“I am going to put a new invention on those gallows; it will prove a surprise to thee.”
It did.
The boy Mordecai passed a year in wonder at what the zigzag journey to hill towns at the west of the State would bring him in the holiday or rest seasons of the fall. He wandered with the drovers to the towns around Boston, and on the Charles and “Merrimack,” trading and selling cattle, and “putting up” at the inns by the way, he himself sleeping in the barns, under the swallows’ nests.
They were merry merchantmen, the drovers. Whittier describes them in a poem. Their cattle trades had a dialect of its own, and there was an unwritten law that “all was fair in trade,” to which “honorable dishonesty” clear-minded Aunt Eunice made objection, and against which she “delivered exhortations.”
Some of these merry rovers used a boy to help them in tricks of trade—to shorten the age of cattle, and the time when the latter were “broke,” and like matters.
One day in the spring tradings a Quaker on one of the Salem farms said to Mordecai:
“Boy, thee must never let thy tongue slip an untruth, or thee will come to the gallows.”
The next year the drovers and Mordecai took their annual journey from Cambridge to Springfield and eastern Connecticut, and stopped at the Plainfield Inn.
The trees flamed with autumnal splendors again; the sun seemed burning in the air, now with a clear flame, now with a smoky haze; there were great corn harvests everywhere. The twilight and early evening hours were still. The voices on the farms echoed—those of the huskers, and of the boys driving the oxen, with carts loaded with corn. The hunters’ moon that rose over the hills like a night sun lengthened out the day.
They went on slowly, and so allowing their cattle to graze on the succulent grasses by the roadside, and to fatten, and become lazy.