A SNIPE-HUNT
A STORY OF JIM-NED CREEK
BY M. E. M. DAVIS
“I ain't sayin' nothin' ag'inst the women o' Jim—Ned Creek ez women,” said Mr. Pinson; “an' what's more, I'll spit on my hands an' lay out any man ez'll dassen to sass 'em. But ez wives the women o' Jim-Ned air the outbeatenes' critters in creation!”
These remarks, uttered in an oracular tone, were received with grave approbation by the half a dozen idlers gathered about the mesquite fire in Bishop's store. Old Bishop himself, sorting over some trace-chains behind the counter, nodded grimly, and then smiled, his wintry face grown suddenly tender.
“You've shore struck it, Newt,” assented Joe Trimble. “You never kin tell how ary one of 'em 'll ack under any succumstances.”
Jack Carter and Sid Northcutt, the only bachelors present, grinned and winked slyly at each other.
“You boys neenter to be so brash,” drawled Mr. Pinson's son-in-law, Sam Leggett, from his perch on a barrel of pecans; “jest you wait ontell Minty Cullum an' Loo Slater gits a tight holt! Them gals is ez meek ez lambs—now. But so was Mis' Pinson an' Mis' Trimble in their day an' time, I reckon. I know Becky Leggett was.”
“The studdies'-goin' woman on Jim-Ned,” continued Mr. Pinson, ignoring these interruptions, “is Mis' Cullum. An' yit, Tobe Cullum ain't no safeter than anybody else—considerin' of Sissy Cullum ez a wife!”
Mr. Trimble opened his lips to speak, but shut them again hastily, looking a little scared, and an awkward silence fell on the group.
For the shadow of Mrs. Cullum herself had advanced through the wide door-way, and lay athwart the puncheon floor; and that lady, a large, comfortable-looking, middle-aged person, with a motherly face and a kindly smile, after a momentary survey of the scene before her, walked briskly in. She shook hands across the counter with the storekeeper, and passed the time of day all around.
But Hines, the new clerk, shuffled forward eagerly to wait on her. Bud was a sallow-faced, thin-chested, gawky youth from the States, who had wandered into these parts in search of health and employment. He was not yet used to the somewhat drastic ways of Jim-Ned, and there was a homesick look in his watery blue eyes; he smiled bashfully at her while he measured off calico and weighed sugar, and he followed her out to the horse-block when she had concluded her lengthy spell of shopping.
“You better put on a thicker coat, Bud,” she said, pushing back her sunbonnet and looking down at him from the saddle before she moved off. “You've got a rackety cough. I reckon I'll have to make you some mullein surrup.”
“Oh, Mis' Cullum, don't trouble yourself about me,” Mr. Hines cried, gratefully, a lump rising in his throat as he watched her ride away.
The loungers in the store had strolled out on the porch. “Mis' Cullum cert'n'y is a sister in Zion,” remarked Mr. Trimble, gazing admiringly at her retreating figure.
“M-m-m—y-e-e-s,” admitted Mr. Pinson. “But,” he added, darkly, after a meditative pause, “Sissy Cullum is a wife, an' the women o' Jim-Nez, ez wives, air liable to conniptions.”
Mrs. Cullum jogged slowly along the brown, wheel-rifted road which followed the windings of the creek. It was late in November. A brisk little norther was blowing, and the nuts dropping from the pecan-trees in the hollows filled the dusky stillness with a continuous rattling sound. There was a sprinkling of belated cotton-bolls on the stubbly fields to the right of the road; a few ragged sunflowers were still abloom in the fence corners, where the pokeberries were red-ripe on their tall stalks.
“I must lay in some poke-root for Tobe's knee-j'ints,” mused Mrs. Cullum, as she turned into the lane which led to her own door-yard. “Pore Tobe! them j'ints o' his'n is mighty uncertain. Why, Tobe!” she exclaimed, aloud, as her nag stopped and neighed a friendly greeting to the object of her own solicitude, “where air you bound for?”
Mr. Cullum laid an arm across the horse's neck. He was a big, loose-jointed man, with iron-gray hair, square jaws, and keen, steady, dark eyes. “Well, ma,” he said, with a touch of reluctance in his dragging tones, “there's a lodge meetin' at Ebenezer Church to-night, an' I got Mintry to give me my supper early, so's I could go. I—”
“All right, Tobe,” interrupted his wife, cheerfully; “a passel of men prancin' around with a goat oncet a month ain't much harm, I reckon. You go 'long, honey; I'll set up for you.”
