Boy nodded.
“Well, get along then and don’t stand there botherin’ me. I’m goin’ to build one up in—but never mind now. I’ll come back with you and show you. Get along.”
For an hour and a half after Boy had gone Paisley worked fast and furious. Building a turkey-trap was no easy job for one man, for a turkey-trap was practically a diminutive log-house with a narrow ground-door and a well-built roof of tough, heavy timbers, strong enough to hold a horse from within or a turkey-loving brown bear from without. When pen number one was finished, Paisley stood back and grinned commendingly.
“Purty good trap, that,” he said, speaking aloud, as was the habit of most Bushwhackers. “Don’t it beat all how foolish a turkey is, now! Just think of ’em follerin’ up a trail of beech-nuts or chaff and enterin’ that little log-house with their heads down and findin’ they’re inside, not seein’ the door they went in by at all.”
He laughed quietly and felt for his pipe.
“Just as soon as they find they’re trapped, up goes their heads and they never see nothin’ but the roof after that. The scareder a turkey is, the higher up goes its head. I’ll bet my winter’s tobaccer that this trap is good for five at least.”
He sat down on a log and lit his pipe.
“Well, well,” he sighed, “what’ll Boy and Big Mac do without that little mother? What’ll they do?”
He pulled viciously at his short pipe and then sprang up and gripped his ax again. Then he stood still, looking away through the woods with unseeing eyes.
“That’s it,” he said huskily. “What’ll she do?—that’s it.”