“I’ll bring home some good pat—partridges.”
“Fat ones?” she jeered, her freckled face again in the doorway. “Then you’ll have to feed ’em first. A high old hunter are you! They’re still in the lowlands a-stuffin’ alder-berries, thin as Macfarlane’s geese.”
“I didn’t say fat partridges, Ella,” he called back. A shrill protest pursued him: “O-o-h, Master Miles, you did, because I heard you!”
Behind their house the hillside rose, abrupt, and slippery with ripe yellow grass. After a brief climb Miles could look back over the warped roof and see the convex field plunge toward the river. Pausing again for breath, he could see the trunks of the two tall hackmatacks which stood before the door, green pillars of an imaginary gate. From between them two brown paths forked wide,—sides of the triangle described by his nightly tour. Pines and underbrush of solemn evergreen hid the distant base, but the twin lighthouses marked each extremity by a fat white column, low and red-capped. Beyond these, in the crisp air, the river shone steel-blue, streaked with tides, blackened with light squalls, and throughout the two miles of its width, empty, except for the dotted penciling of weirs, and for one dark fir knoll, the little midway island. Yellow birches, scarlet maples, flamed like bale-fires along the evergreen headlands on the other shore; but hay-fields of the American borderers, over there, still remained verdant squares, dressed in the living green of second crops.
He gained the crest, and shifting his gun, struck across a decrepit orchard toward the green wall of the woods. Suddenly a white fleck, through the pattern of gnarled boughs, stirred in the adjoining field. A horse whinnied. The boy stopped in astonishment. What were men and horses doing by the ruins of the old house? He changed his course.
Where the Admiral’s house, last sign of family prosperity, had long ago burned to the ground, the cellar yawned like a grassy crater in a pasture knoll. Hawthorns, a hedge grown high and wild, screened the mound on its river side; and framed in glossy leaves and scarlet clusters, a little man scrubbed vigorously the back of a tethered pony. The beast was curiously piebald, blotched with snow white and dingy gray.
Miles and the pony stared at each other. The man, without pausing, turned a swarthy face, scowled, and then grinned.
“Hello, Squair,” he called slyly, “don’t give a poor chap away now, will ye?”
“Give what away?” said Miles, wondering.
“Pipe-clay,” replied the stranger. He dangled a rag aloft, stirred it in a bucket on the grass, and smeared another snow-white patch down the pony’s flank. “How’s that, huh? Look a-here,”—his crafty black eyes twinkled,—“I’ll tell you what, Squair. If you won’t give me away, I’ll let ye finish the rest of him.”