I
To this day, when Chet McAusland tells the tale his voice becomes husky
and his eyes are likely to fill--and, “It was murder,” he will say when
he is done. “I felt like a murderer and that’s what I was. But it was
too late then.” Sometimes his listeners are silent, appearing to agree
with him. More often, those to whom he speaks seek to reassure him, for
it is plain to any man that there is no murder in Chet, nor any malice
nor anything but a very human large-heartedness toward every man and
beast.
In Tantry’s time Chet was a bachelor living alone at his farm above
Fraternity, cooking and caring for himself, managing well enough. He had
been a granite cutter, a fisherman upon the Banks, a keeper of bees. Now
he farmed his rocky hillside farm. He was a man of middle age--a small
man with a firm jaw and a pair of bushy eyebrows and deep-set piercing
eyes. When he laughed he had a way of setting his head firmly back upon
his neck, his chin pressed down, and his laughter was robust and free
and fine. I have spoken of his occupations; he had also avocations. All
his life he had fished, had hunted, had traversed the forests far and
wide. A man who loved the open, loved the woods, loved the very imprint
of a deer’s hoof in the mud along the river. A good companion,
open-hearted, with never an evil word for any man.
He was, as has been said, a bachelor; but this was not of Chet’s own
choosing, as at least one person in Fraternity well knew. Old
Tantrybogus knew also--knew even in the days when he was called young
Job. He knew his mistress as well as he knew his master; knew her as
truly as though she dwelt already at the farm upon the hill. Between her
and Chet was his allegiance divided. None other shared it ever, even to
the end.
Chet as a bachelor kept open house at his farm upon the hill and this
was especially true when there was fishing or gunning to be had. A
Rockland man came one October for the woodcock shooting. He and Chet
found sport together and found--each in the other--a friend. The
Rockland man had fetched with him a she dog of marvelous craft and from
her next litter he sent a pup to Chet. In honor of the giver Chet called
the dog Job. And Job--Old Tantrybogus that was to be--learned that the
farm upon the hill was his world and his home.
Chet’s farm, numbering some eighty acres, included meadows that cut
thirty or forty tons of hay; it included ample pasturage for a dozen
cows; and it ran down to the George’s River behind the barn, through a
patch of hardwood growth that furnished Chet with firewood for the
cutting--a farm fairly typical of Fraternity. No man might grow rich
upon its fruits, but any man with a fair measure of industry could draw
a pleasant living from it and find time for venturing along the brooks
for trout or through the alder runs after woodcock or into the swamps
for deer, according to the season. From the wall that bounds the orchard
you may look down to where the little village lies along the river. A
dozen or so of houses, each scrupulously neat and scrupulously painted;
a white church with its white spire rising above the trees; the mill
straddling the river just below the bridge, and a store or two. Will
Bissell’s store is just above the bridge, serving as market place and
forum. The post office is there, and there after supper the year round
Fraternity foregathers.
In Fraternity most men own dogs; not the cross-bred and worthless brutes
characteristic of small towns in less favored countrysides, but setters
of ancient stock or hounds used to the trail of fox or rabbit. Now and
then you will see a collie or a pointer, though these breeds are rare.
Utilitarian dogs--dogs which have tasks to do and know their tasks and
do them.
Most men in Fraternity own or have owned some single wonderful dog of
which they love to tell--a dog above all other dogs for them, a dog
whose exploits they lovingly recount. And it was to come to pass that
Job, better known as Old Tantrybogus, should be such a dog to Chet
McAusland.