The cooper looked in a puzzled way at the huge butternut-yarn stockings held out under his nose, but he seemed too much taken aback to speak or to offer to touch them.
“Yes, father!” said Esther, with quite an air of command. “You know what that cough means,” and straightway Hagadorn lifted one of his feet to his knee and started tugging at the boot-heel in a desultory way. He desisted after a few half-hearted attempts, and began coughing again, this time more distressingly than ever.
His daughter sprang forward to help him, but Abner pushed her aside, put the stockings under his arm, and himself undertook the job. He did not bend his back overmuch; but hoisted Jee’s foot well in the air and pulled.
“Brace your foot agin mine an’ hold on to the chair!” he ordered, sharply, for the first effect of his herculean pull had been to nearly drag the cooper to the floor. He went at it more gently now, easing the soaked leather up and down over the instep until the boots were off. He looked furtively at the bottoms of these before he tossed them aside, noting, no doubt, as I did, how old and broken and run down at the heel they were. Jee himself peeled off the drenched stockings, and they too were flimsy old things, darned and mended almost out of their original color.
These facts served only to deepen my existing low opinion of Hagadorn, but they appeared to affect Abner Beech differently. He stood by and watched the cooper dry his feet and then draw on the warm dry hose over his shrunken shanks, with almost a friendly interest. Then he shoved along one of the blankets across the floor to Hagadorn’s chair that he might wrap his feet in it.
“That’s it,” he said, approvingly. “They ain’t no means o’ building a fire here right now, but as luck would have it we’d jest set up an old kitchen stove in the little cow-barn to warm up gruel for the caves with, an’ the first thing we’ll do ’ll be to rig it up in here to cook breakfast by, an’ then we’ll dry them boots o’ yourn in no time. You go an’ pour some oats into ’em now,” Abner added, turning to me. “And you might as well call Hurley. We’ve got considerable to do, an’ daylight’s breakin’.”
The Irishman lay on his back where I had left him, still snoring tempestuously. As a rule he was a light sleeper, but this time I had to shake him again and again before he understood that it was morning. I opened the side-door, and sure enough, the day had begun. The clouds had cleared away. The sky was still ashen gray overhead, but the light from the horizon, added to the whiteness of the unaccustomed snow, rendered it quite easy to see one’s way about inside. I went to the oat-bin.
Hurley, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, regarded me and my task with curiosity. “An’ is it a stovepipe for a measure ye have?” he asked.
“No; it’s one of Jee Hagadorn’s boots,” I replied. “I’m filling ’em so’t they’ll swell when they’re dryin’.”
He slid down off the hay as if some one had pushed him. “What’s that ye say? Haggydorn? Ould Haggydorn?” he demanded.