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THE AFFAIR AT TIMBER CREEK CAMP MEETING
When Tom Grayson found himself suddenly stranded on the farmstead in Hubbard Township he went to work to learn again the arts half forgotten during his three-years' absence in Moscow. It was necessary to put his soft hands to the plow, and to burn his fair face in the hot sun of the hay-field. With characteristic heedlessness of results he set out, on the very first day after his return, to mow alongside the stalwart hired man, Bob McCord, the father of Mely. Bob lived in a little cabin not far from the Grayson place, and since Tom left the farm he had done most of the work for Mrs. Grayson. He was commonly known as "Big Bob," because he had a half-brother of sinister birth who was older than himself, but a small man, and who for distinction was "Little Bob." Big Bob fulfilled his name in every dimension. His chest was deep, his arms were gigantic in their muscularity, and no man had ever seen his legs show signs of exhaustion. His immense muscles were softened in outline by a certain moderate rotundity; his well-distributed adipose was only one of many indications of his extraordinary physical thriftiness. In more than one stand-up fight he had demonstrated his right to the title of champion of the county. Yet he was a boyishly good-natured man, with no desire to hurt anybody, and he never fought from choice. But every rising fisticuffer within half a hundred miles round had heard of Bob's strength, and the more ambitious of these had felt bound to "dare" him. It was not consonant with the honor of such a man as Bob to "take a dare"; so against first one and then another aspiring hero he had fought, until at length there was none that ventured any more to "give a dare" to the victor of so many battles. His physical perfections were not limited to mere bull strength: no man had a keener eye or a steadier hand; none could send a rifle-ball to its mark with a more unerring aim. Had he lived in the days of the Saxon invasion of England, McCord would have stood high on the list of those renowned for exploits of strength and daring, the very darling hero of the minstrel. Our own Indian wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought renown to just such men as he, semi-barbarian path-makers for the advance of civilization. He had lagged a generation late. In the peaceful time, when strength of muscle was secondary to mental power, and when a sure aim was no longer important for the defense of one's life, nor the chief means for winning one's meat, the powerful Bob McCord saw degenerate men, whom he could have held at arms-length, prevail over him in the struggle for subsistence. For though he was capable of hard work he could never endure steady application; his nature was under mortgage to adventurous ancestors, the ancient Indian-fighters and scouts of the Appalachian country, and those more remote forefathers, the untamed emigrants who had been almost expelled from the Scottish border in the time of the Stuarts, to help resettle the devastated north of Ireland, to say nothing of the yet wilder Irish women with whom they had mated. Nothing less than the sound of the cup scraping on the bottom of the family meal-box would impel Bob to work. Every wind that came from the great sea of grass to the westward brought him the whir of the wings of prairie-hens; dreams of bear-hunting filled his mind whenever he looked into the recesses of the woods. At sight of the rising moon his hunter's soul imagined the innumerable deer which at that hour come from their coverts to graze on the prairies. Every stream tantalized him with the thought of darting perch, and great prowling cat-fish hidden beneath its surface, and challenging him to catch them if he could. If, as we are taught to believe, the manliness of the English aristocracy and that of the American apery is only kept alive by outdoor sports, how much their superior in surplus manhood must such a man as Bob McCord be! In his estimation no days were counted a part of human life except those passed in circumventing and taking the wild creatures of the woods or the prairie, and those others spent in the rude fun of musters, barbecues, elections, corn-shuckings, wood-choppings, and like assemblages, where draughts from a generous big-bellied bottle, with a twisted neck, alternated with athletic feats, practical jokes, and tales as rude as the most unblushing of those told by pious pilgrims to Canterbury in the old religious time.
It was alongside this son of Anak that Tom set himself to do a full day's work at the start. The severity of labor accorded well with his pungent feeling of penitence. Big Bob regarded him as he might any other infant, not unkindly; he even had a notion that the Widow Grayson and her children were in some sense under his care, and he did not wish any harm to come to the boy, but a practical joke was too good a thing to be missed. For two hours and a half, on that morning of Tom's appearance in the field with a scythe, Bob did not once stop to take the usual rests. Tom felt inevitable exhaustion coming on, though he cut a much narrower swath than his companion. McCord's herculean right knee was bare, having that morning forced itself through his much-bepatched trousers of butternut-dyed cotton cloth. While swinging his wider-sweeping scythe at a desperate rate, he kept telling Tom stories of adventure and the well-worn joe-millers of the log-cabin firesides, never seeming to notice the poor fellow's breathless endeavors to keep up or his ever-narrowing swath. Only when at length he turned and looked at Tom's face and perceived that the persistency of his will might carry him too far, he said, as with his scythe he picked some bunches of good grass from the edge of an elder patch and cast a wistful glance at the jug standing in a cool fence corner:
"Looky h-yer, Tom, you're a-gittin' kind-uh white-like about the gills, un 'f you try to keep up weth me, yer hide 'll be on the fence afore night."
"I know that," said Tom, who found himself so thoroughly beaten that there was no use in denying it.
"Well, hang yer scythe on that air red-haw over there un take a leetle rest, un then try a pitch-fork awhile. I 'lowed I'd see what sort uv stuff you've got, seein's you wuz so almighty gritty. A bigger man'n you couldn't hold agin me"; and Bob let the amusement he felt at Tom's discomfiture escape in a long hearty chuckle, rising at length into a loud laugh, as he reversed his scythe and fell to whetting it, making the neighboring woods ring with the tune he beat on the resonant metal,—a kind of accompaniment to the briskness of his spirit.
And now Barbara appeared bringing the snack that was commonly served to the mowers in the forenoon. Bob hung up his scythe, and, having taken some whisky, joined the exhausted Tom under the shady boughs of a black walnut. Barbara uncovered her basket, which contained an apple-pie to be divided between the two and a bottle of sweet milk. Tom had stretched himself in sheer exhaustion on a swath of hay.
"You foolish boy," said Barbara. "You've gone at your work too brash. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Here, take some of this pie; and don't you work so hard the rest of the day."
"Tom," said Bob, speaking with his mouth full of pie, "'f I had the eddication you've got, you wouldn't ketch me in this yere hot sun. I'd take a school. What's eddication good fer, anyhow, ef 't ain't to git a feller out uh the hot sun?"