the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in
the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did
not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who
was learning the trade in his father's printing-office. This boy was
just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good
comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them, and
my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that were
not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, and
they both began to write historical romances. My boy's romance was
founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again
and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors,
and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given
almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day
sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an
Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the mean time he did
what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods
with the other boy, who used to get his father's horse when he was not
using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild
grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river,
their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world that
could never come true.
INDIANS
There was not a boy in the Boy's Town who would not gladly have turned
from the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in
every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of
refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close
to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys'
fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned
in the boys' hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the
woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any
rate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking among
themselves of how they would go farther West when they grew up, and be
trappers and hunters. I do not remember any boy but one who meant to be
a sailor; they lived too hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the
boy who invented the marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a
pirate, would just as soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those
days Oregon had just been opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to
go and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deer
and wild turkey, while a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging
away at the line you had set in the river that ran before the
log-cabin.
If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything
else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were
willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed
mind about them in the mean time, but perhaps they were not unlike other
idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came
pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than
they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and
the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be
British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you
had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some
time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the
circus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them
dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at
the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the
Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the State, on their way
to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys' fathers must have known
that these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most of
fathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once there
the Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out of
heaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets and
moccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squatting
in groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures.
The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys had
bows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed the
Indians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went up
to the courthouse yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows.
It almost made the boys crazy.
[Illustration: ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE]
Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, or
some game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents and
bits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indians
would all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit it
had the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back the
arrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they lived
through it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; he
could only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom he
revered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would have
been too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three of
the Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy's Town boys said they were
girls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of six
or seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men were
not a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did not
enter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sages
who shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and the
boys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of a
world where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and ranging
the woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alone
make men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish persons
do among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escape
them they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merely
savage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilized
man is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indians
away into the Far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for the
rest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did not
try it.
GUNS
After the red men had flitted away like red leaves, their memory
remained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged among
them, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their old
desire of having a gun. But they came back to that at last, for that was
the normal desire of every boy in the Boy's Town who was not a girl-boy,
and there were mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point a
pistol would do, especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run
bullets to shoot out of it; only your mother would be sure to see you
running them, and just as likely as not would be so scared that she
would say you must not shoot bullets. Then you would have to use
buckshot, if you could get them anywhere near the right size, or small
marbles; but a pistol was always a makeshift, and you never could hit
anything with it, not even a board fence; it always kicked, or burst, or
something.
Very few boys ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have
one. But seven or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and
take turn-about shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot
at all, but they could run and see whether the big boys had hit anything
when they fired, and that was something. This was my boy's privilege for
a long time before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with
his elder brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps,
to shoot the load off before they got back to town; they were not
allowed to bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe
for anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going
to do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy's
brother bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the
half-real piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one
gunsmith and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took
time; perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in their
leisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part pay
for their papers. When they got through with it my boy's brother made
himself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least as
straight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had a
little twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was a
first-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself a
powder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft
(it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece of
glass; it hung at his side; and he carried his shot in his pantaloons
pocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he had
never shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smooth-bore
rifle, and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been
nearly ten years old.
It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have a gun; but he was
mortified the very next morning after he got it by a citizen who thought
differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out and shoot kildees on the
Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun on his shoulder when the
citizen stopped him and asked him what he was going to do with that gun.
He said to shoot kildees, and he added that it was his gun. This seemed
to surprise the citizen even more than the boy could have wished. He
asked him if he did not think he was a pretty small boy to have a gun;
and he took the gun from him, and examined it thoughtfully, and then
handed it back to the boy, who felt himself getting smaller all the
time. The man went his way without saying anything more, but his
behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boy had no pleasure in his
sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because he found no kildees to
shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gun once or twice at a
fence, and then he sneaked home with it through alleys and by-ways, and
whenever he met a person he hurried by for fear the person would find
him too small to have a gun.
Afterward he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went hunting
with it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snap
a good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; and
sometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and go
off, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder.
The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this was
not the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could not
shut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aim
with both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till one
day when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blow
over his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye was
put out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cut
above it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at a
pump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. It
suddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now,
and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; by
help of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himself
presentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and went
joyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure it
had not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurried
home to share the joyful news with his family.
He went hunting the very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed
a bird. It was a suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal
upon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of that
wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy
could bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when his
father came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted
of his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he
had expected to eat this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it
together. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. "Then you took
its poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it," said the
father. "Was it a great pleasure to see it die?" The boy hung his head
in shame and silence; it seemed to him that he would never go hunting
again. Of course he did go hunting often afterward, but his brother and
he kept faithfully to the rule of never killing anything that they did
not want to eat. To be sure, they gave themselves a wide range; they
were willing to eat almost anything that they could shoot, even
blackbirds, which were so abundant and so easy to shoot. But there were
some things which they would have thought it not only wanton but wicked
to kill, like turtle-doves, which they somehow believed were sacred, nor
robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they kept
about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a shame to
shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the turtle-doves,
which used to light on the Basin bank, and pick up the grain scattered
there from the boats and wagons.
