"What's this hyar thing at the e-end o' the rope?" asked Pete, as he began to draw the cord up, and felt a weight still suspended.
"It air the tur-r-key," said Ethan meekly.
"I tied her ter the e-end o' the rope afore I kem up."
"Waal, sir!" exclaimed Pete, in indignant surprise.
And George, for duty performed, was remunerated with the two "whings," although it still remains a question in the mind of Ethan whether or not he deserved them.
IN THE "CHINKING"
Not far from an abrupt precipice on a certain great mountain spur there stands in the midst of the red and yellow autumn woods a little log "church-house." The nuts rattle noisily down on its roof; sometimes during "evenin' preachin'"—which takes place in the afternoon—a flying-squirrel frisks near the window; the hymns echo softly, softly, from the hazy sunlit heights across the valley.
"That air the doxol'gy," said Tom Brent, one day, pausing to listen among the wagons and horses hitched outside. He was about to follow home his father's mare, that had broken loose and galloped off through the woods, but as he glanced back at the church, a sudden thought struck him. He caught sight of the end of little Jim Coggin's comforter flaunting out through the "chinking,"—as the mountaineers call the series of short slats which are set diagonally in the spaces between the logs of the walls, and on which the clay is thickly daubed. This work had been badly done, and in many places the daubing had fallen away. Thus it was that as Jim Coggin sat within the church, the end of his plaid comforter had slipped through the chinking and was waving in the wind outside.
Now Jim had found the weather still too warm for his heavy jeans jacket, but he was too cool without it, and he had ingeniously compromised the difficulty by wearing his comforter in this unique manner,—laying it on his shoulders, crossing it over the chest, passing it under the arms, and tying it in a knot between the shoulder-blades. Tom remembered this with a grin as he slyly crept up to the house, and it was only the work of a moment to draw that knot through the chinking and secure it firmly to a sumach bush that grew near at hand.