they rolled upward, a peculiar black, greenish tint.
It was such a tempest as Lucretius describes when he says,--
"So dire and terrible is the aspect of Heaven, that one might think all the Darkness had left Acheron, to be poured out across the sky, as the drear gloom of the storm collects and the Tempest, forging loud thunderbolts, bends down its black face of terror over the affrighted earth."
Gramp called us in, to carry a few c.o.c.ks of late-made hay into the barn from the orchard, and then bade us shut all the barn doors and make things snug. "For there"s a tremendous shower coming, boys," he said.
"There"s hail in those clouds."
We ran to do as he advised, and had no more than taken these precautions when the shower struck. Such awful thunder and such bright, vengeful lightning had, the people of the vicinity declared, never been observed in that town, previously. A bolt came down one of the large Balm o" Gilead trees near the house, and the thunder peal was absolutely deafening. Wealthy hid herself in the parlor clothes-closet, and Gram sat with her hands folded in the middle of the sitting-room. Just before the clouds burst, it was so dark in the house that we could scarcely see each others" faces. A moment later the lightning struck a large b.u.t.ternut tree near the calf-pasture wall, across the south field, shivering it so completely that nearly all the top fell; the trunk, too, was split open from the heart.
In fact, the terrific flashes and peals indicated that the lightning was descending to the earth all about us. Two barns were struck and burned in the school district adjoining ours. Rain then fell in sheets, and also hail, which cut the garden vegetables to strings and broke a number of windows. This tempest lasted for nearly an hour, and prostrated the corn and standing grain very badly. An apple tree was also up-rooted, for there was violent wind as well as lightning and thunder.
Next morning we were obliged to leave our farm work and repair the roads throughout that highway district, for the shower had gullied the hills almost beyond belief. Altogether it had done a great amount of damage on every hand.
At supper that night, after returning from work on the highway, the Old Squire suddenly asked whether any of us had seen the colts, in the pasture beyond the west field, that day.
No one remembered having seen them since the shower, though we generally noticed them running around the pasture every day. There were three of them, two bays and a black one. The two former were the property of men in the village, but Black Hawk, as we called him, belonged to us.
"After supper, you had better go see where they are," the Old Squire said to us.
Addison and I set off accordingly. The pasture was partly cleared, with here and there a pine stub left standing, and was of about twenty acres extent. We went up across it to the top of the hill, but could not find the colts. Then we walked around by the farther fence, but discovered no breach in it and no traces where truant hoofs had jumped over it. It was growing dark, and we at length went home to report our ill-success.
"Strange!" the Old Squire said. "We must look them up." But no further search was made that night.
"Is that a hawk?" Halstead said to me, while he and I were out milking a little before sunrise next morning. "Don"t you see it? Sailing round over the colt pasture. Too big for a hawk, isn"t it?"
A large bird was wheeling slowly above the pasture, moving in lofty circles, on motionless wings.
"I"ll bet that"s an eagle!" Halse cried. "Can"t be a hawk. We couldn"t see a hawk so far off."
Suddenly the bird seemed to pause on wing a moment, then descended through the air and disappeared just over the crest of the ridge.
Perhaps it was fancy, but we thought we heard the roar of its wings.
"Came down by that high stub!" exclaimed Halstead. "Pounced upon something there! I"ll run in and get the shotgun. The folks aren"t up yet. We"ll go over. Perhaps we can get a shot at it."
Addison had gone on an errand to the Corners that morning. Halstead got the gun, and setting down our milk pails, we ran across the field, and so onward to the pasture. ""Twas near that stub," whispered Halse, as we began to see the top of it over the crest of the ridge. We peeped over.
Down in the hollow at the foot of the stub was the great bird, flapping and tugging at something--one, two, three animals, lying stretched out on the ground! The sight gave us a sudden shock.