Blackie nodded.
“Well, that’s a black birch tree—the kind they make birch beer from. Some time I’ll show you how to tap it and get a drink of the sap—it tastes great. Here, take this twig and chew on it. Doesn’t it taste something like sassafras?”
“Come on—we’ll be back with Elephant Crampton in a minute,” urged Jake, the other of the twins. “Hurry up if you kids want to see the old hermit before dark.”
They increased their pace, and caught up with the vanguard about Dr. Cannon just as the mysterious house came into sight at the end of the lane. Surrounded by the shouting company of the campers, Blackie was not so awed by the place as he had been when, alone with Gil, he had glimpsed it from afar on his first memorable evening in camp. There were the same weathered shingles on the low roof, the same dirty windows and decaying out-houses—but it did not seem so unreal and awful now.
On their approach they were announced by the furious baying and howling of half a dozen hounds that leaped and pulled at their chains beside a rickety kennel by the door. The campers drew back, hoping with all their hearts that none of the dogs would break loose. The door was flung open, and a tall old man stamped out and began quieting the hounds, beating their heads with a stick until they subsided, whimpering. Then he turned and gazed strangely at the group of boys, shading his eyes against the slanting rays of sunset.
“Wal, now,” he said after a minute, “if it ain’t the Doctor and the camp-ground boys. How be ye, Doc?” He extended a dirty and claw-like hand. Blackie was near enough to notice that the finger-nails were all about half an inch long, broken, ragged, and encrusted with mold.
Indeed, as Blackie watched him shake hands with Dr. Cannon and step back to lounge in the doorway, he seemed a far from attractive personality. He was probably sixty years old, with a tall, stoop-shouldered body. He leaned slouchily against the rough doorpost, and the blackened fingers of one hand nervously combed a ragged and greasy beard that was streaked with gray. The same tangled gray prevailed in the straggling hair that crawled from beneath his battered felt hat, and in the discouraged mustache that drooped to mingle with the beard. The hermit’s eyes were bleared by sitting beside a smoky fire, and were overhung by bushy brows. Now and then, as he talked, he would profanely quiet the hounds at his feet, who, it must be admitted, were far more intelligent and far cleaner than their master.
“Glad ye’ve come, boys,” he drawled. “Allus glad to see boys here. Glad to see anybody. I been livin’ all alone here five year now come fall, sence my boy Jase left me to go over and cut ties in Pike County. Good boy, Jase was, but him and me couldn’t get along right well together. Say, Doc, when ye get back to camp-ground ye kin give Ellick and the Chief my regards fer sendin’ up that sack of flour last week. Shore did enj’y it.”
“We thought you might,” said the doctor. “These boys wanted to take a little hike to-night, and I brought them up to call on you.”
“Thet’s fine—allus glad to see boys. Well, boys, guess ye want to see my old thunderbolt, don’t ye? I allus show all the boys that thunderbolt——” He entered his house and with a long knife pried up a flat flagstone, one of those forming the hearth before his fireplace. Blackie saw him kneeling in a shaft of sunlight beside the cold embers, and watched until he drew forth from its hiding-place what seemed to be a long, thin, slate-colored piece of stone or iron. The hermit brought it out and passed it around for all to see. It was pitted and twisted, like a short iron bar that had been exposed to rough use and rust for years.