Donald and Dorothy

by Mary Mapes Dodge

THE CANDY-PULLING.

We'll look into Mr. Reed's study, the door of which stands slightly ajar. Amanda Danby is there alone. She is sitting in the master's big chair with a volume of poems in her hand—forgetting the party, forgetting that she has laboriously smoothed her curly hair for the occasion, forgetting that she is wearing her precious drab merino—her mother's wedding gown—now made over for the fourth time, forgetting the new collar and pretty blue bow at her throat (Dorry's gifts), conscious only that

"The bride kissed the goblet; the knight took it up,
He quaffed off the wine, and he threw down the cup.
She looked down to blush, and she looked up to sigh,
With a smile on her lips, and a tear in her eye.
He took her soft hand, ere her mother could bar,—
'Now tread we a measure!' said young Lochinvar."

Amanda smiles to herself as she turns the leaf, feeling that, after all, there is a great deal of life and spirit in the world, and that dish-pans, pots, and kettles are mere phantoms of the imagination. The verse runs on so smoothly too. She could write whole books of poetry herself if she only had gone somewhere and improved herself. Then, as she reads on, the great, comfortable arm-chair, the soft carpet, the well-filled book-shelves and the subdued light, give her a vague, delightful sense of having improved herself already.

Let us look into the other rooms. No one in the parlor; the back sitting-room, too, is deserted; the dining-room is locked for awhile; but high up on the garret-stairs sit three wide-eyed, open-mouthed youngsters listening to Ben Buster.

"True?" he is saying, "of course it's true; I knew the boy myself—Joe Gunther, smart fellow. He's on a ranch, now, out in Californy. I'll tell you how it was; he was living with a settler named Brown, 'way off in Utah. Brown had three men besides Joe to help him,—sort of partnership, I b'lieve, raising cattle. It was a desolate place, and the Indians were troublesome. Brown nor his men never went outside the door without a loaded gun, and they kept several more in the hut, always loaded, ready for an attack. One morning, long before daylight, Joe heard a rumpus. He was in bed,—none of your cots, but a bunk, like a shelf, fastened to the inside of the stockade walls."

"What do you mean by stockade walls?" asks one of the listeners.

"Why, walls made out of logs standing upright. It was only a hut, you see; no laths, nor plaster, nor any such nonsense. Well, Joe knew by what he heard that old man Brown was inside, firing from the door at the Indians; didn't know where the other two were,—killed, may be,—and so Joe gets up on his knees and looks through a crevice of the stockade wall, and sees the chief crawling stealthily around the hut to get in at the only window and attack the old man! A loaded gun—double barrel—was hanging on the wall right near Joe. What did he do but take it, put the muzzle through the chink, and let go at the fellow; discharged both barrels clean at him. 'You will, will you?' he yelled out, as the Indian fell; and I declare, if the other Indians weren't so scared and mystified by the sudden voice, and the chief killed, out of the very walls, as it seemed to them, that they turned and scampered. Joe rushed out to old man Brown, and there he was, with his two partners, at the door, not one of the three scratched, and the chief was lying there by the stockade wall, just as he fell.