Meets with the Object of His Love.
So, next Monday, Jervis Whitney set out on his long tramp, with Pow-wow
for company, and with Black Bess, his rifle, to keep them supplied with
game, their chief dependence for subsistence while traveling the five
hundred miles of wilderness, which lay between them and their old home
beyond the Alleghenies. While they were gone, Sprigg kept count of the
months and weeks and days, and, as they went silently gliding by, he
went silently dreaming on about the red moccasins. Silently, for never
another word said he to his mother concerning the matter he had so near
at heart. He knew she would laugh at him, and call him a monkey--our
hero, bear in mind, being as touchy to ridicule as a raw mouth to
ginger. You might scold him and rate him, sneap him and snub him, to a
degree you would suppose sufficient to break the heart of any boy who
knew his catechism, yet not a fig nor a flint would he care for it all.
Perhaps, he would kick up his heels in the very face of your reproof;
or, it may be, merely wrinkle up his saucy young knob of a nose,
thereby saying as plainly as words could say it:
"Thin! thin!
When the wise waste words, then fools may grin,
So, save your breath for a rainy day,
Or the wind will blow it all away;
Bottle it up and cork it fast,
The longer you keep it, the longer 'twill last."
The month of May was drawing near its close. Night was spreading its
dusky shadows over the lonely forest home. The turkey-cock had gone to
its rest; so had the red-bird, so had the jay-bird; so had Sprigg.
Elster had heard her boy repeat his prayers and was now singing him to
sleep with a hymn; a pious custom which, in all sincerity, she had
faithfully observed from his infancy up; doing her best, from night to
night, to make him a Christian, while suffering him, from day to day, to
become more and more of a heathen. Such parental inconsistencies were
rare in the days of Mary Washington, but are so common nowadays that no
one excepting himself or herself can find an exception to the rule
except at home. The last line of the hymn had just been sung, and Sprigg
was making his last big sleepy wink at the cradle before fairly off for
nodland, when they heard, first, a glad yelp out there in the yard,
which they thought they knew; then a brisk, firm step on the loose board
floor of the porch, which they were certain they knew. Up from her chair
sprang Elster; up from his bed bounced Sprigg, and by the time the
door, with a ringing click of its wooden latch, swung open, both were
there, and both hugged tight in the long, strong arms of husband and
father.
"Heaven be thanked!" exclaimed Elster, kissing her husband for the----,
but I must not say what number of times.
"The moccasins! the moccasins!--where are my red moccasins?" cried
Sprigg, who had not kissed nor hugged his father once.
"You young feather-pate! you jay-bird!" exclaimed Jervis. "Can't you
give your poor pap some little sign of welcome first?"
"Oh! then, you have got them! You have got them!" And now, assured that
such was the case, Sprigg could find it in his heart to hug and kiss his
father, which he did as sleekly and lovingly as any he-kitten. But
Sprigg paid for this bit of selfishness, and that dearly, too. Having
laid Black Bess in the rifle-hooks over the fireplace, and hung his
bearskin cap on the hook to the left and his ammunition pouch and powder
horn on the hook to the right, Jervis hugged and kissed his wife again.
Then, from the capacious game bag which, slung by a strap from the
shoulder, he wore at his side, he began drawing out slowly and with
great show of carefulness a small package, which Sprigg instinctively
knew to be the object of his heart's desire. The next moment, held high
aloft in pap's right hand, there they were at last, in plain view
before his eyes, the long dreamed of red moccasins. How beautiful looked
they. Trimmed with the finest of fur and glittering all over with the
brightest of beads, to say nothing of the color--red, as the reddest of
leather could be, not dyed in blood. You would have laughed, or,
perhaps, felt more like crying, to have seen the poor, vain boy, as he
stood there, with his heart in his eyes, gazing gloatingly up at the
moccasins as if the very shine of them had charmed him out of his
senses. Thus he stood for several moments till, giving a quick turn of
the head, he glanced sharply up at the Indian boy on the show bill, as
if half expecting to find the young horseman stripped of his moccasins
and now performing his equestrian antics in bare feet.
"Jervis," said Elster, grieved and provoked, "I am so surprised that you
should indulge our boy in so ridiculous a fancy, as were he, after all,
the monkey he would make himself. I had no idea that you would ever give
the whim a second thought. Why did you not get him the boots you have
been promising him? Throw the moccasins into the fire and let us be rid
of the nuisance at once! If you won't, I will!"
"Mum, Elster! Mum! I neither bought them nor sought them. They were sent
as a present to our boy by some one, who said that he was one of
Sprigg's very best friends; and that he could not do a better part by
our boy and ourselves, too, than to let him have them and wear them, a
little experience being all that he needed to disenchant him of his
fancy. 'Our boy's case,' said he, 'was like a man's case, whose heart is
set on matrimony--a little lively experience being all that was needed
to cure him of his hankering and set him right with matrimony, so with
moccasins.' Quoting, Elster; understand me, now, only quoting: Thirteen
years of lively experience, and here am I, just as far from being cured
as I was the day we went to the show, and your case every whit as
desperate. But here stands the boy like one bewitched. Sprigg!"
The boy giving a big start, the spell, which the moccasins, or his own
fancy, or, it were hard to say what, had thrown upon him, was snapped in
a twinkle, and recovering the use of his tongue, he cried out: "Let me
try them on! Let me try them on!" and on they were in a trice. "Look,
look! Do but see how nicely they fit! Oh, what beautiful shoes!" And the
boy began dancing about the room in a fashion so fantastic as were
enough to make one fancy that what he had on his feet were medicine
moccasins, which could carry him whithersoever and in what manner soever
might please him, or might please them. In the extravagance of his
delight he ran up to Pow-wow, where he sat on the hearth, and gave him
an affectionate hug; then, taking the old dog's paws in his hand and
shaking it heartily, said: "How are you, old pard, and did you bring
your Sprigg the red moccasins? Yes, that you did, and you shall have a
good meat-bone for it, too; that you shall." And going to the cupboard,
like old Mother Hubbard, to get the poor dog a bone, Sprigg found there
three ribs of a bear, and so the poor dog had plenty.
"Sprigg," said Elster, in a grieved and reproachful voice, "are all your
thanks for the dog? Have you none for pap? Poor pap, who has been gone
so long and traveled so far, and has come home so weary, and has been so
kind to bring you the moccasins, which, of all things else, you have
most desired! Shame upon you! Who would have thought that our boy could
have shown himself so thankless!"
Sprigg stopped short in his capers; looked first at his mother and then
at his father, and, perceiving that pap also seemed hurt and grieved, he
hung his head, but not this time to look at the moccasins. It was to
hide the blush of shame, which, redder than they, burst up from his
heart and burned in his cheek--the first that had ever been seen there.
They had hardly observed the change and wondered thereat when the boy
burst into tears, and drawing off the moccasins crept back to bed. Nor
could they get another word out of him that night, though they tried
hard to do so--harder, indeed, than was wise. So, at last they gave it
up and allowed him to sob himself to sleep.
But all night long, to and fro and up and down, were the red moccasins
walking about in his dreams. Sometimes he felt as if they were treading
upon his naked heart and brain, as though feet were in them--cruel feet,
which took a delight in trampling upon him, and once or twice it seemed
to him as if some wild and fearful shape of the night were clutching at
his toes, when he had cried out in a fright: "Oh! the red moccasins! How
they hurt my feet!"