"Quite a passel to tote."
"I'll make three trips."
"You needn't,'" Jud declared. "Come get our Tom horse. He packs good an' just turn him loose when you're done. He'll come home."
Andy led Tom, the Casman brothers' gentle brown pack horse, off the road and down the trail to his house. The halter rope was slack. Tom knew he had a job and was entirely willing to do it. Sure-footed as a goat, he threaded his way among the boulders in his path and matched his pace to Andy's. Since it was unnecessary to watch the horse, Andy gave himself to reflection.
There was a change in his relations with the Casman brothers and Old Man Haroldson and his sons. Nobody had mentioned it and it could not be seen, but it could be felt. His reception by each of the Haroldsons had been approximately the same as that which the Casmans had accorded him. None had been loquacious, but all had listened and all had promised to leave Andy's muskrats alone until he himself gave the word. Through that simple understanding, the change was worked.
Formerly considered at least queer, if not an outright crackpot, he had now advanced to being respected. Nobody except himself had thought his swamp anything except a worthless marsh. He had not only seen possibilities there but was in the process of developing them. Time might very well prove that it was they, not he, who had been short-sighted.
When he arrived at his house, Andy tied Tom to the porch railing. Frosty, napping in the sun, glided silkily over, regarded the horse with haughty and the muskrats with haughtier disdain, then sat down to watch the proceedings. Unstrapping the ropes that bound the crates to Tom's pack saddle, Andy lifted them to the ground, one by one. When they were all unloaded, he untied Tom, looped the lead rope through his bridle so it wouldn't drag and patted him on the rump. The horse started cheerfully up the trail toward his home.
These muskrats were designed for the most inaccessible ponds and sloughs in the swamp and it was too late even to think of taking them in today. Two at a time, one under each arm, Andy carried the crates inside. He stepped back to look at them with pleased satisfaction.
An almost visible sneer on his face, Frosty paraded up and down the row of crates, looked intently at the occupants of each and turned loftily away. Andy laughed.