“Sissy is that soft an' innercent an' mild,” muttered Mr. Cullum, striding away in the gathering twilight, “that a suckin' baby could wrop her aroun' its finger—much lessen me!”
About ten o'clock the same night Granny Carnes, peeping through a chink in the wall beside her bed, saw a squad of men hurrying afoot down the road from the direction of Ebenezer Church. “Them boys is up to some devilmint, Uncle Dick,” she remarked, placidly, to her rheumatic old husband.
Uncle Dick laughed, a soft, toothless laugh. “I ain't begrudgin' 'em the fun,” he sighed, turning on his pillow, “but I wisht to the Lord I was along!”
The “boys” crossed the creek below Bishop's and entered the shinn-oak prairie on the farther side.
“Nance ast mighty particular about the lodge meetin',” observed Newt Pinson to Mr. Cullum, who headed the nocturnal expedition; “she know'd it wa'n't the regular night, an' she suspicioned sompn, Nance did.”
“Sissy didn't,” laughed Tobe, complacently. “Sissy is that soft an' innercent an' mild that a suckin' baby could wrop her aroun' its finger—much lessen me!”
Bud Hines, in the rear with the others, was in a quiver of excitement. He stumbled along, shifting Sid Northcutt's rifle from one shoulder to the other, and listening open-mouthed to Jack Carter's directions. “You know, Bud,” said that young gentleman, gravely, “it ain't every man that gets a chance to go on a snipe-hunt. And if you've got any grit—”
“I've got plenty of it,” interrupted Mr. Hines, vaingloriously. He was, indeed, inwardly—and outwardly—bursting with pride. “I thought they tuk me for a plumb fool,” he kept saying over and over to himself. “They ain't never noticed me before 'cepn to make fun of me; an' all at oncet Mr. Tobe Cullum an' Mr. Newt Pinson ups an' asts me to go on a snipe-hunt, an' even p'oposes to give me the best place in it. An' I've got Mr. Sid's rifle, an' Mr. Jack is tellin' of me how! Lord, I wouldn't of believed it of I wa'n't right here! Won't ma be proud when I write her about it!”
“You've got to whistle all the time,” Jack continued, breaking in upon these blissful reflections; “if you don't, they won't come.”
“Oh, I'll whistle,” declared Bud, jauntily.
Sam Leggett's snigger was dexterously turned into a cough by a punch in his ribs from Mr. Trimble's elbow, and they trudged on in silence until they reached Buck Snort Gully, a deep ravine running from the prairie into a stretch of heavy timber beyond, known as The Rough.
Here they stopped, and Sid Northcutt produced a coarse bag, whose mouth was held open by a barrel hoop, and a tallow candle, which he lighted and handed to the elate hunter. “Now, Bud,” Mr. Cullum said, when the bag was set on the edge of the gully, with its mouth towards the prairie, “you jest scrooch down behind this here sack an' hold the candle. You kin lay the rifle back of you, in case a wild-cat or a cougar prowls up. An' you whistle jest as hard an' as continual as you can, whilse the balance of us beats aroun' an' drives in the snipe. They'll run fer the candle ever' time. An' the minit that sack is full of snipe, all you've got to do is to pull out the prop, an' they're yourn.”
“All right, Mr. Tobe,” responded Bud, squatting down and clutching the candle, his face radiant with expectation.
The crowd scattered, and for a few moments made a noisy pretence of beating the shinn-oak thickets for imaginary snipe.
“Keep a-whisslin', Bud!” Mr. Cullum shouted, from the far edge of the prairie. A prolonged whistle, with trills and flourishes, was the response; and the conspirators, bursting with restrained laughter, plunged into the ford and separated, making each for his own fireside.
Mrs. Cullum was nodding over the hearth-stone when her husband came in. The six girls, from Minty—Jack Carter's buxom sweetheart—to Little Sis, the baby, were long abed. The hands of the wooden clock on the high mantel-shelf pointed to half-past twelve. “Well, pa,” Sissy said, good-humoredly, reaching out for the shovel and beginning to cover up the fire, “you've cavorted pretty late this time! What's the matter?” she added, suspiciously; “you ack like you've been drinkin'!”
