Dauphin Thompson and the Allen boys became great friends and inseparable companions, and in the “education” of the latter the grandson of “Old John Brown” not only joined, but was able to initiate them into many of the mysteries of wood and stream. The Allen boys had new breech-loading shotguns, but Dauphin was the proud possessor of the carbine which his father had carried from Osawatomie to Harper’s Ferry, and which had been fitted for small-shot cartridges.
To the north, from which the Yellow river flowed, lay the vast, unbroken forests of pine; to the west stretched many miles of swamp and low-lying prairie. In the summer these prairies were covered with grass often so high as to completely hide the tallest man walking through. Game abounded. Deer were so unafraid that frequently the boys would find them quietly feeding among the cattle when they went at night to bring home the milch cows. Bears, panthers, and wild cats came at night to call, and left their “cards” in great tracks on the sand along the river front of the new home.
Here, in the bottom of the ancient sea, these boys began lessons which made of two of them stalwart, honored men, and which one of them had the good fortune to supplement, at a later day, in college.
CHAPTER II
CATCHING THE FAWN
The first winter after the Allen family moved to their new home on the Necedah river was unusually severe and long. While in that section of Wisconsin deep snows were not uncommon, this year they had started in about the middle of October, and by Christmas lay piled in great drifts, like small hills, in places, while on the level even the top rail of the “stake-and-rider” fence about the buildings was covered, and over which the boys, Rob and Ed, hauled loads of hay in their sleds. Between the house and stable there was one huge drift, higher than either building, through which the boys cut a tunnel large enough to drive through with their team of steers and bob-sled.
Uncle Sam Thompson, who was wise in the ways of weather, prophesied a spring flood that would sweep away the fences and come up into the houses; and, indeed, such a flood did occur a few years later, but this year the winter held on so late into the spring, and the snows melted away so slowly and gradually, that the feared high water did not come.
The Allen boys were initiated into a new and delightful experience in the latter days of March. Warm days would be followed by freezing nights, which, Uncle Sam declared, were ideal “sap” conditions. Hundreds of great maple trees lined the river, and while they were not of the “rock,” or regular sugar variety, but the “soft” maple, yet the sap held enough of sweet to yield a fair amount of sugar.
To less sturdy youths the trudging through melting snow and wading in icy water would have been accounted anything but a pastime, but the Allen boys and their chum, Dauphin Thompson, worked at the sugar making with zeal and zest. Uncle Sam showed them how to “tap” the trees. First, a hole would be bored into the tree trunk with an inch augur, then a V-shaped notch would be cut through the bark just above it. Into the augur hole would be driven a “spile,” or piece of grooved wood, down which the sap from the V-shaped cut would run. At the foot of the tree, under the spout, would be placed a wooden trough, hollowed out from a block of the light linden, or “basswood.”