“Did Mr. Whitman use to go with you?”
“No, Jonathan never took much to such things. He’s all for farming, but my William, who’s settled in the wilderness on the Monongahela, was full of it from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. He’s a chip of the old block. But Jonathan is right, farming pays the best now; but in those days if you raised anything there was no market for what you could not eat, and trapping and hunting, and killing Indians for the bounty on their scalps were all the ways to get a dollar.”
Peter and Bertie liked well enough to watch for and kill coons in the corn or on the trees for a few hours in pleasant moonlight nights, but did not possess that innate hunter’s spirit that reconciled them patiently to bear hunger, cold and watching to circumvent their game; but James did, and his former life of poverty, hunger and outdoor exposure with but scanty clothing had rendered him almost insensible to cold and wet, and he embraced every opportunity that was offered him to shoot or trap. Besides coons and muskrats, he shot, on the bait afforded by a dead sheep, two silver-gray foxes, and caught one cross fox and two silver-grays in traps that the old gentleman told him how to set. His greatest exploit and one that elicited the praises of grandfather, was in the latter part of winter, trapping an otter, that brought him twelve dollars.
The elder Whitman instructed him in the right methods of stretching and curing the skins, and sent them to Philadelphia to a fur dealer with whom he had dealt a great many years, and James received for what he took alone, and half of those he obtained in company with Peter and Bertie, sixty-eight dollars.
CHAPTER XVI.
A YEAR OF HAPPINESS.
The success of James in trapping did by no means overshadow his love for the soil, neither did it lead him to neglect his studies, nor cool his affection for the colt. A quart of oats every night, and potatoes, Sunday morning, with plenty of hay, made the animal grow finely.
This winter James so excelled in writing that the master employed him to set the copies. Everything passed along pleasantly in the school; James mingled freely with the scholars in their diversions, and even Morse, Riggs, and Orcutt forgot the old grudge, or pretended they had. He likewise so far conquered his reserve as to spend a sociable evening where he was invited; went through the arithmetic, and took surveying by the advice of the old gentleman, who told him it would put many a dollar in his pocket if he could run land, and he could in no other way get it so easily, especially if he ever went into a newly settled place.
In short, it was the happiest winter James had ever passed; time seemed to take to itself wings, and he could hardly realize it was March when March came.
As the time for work upon the land drew near, James said to Mr. Whitman,—
“I don’t think you need to hire a man this summer; the boys are some older. I have got the run of the work, and have learned to cradle grain as well as to reap. I think we can do the work.”