“You can depend on it, Master Hempstead wouldn’t be here in Fish Creek teaching us if he wasn’t addicted to the bowl. He’s a scholar, and some day you’ll regret you didn’t appreciate what he’s tried to teach you.”
“Lewis is preaching again,” cried Moses. “What’s Master Hempstead taught us except the way to the Marietta tavern?”
“Who needs to go to Marietta since the Claibornes bought their new still,—except to hide himself?” asked Louis Gist.
There was a sudden silence over all the room. It was so quiet that Jimmy Claiborne’s labored writing was heard, and all the older scholars exchanged glances. The Claiborne still had been a bitter subject at Fish Creek, and some of the older boys had said that it was already ruining Jimmy Claiborne.
Lewis Hoyt held his hand closed over Jimmy’s as the silence fell,—a silence timed by the steady booming of the puncheon mauls at the little shipyard where the ark was building.
Jimmy’s hand trembled and stopped. Lewis steadily drove it to the finishing of the name.
“I wish there wasn’t a still on the whole length of the Ohio river,” Lewis said very quietly. “Come here, Louis Gist, it’s your turn to sign.”
Jimmy Claiborne went back to the fire, sullen, red-faced and silent, and while the incident was soon dismissed by the others he sat looking into the fire or plucking savagely at the feathers of his turkey. He and Louis had caught them that morning, just outside the schoolhouse, in their turkey trap.
Over at the shipyard the treenail hammers sounded, blending their sharp raps with the measured hollow strokes of the mauls. All the men on the creek were working on the ark which young Captain Marion Royce was building to go down to New Orleans with the spring “fresh.”
Jonas Sparks, the veteran shipwright, had come down from Marietta to oversee the work. Even Gaffir Hoyt was working there, and Uncle Amasa Claiborne, half of whose scalp the Indians had taken thirty years before.