For Tobe was rolling about the room in an ecstasy of uproarious mirth.
“I 'ain't teched nary drop, Sissy,” Mr. Cullum returned, “but ever' time I think about that fool Bud Mines a-settin' out yander at Buck Snort, holdin' of a candle, and whisslin' fer snipe to run into that coffee-sack, I—oh Lord!”
He stopped to slap his thighs and roar again. Finally, wiping the tears of enjoyment from his eyes, he related the story of the night's adventure.
“Air you tellin' me, Tobe Cullum,” his wife said, when she had heard him to the end—“air you p'intedly tellin' me that you've took Bud Hines snipin'? An' that you've left that sickly, consumpted young man a-settin' out there by hisse'f to catch his death of cold; or maybe git his blood sucked out by a catamount!”
“Shucks, Sissy!” replied Tobe; “nothin' ain't goin' to hurt him. He's sech a derned fool that a catamount wouldn't tech him with a ten-foot pole! An' him a-whisslin' fer them snipe—oh Lord!”
“Tobe Cullum,” said Mrs. Cullum, sternly, “you go saddle Buster this minit and ride out to Buck Snort after Bud Hines.”
“Why, honey—” remonstrated Tobe.
“Don't you honey me,” she interrupted, wrathfully. “You saddle that horse this minit an' fetch that consumpted boy home.”
Tobe ceased to laugh. His big jaws set themselves suddenly square. “I'll do no such fool thing,” he declared, doggedly, “an' have the len'th an' brea'th o' Jim-Ned makin' fun o' me.”
“Very well,” said his wife, with equal determination, “ef you don't go, I will. But I give you fair warnin', Tobe Cullum, that ef you don't go, I'll never speak to you again whilse my head is hot.”
Tobe snorted incredulously; but he sneaked out to the stable after her, and when she had saddled and mounted Buster, he followed her on foot, running noiselessly some distance behind her, keeping her well in sight, and dodging into the deeper shadows when she chanced to look around.
“I didn't know Sissy had so much spunk,” he muttered, panting in her wake at last across the shinn-oak prairie. “Lord, how blazin' mad she is! But shucks! she'll git over it by mornin'.”
Mr. Hines was shivering with cold. He still whistled mechanically, but the hand that held the sputtering candle shook to the trip-hammer thumping of his heart. “The balance of 'em must of got lost,” he thought, listening to the lonesome howl of the wind across the prairie. “It's too c-cold for snipe, I reckon. I wisht I'd staid at home. I c-can't w-whistle any longer,” he whimpered aloud, dropping the candle-end, the last spark of courage oozing out of his nerveless fingers. He stood up, straining his eyes down the black gully and across the dreary waste around him. “Mr. T-o-o-be!” he called, feebly, and the wavering echoes of his voice came back to him mingled with an ominous sound. “Oh, Lordy! what is that?” he stammered. He sank to the ground, grabbing wildly for his gun. “It's a cougar! I hear him trompin' up from the creek! It's a c-cougar! He's c-comin' closter! Oh, Lordy!”
“Hello, Bud,” called Mrs. Cullum, cheerily. She slipped from the saddle as she spoke and caught the half-fainting snipe-hunter in her motherly arms.
“Ain't you 'shamed of yourse'f to let a passel o' no-'count men fool you this-a-way?” she demanded, sternly, when he had somewhat recovered himself. “Get up behind me. I'm goin' to take you to Mis' Bishop's, where you belong. No, don't you dassen to tech any o' that trash!”
Mr. Hines, feeling very humble and abashed, climbed up behind her, and they rode away, leaving the snipe—hunting gear, including Sid Northcutt's valuable rifle, on the edge of the gully.
She left him at Bishop's, charging him to swallow before going to bed a “dost” of the home-brewed chill medicine from a squat bottle she handed him.
“He cert'n'y is weaker'n stump-water,” she murmured, as she turned her horse's head; “but he's sickly an' consumpted, an' he's jest about the age my Bud would of been if he'd lived.”
And thinking of her first-born and only son, who died in babyhood, she rode homeward in the dim chill starlight. Tobe, spent and foot-sore, followed warily, carrying the abandoned rifle.