“Didn’t I tell ye to have nothin’ to do with city folks? Ye shan’t keep that thing. I’ll smash it, so he’p me God!” But before he could lift a hand a 28 scream came from the bed, and Mrs. Langly sat up wild and dishevelled.
“Let him hev it, Jim Langly, let him hev it,” and then she dropped back gray and still. Jim Langly had seen that gray stillness before, and he stood looking upon it now in dumb terror. His wife had been ailing a long time, it was true, yet no one had thought of death. But the grim visitor was there in all his quiet majesty. The weary spirit, which had for so many years longed for flight into new haunts of men, had winged its way at last to a far, mysterious country of which she had heard little, but towards which for months past she had been reaching out with a strange prescience of which no one guessed.
It was a dreary night at the cabin. No one tried to sleep. Jim Langly said no more to Steve about the watch, and the boy wore it in his bosom attached to a stout string about his neck, keeping it out of sight, and sobbing in the stillness of the woods as he wandered with Tige, “Mammy wanted me to have it.” And though his joy in it for the time was gone, there was peculiar comfort in this thought of her approval. The old dog looked up in the boy’s face from time to time pitifully, or stuck his nose in the lad’s hand, knowing well, in a way dogs have, what had happened.
Next day the wife and mother was laid to rest beside the row of little graves, and life completely changed for Steve. He went to bed as usual in his corner of the room, but he could not forget the still form which had lain in another corner the night before, and while Mirandy and his father slept heavily, he slipped from the bed, took a blanket and with Tige at his heels went into the woods again. Here in the stillness which he loved, worn out with loss of sleep and his first encounter with grief, nestling close to old Tige slumber came and held him until late the next day. His father and Mirandy paid little attention to what he did, so night after night he took his blanket and dog and slept in the woods, the two only going to the cabin for meals.
During all these strange, restless days the words of Steve’s mother came to him over and over: “Remember you air goin’ whar you kin larn to make things lack that watch.” And he thought, “How am I a-goin’ lessen I jes’ go?” He knew his father would never give him permission, it was not worth while to ask it, so gradually his plans took shape in the solitude of the woods with no one to counsel. Had the boy known what distance lay between him and his goal he would have grown faint-hearted, but he had no conception of what his undertaking meant. So he laid his plans with good courage, which plans, 30 of course, included the taking of his dog. For three or four days Steve took an extra share of corn pone and bacon, Mirandy not noticing in her shiftless manner of providing, and feeling the loss of her mother, she was even more listless than usual. These extra rations for himself and Tige Steve carried to the woods and laid away. Then his beloved fox skin, the greatest treasure which he possessed beside the watch, he must take that with him, because it was “the man’s”; he had promised it in return for the watch, and now that he was going he must take it along to give to the man. The boy had no thought of any difficulty in such a search. The food, the skin, the watch, and the scanty clothes he wore constituted all his equipment for the journey. When he started out with the skin Mirandy lazily asked what he was going to do with it, and he replied: “Use it fer a piller in the woods.”
“Ye better quit sleepin’ out thar,” she said; “somethin’ ’ll eat ye up some night.”
“I ain’t a-feerd,” he said, and she thought no more about it.
Three days passed with a good accumulation of food, and as Steve and Tige lay down to sleep at night the boy said:
“Tige, we’ve gotter be a-goin’ ’bout day arter ter-morrer,” and the dog wagged sleepy assent. But 31 next morning when Steve wakened a peculiar stillness smote him. Tige was usually alert at his least move. With intuitive alarm Steve put out his hand,––and touched a rigid body! Drawing back he sprang to his feet, a cry of anguished appeal on his lips: