Those who obtained their information from the landlord of the public-house where Wilson put up, having James with him, averred that Jonathan Whitman had got awfully cheated in a redemptioner; that he was lame and underwitted; a great scrawny, loutish boy, and no life in him, and had such a down look that many people reckoned he might be a thief, most likely he was, for Wilson got him out of a parish workhouse.
Others were of opinion that the next time Wilson came that way he should be treated to a coat of tar and feathers for putting such a creature on to so good a man as Mr. Jonathan Whitman; still others said there could be no doubt of it, for Blaisdell, Mr. Wood’s redemptioner, who came over in the same vessel, said he thought he was underwitted or crazy, for he never heard him speak, nor saw him talk with any of the passengers.
While this talk was going on in the bar-room, a shoemaker came in, who said that Lunt the miller told him that the week before the redemptioner was at his mill with Whitman’s youngest boy, and he never saw a man handle a span of horses or bags of wheat better, and that he would pitch a barrel of flour into a wagon as easily as a cat would lick her ear.
James Stone the peddler then said that the last time he was there, the redemptioner was sitting in the sun on the wood-pile, while Whitman and Peter were threshing in the barn with all their might, and the redemptioner had been there a week then.
At that moment a drover, a joking, good-natured fellow, came into the bar-room and said he was over in Whitman’s neighborhood that very forenoon, and when he went by there about eleven o’clock, the redemptioner was holding plough, and Whitman was driving, and the horses were stepping mighty quick too.
This occasioned a great laugh, and the subject was dropped. The verdict, however, remained unfavorable to James, as Eustis the shoemaker was not considered very reliable, and Sam Dorset the drover was so given to joking, that though a truthful man, everyone supposed he then spoke in jest.
James now went again to the wood-pile with the old gentleman, and chopped for four days in succession, the former cutting till he was tired, and then going into the house or piling up the wood.
The weather was fast growing cooler, and it was the custom of Mr. Whitman to cut and haul a large quantity of wood to last over the wet weather in the fall and till snow came. He also wished to haul wheat to the mill himself, and wanted Peter to go with him, going two turns in a day. He therefore asked his father if he felt able to go into the woods with James and Bertie, and show James how to fell a tree, and see that he didn’t fell one on himself or Bertie.
The old gentleman said he could go as well as not, that he could ride back and forth in the cart, chop as much as he liked, and then make up a fire, and sit by it, and see to them, and he thought it would do him good to be in the woods.
The old gentleman selected a tree and cut it down, while James who had never seen a tree cut down in his life, looked on; he then selected another and told him to chop into it. James did so, though he found it a little more difficult to strike fair into the side of a tree, than into a log lying on the ground. When it was more than half off his instructor told him where to cut on the other side.