Matt and his young allies discovered Joe before the latter saw them, and made an effort to steal alongside and capture him before he knew that there was any danger near; but one of the impatient boys carelessly allowed his paddle to rub against the side of the scow, and the sound alarmed Joe, who at once took to the water and struck out for shore, leaving me to my fate. But I never blamed Joe for that, because I knew he could not have done any thing else. He had paid out a good deal of rope in order to place himself in the best position for casting, and he could not haul it in and raise the anchor before his enemies would be upon him.
“So that’s your game, is it?” shouted the squatter, when he saw Joe pulling for the shore with long lusty strokes. “Wal, it suits us I reckon. Never mind the boat, Jakey. She’s fast anchored and will stay there till we want her. Take after the ’ristocrat whose dad won’t let honest folks live onto his land less’n they’ve got a pocketful of money to pay him for it. Jest let me get a good whack at him with my paddle, an’ he’ll stop, I bet you.”
Now we know that Matt didn’t tell the truth when he said that Joe Wayring’s father would not let any one live on his land except those who had money to pay for the privilege. Mr. Wayring was one of the most liberal citizens in Mount Airy. Nearly all the men who were employed as guides and boatmen by the summer visitors lived in neat little cottages that he had built on purpose for them, and for which he never charged them a cent of rent; and when Matt Coyle and his family came into the lake with a punt load of goods, and took possession of one of his lots, and proceeded to erect a shanty upon it without asking his permission, Mr. Wayring did not utter one word of protest. It is true that he was not very favorably impressed with the appearance of the new-comers, but he thought he would give them an opportunity to show what they were before he ordered them off his grounds. If they proved to be honest, hard-working people they might stay and welcome, and he would treat them as well as he treated the other inhabitants of “Stumptown.”
But it turned out that Matt Coyle was neither honest nor hard-working. He had once been a hanger-on about the hotels at Indian Lake. He called himself an independent guide (neither of the hotels would have any thing to do with him), but, truth to tell, he did not do much guiding. He gained a precarious subsistence by hunting, trapping, fishing, and stealing. It was easier to steal a living than it was to earn it by hunting and trapping, and Matt’s depredations finally became so numerous and daring that the guides hunted him down as they would a bear or a wolf that had preyed upon their sheep-folds, and when they caught him ordered him out of the country. To make sure of his going they destroyed every article of his property that they could get their hands on, thus forcing him, as one of the guides remarked, to go off somewhere and steal a new outfit.
Where Matt and his enterprising family went after that no one knew. They disappeared, and for a few weeks were neither seen nor heard of; but in due time they rowed their punt into Mirror Lake, as I have recorded, and Matt and his boys at once sought employment as guides and boatmen. But here again they were doomed to disappointment. The managers of the different hotels saw at a glance that they were not proper persons to be trusted on the lake with a boatload of women and children, and told them very decidedly that their services were not needed. The truth was they drank more whisky than water, and guides of that sort were not wanted in Mount Airy.
Matt and his boys next tried fishing as a means of earning a livelihood; but no one could have made his salt at that, because the guests sojourning at the hotels and boarding houses, with the assistance of the regular guides, kept all the tables abundantly supplied. This second failure made the squatters angry, and they concluded that affairs about Mount Airy were not properly managed, and they would “run the town” to suit themselves. But they could not do that either, for they were promptly arrested and thrust into the calaboose.
After they had been put in there twice, the trustees concluded that they were of no use in Mount Airy, and that they had better go somewhere else. Accordingly Matt received a notice to pull down his shanty and clear out. The officer who was intrusted with the writ had considerable trouble in serving it, but he had more in compelling the squatter to vacate the lot of which he had taken unauthorized possession. Matt and his boys showed fight, while the old woman, who, to quote from Frank Noble, “proved to be the best man in the party,” threw hot water about in the most reckless fashion. After a spirited battle the representatives of law and order came off victoriously, and Matt and his belongings were tumbled unceremoniously into the punt and shoved out into the lake. This made them almost frantic; and before they pulled away they uttered the most direful threats against those who had been instrumental in driving them out of Mount Airy “because they were poor and didn’t have no good clothes to wear,” and they even went so far as to threaten to burn Mr. Wayring’s house. But you will remember that it was Tom Bigden, a boy who hated Joe for just nothing at all, who put that idea into Matt’s head.
Being once more adrift in the world, the squatter made the best of his way to Sherwin’s pond to carry out certain other plans that had been suggested to him by that same Tom Bigden, who never could be easy unless he was getting himself or somebody else into trouble. Between the lake and the pond there were twelve miles of rapids. Having run them scores of times under the skillful guidance of my master, I may be supposed to be tolerably familiar with them, and to this day I can not understand how Matt ever succeeded in getting his clumsy old punt to the bottom of them in safety. He must have had a hard time of it, for the bow of his craft was so badly battered by the rocks that it was a mystery how he ever took it across the pond and up the creek to the place where he made his temporary camp. With his usual caution he concealed his shanty in a grove of evergreens, and waited as patiently as he could for something to “turn up.” Tom Bigden had assured him that he could make plenty of money by simply keeping his eyes open, but Matt did not find it so.
“I don’t b’lieve that ’ristocrat knew what he was talkin’ about when he said that some of them sailboats up there in the lake would be sure to break loose, an’ that I could make money by ketchin’ ’em as they come through the rapids, an’ givin’ ’em up to their owners,” said the squatter one day, when his supply of corn meal and potatoes began to show signs of giving out. “There ain’t nary one of ’em broke loose yet, an’ if any one of them p’inters an’ hound dogs that we’ve heared givin’ tongue in the woods ever lost their bearin’s I don’ know it, fur they never come nigh me.”
“He said that if the things he was talkin’ about didn’t happen of theirselves, he’d make ’em happen,“ suggested Jake.