There were a good many things you could do with a gun: you could fire
your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the air; you could fill
the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and send the water in a
straight column at a fence. The boys all believed that you could fire
that column of water right through a man, and they always wanted to try
whether it would go through a cow, but they were afraid the owner of the
cow would find it out. There was a good deal of pleasure in cleaning
your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck in it and you could
hardly get it out. You poured hot water into the muzzle and blew it
through the nipple, till it began to show clear; then you wiped it dry
with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled it with greasy
tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw, and stay in the
barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in at the nipple
to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old muzzle-loading
shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.
But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired and
footsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as you
came in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit for
supper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy's mother
ever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind of
preserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly take
the time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before you
rushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you left
it with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and saved
you the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good deal
quicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.
Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late was the pleasure
of starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shoot
ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had an
alarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant it
rang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayed
than shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashes
off the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked and
bristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on their
clothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns.
Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to know
they were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, and
twisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tail
off; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns all over;
he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they were going,
and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, and led the
way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks on the
grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild, clamorous cries,
till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back with my boy
and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right to the
first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and crept along to
the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold on Tip's
collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning. The
place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that pale light,
and he was glad of old Tip's company, for it seemed a time when there
might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet of smooth,
gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, and through these
at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro, and he could
catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood still and then jumped
wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled with the rush of
wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocks arriving.
Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopes he will
lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he bet that he
did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got a shot at
them, they would not come back so that he could get a chance himself to
kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, and just when he
was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the ducks were, the old
smooth-bore sent out a red flash and a white puff before he heard the
report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard the splashing rise
of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; and he ran forward,
yelling, "How many did you hit? Where are they? Where are you? Are they
coming back? It's my turn now!" and making an outcry that would have
frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a flock of ducks.
One shot always ended the morning's sport, and there were always good
reasons why this shot never killed anything.
NUTTING
The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts,
and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter
kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but
the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people.
Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black
walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks,
as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go
walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they
were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the
fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thought
necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and
that a boy had to make a new wagon every year.
No boy's walnut wagon could last till the next year; it did very well if
it lasted till the next day. He had to make it nearly all with his
pocket-knife. He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine
board, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of the
blocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness,
and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape,
and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, and
he made the hubs with it. He could get a tongue ready-made if he used a
broom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittled
so it could be fastened to the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes
with his knife if he could not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an
auger, he bored the holes through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and
then whittled them large enough with his knife. He had to use pine for
nearly everything, because any other wood was too hard to whittle; and
then the pine was always splitting. It split in the axles when he was
making the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins
that were tied in; the wheels themselves split, and had to be
strengthened by slats nailed across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a
candle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front axle tight, so
that it took the whole width of a street to turn a very little wagon in
without upsetting.
When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his
brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He
started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost
still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops
and the roof of the woodshed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get
there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them
was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and
around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay
scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still
yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to
the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,
wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever.
[Illustration: NUTTING]
The leaves had dropped from the trees overhead, and the branches
outlined themselves against the blue sky, and dangled from their outer
stems clusters of the unfallen fruit, as large as oranges, and only
wanting a touch to send them plumping down into the grass where
sometimes their fat hulls burst, and the nuts almost leaped into the
boy's hands. The boys ran, some of them to gather the fallen nuts, and
others to get clubs and rocks to beat them from the trees; one was sure
to throw off his jacket and kick off his shoes and climb the tree to
shake every limb where a walnut was still clinging. When they had got
them all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree,
they began to hull them, with blows of a stick, or with stones, and to
pick the nuts from the hulls, where the grubs were battening on their
assured ripeness, and to toss them into a little heap, a very little
heap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from. The boys
gloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could,
for it would not wash off, and it showed for days that they had been
walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one another's faces with the
juice, and pretending they were Indians.
The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and
while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and
hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one
of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o'clock, they would
start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their
shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good
luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone
home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I have
to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts
rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the
wagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always
would in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready to
drop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs
or rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get
the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because they
usually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made just
as much preparation for drying the nuts on the woodshed roof whether
they got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stop
gathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleat
across the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them out
thin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. They
said they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to try
pretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and in
about three days they were all eaten up.
THE FIRE-ENGINES
There were two fire-engines in the Boy's Town; but there seemed to be
something always the matter with them, so that they would not work, if
there was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulled
them up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with them
against the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as good
as a muster to see the firemen in their red shirts and black trousers,
dragging the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each side of
the rope.
My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he never dared; and
the foreman of the _Neptune_, which was the larger and feebler of the
engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyes that he
felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was a
storekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his black
trousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and a
brass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It did
not make any difference how close he was to the men, he shouted
everything through the trumpet; and when they manned the brakes and
began to pump, he roared at them, "Down on her, down on her, boys!" so
that you would have thought the _Neptune_ could put out the world if it
was burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter from
the nozzle, and sometimes none at all, even if the hose did not break;
it was fun to see the hose break.