She was an “old country” woman who, having lost her children, was left with a number of young grandchildren to bring up. Fate had wafted her to the lead mines in Iowa, down by one of which she had settled in a log cabin, and had picked up a living by boarding the miners, attending to them in sickness, and by sending her eldest, Tim, down the shaft with the miners’ dinners. A lead mine is worked far under ground, from a shaft which is sunk like a bucket in a well. Tim was not afraid to go down this bucket, nor to crawl on his hands and knees far into Yorkshire Tom’s lead, with a tallow candle in his cap, to carry the miner his dinner; nor did he dread an occasional rattlesnake, who, coiled at the mouth of the cave, would often ring his deadly rattle at the boy. No, Tim was inured to danger, and he knew how to give the rattlesnake a good tap over his ugly head with a stick, and silence his hiss forever; and he knew how to measure and guard against the equally poisonous air, in some parts of the mine, by the uncertain flame of his candle.
But he could not “shoot the creature.” Love made him a coward.
For the “creature” was a beautiful fawn, the loveliest, soft eyed, tender pet that ever lived, whom Tim had trained and fed and educated, and brought in from the prairie when the fawn was a baby. Some hunters had shot the pretty doe, the fawn’s mother, and Tim had educated the orphan.
Granny Luke had a little garden where she raised with her own hands a few vegetables, highly prized by the miners. The fawn had shown a great appreciation of early cabbage sprouts, green peas, beet tops and other succulent green things. No bars could keep him out, and no ropes could tie this gentle robber. He would jump over everything, and he nibbled so neatly and judiciously that Granny Luke’s garden had been ruined several times, and now her really long-suffering patience was at an end.
“No early peas and no late peas, no corn, no squash, no lettuce, no anything,” said Granny, in despair. “The creature shall be shot.”
TIM’S COURAGE FAILS.
She loved Primrose, too—as Tim had named the pretty fawn, whom he found deserted, lying on a bed of those yellow flowers which grow in tufts on the prairie. Primrose had tears in his big eyes, and was crying for his mother just like a human baby, when Tim found him and brought him home in his arms. Granny Luke had fed him with warm milk then, and had tended him as carefully as she did Tim, at a similar tender age; but those days were past, and Primrose was growing every day to be a buck of promise; and although he was tame enough to them, his moral nature could not be cultivated to know that while it was proper to eat green boughs and the coarse grass of the prairie, it was a sin to eat the fine things behind the fence.
Granny Luke gardened like a German woman, and sowed her water-cresses and spinach every day, hoping for continuous crops. But Primrose allowed them to nearly reach perfection, and then down they went, under his even, strong, white teeth.
If Granny Luke threw a stone at him he would give her one tender, loving look out of his beautiful eyes, and run away over the prairie for fifty miles, perhaps, glad of the exercise; always back, however, to greet Tim, when he crawled up out of the well-like bucket and from the cold, dark mine into the sun, and ready to offer him the warm friendship of his own well-furred neck, as the poor boy threw an arm around his four-footed friend, and the twain sat down, to an out door supper.