“Could you but say a prayer, father,” the man supplicated, “the worms will cease.”
“It is for you to prevent them,” said Jan Kanty. “Sprinkle all the earth about the plants with ashes which you take from your stove. If this does not prevent the worms, then rise early in the morning and pour water about the plants. The worms will then come to the top where the water is and you may kill them.”
Then stooping over a high desk he began to write upon a long scroll of parchment, the end of which hung far over the desk almost to the floor. He used for writing the quill of a pigeon thrust into a piece of oak wood.
Joseph curled up on a bench that ran along beneath the windows and closed his eyes. What a day it had been! And what might the future hold?
His thoughts, which at first had begun to run slowly, suddenly became brisk and grew fantastic. He seemed to see himself bearing armor, a shield, and a sword, fighting desperately with a great dark-browed Tartar who had instead of a head a huge yellow pumpkin. Then the Tartar suddenly took off his head, and carrying it in his arms, climbed up a steep ladder to a room that seemed to hang from the stars. Out of it came lightning and flashes of strangely colored light, and suddenly the Tartar emerged, now with the head of a dog, and the pumpkin floating along beside him as if it were but a ball of feathers in the wind. The scratching of Jan Kanty’s quill grew fainter and fainter, and the fantastic world dimmed slowly in blackness.
Joseph was fast asleep.
When he awoke the room was no longer filled with sunshine. A single candle lantern was burning at the farther end of the cell and by its light he could see his father, Jan Kanty, and his mother busied with something that lay in front of them upon the table. He rubbed his eyes to make sure that he was awake—yes, it was the mysterious pumpkin from which his father was slicing away the outer rind with a huge knife. It was a curious pumpkin, that vegetable—the rind was so hard and brittle that the knife scraped on it as if it were cutting or whittling away a piece of board. Joseph, fascinated, watched the process, almost afraid to breathe. Little by little the hard pieces dropped to the floor like bits of shell as the blade cut them through.
“I think,” the father was saying in a low voice, “that I hold here in my hand the reason for the attack on my house in the Ukraine, and that the man who has hounded us to-day knew very well what this pumpkin shell contained. He had been told that I had it in my possession; he knew the exact size of my property, and he quickly put two and two together when he saw this pumpkin, and only this pumpkin, in my wagon. The reason that I made no effort to conceal it was, of course, to allay any suspicion concerning it.”
“But,” interrupted Jan Kanty, “a pumpkin at this time of year is likely to create some curiosity among those who give the matter a second thought. This is a late pumpkin, and I suppose that in all Poland it would be hard to find another such in midsummer.”
“True,” replied Pan Andrew, “but I had to risk that. Long ago when I was worried over this sacred charge and feared lest some enemy might discover its existence and attempt to rob me, there came to me the idea of a shell like this as an excellent means of concealment. Since that day there has never been a time, summer or winter, when there was not a pumpkin shell in readiness for an emergency, and many an experiment was I obliged to make, indeed, before I was able to preserve a shell in the good condition of this one.”