Strange and abrupt as were the transitions from Allen’s favorite Scriptural manner of speech to the ordinary vernacular, no one thought of laughing. As the boy dismounted, Allen said:
“You go straight to Job and do as he tells you;” and as he rode away called back, “everybody lay low and keep dark till you hear the owl hoot.”
Soon Nathan turned from the road into an obscure footpath that led in the direction of Job Carpenter’s cabin. The gloom and loneliness of the mysterious forest, through which the narrow footpath wound, so pervaded it that the song birds seemed awed to silence, and the woodpeckers tapped cautiously, as if afraid of being heard by some enemy. No boy, even of backwoods breeding, would care to loiter had his errand been less urgent, and he gave but a passing notice to things ordinarily of absorbing interest.
A mother partridge fluttered along the ground in simulated crippledness while her callow brood vanished among the low-spread leaves. A shy wood bird disclosed the secret of her nest as he sped by. Against a dark pine gleamed the fiery flash of a tanager’s plumage. A wood mouse stirred the dry leaves. His own foot touched a prostrate dead sapling, and the dry top rustled unseen in the wayside thicket. There was a sound of long, swift bounds, punctuating the silence with growing distinctness, and a hare, in his brown summer coat, wide-eyed with terror, flashed like a dun streak across the path just before him, and close behind the terrified creature a gray lynx shot past, eager with sight and scent of his prey, closing the distance with long leaps. Before the intermittent scurry of footfalls had faded out of hearing they ceased, and a wail of agony announced the tragical end of the race. The cry made him shiver, and he could but think that the lynx might have been a panther and the hare a boy.
His heart grew lighter when he saw the sunshine showing golden green through the leafy screen that bordered the hunter’s little clearing. He found Job leaning on his hoe in his patch of corn, looking wistfully on the creek, where the fish were breaking the surface among the weeds that marked the expanse of marsh with tender green, and where the sinuous course of the channel was defined by purple lines of lily pads. The message was received with a show of vexation, and the old man exclaimed:
“Plague on ’em all with their pitches and surveyin’ and squabblin’. Why can’t folks let the woods alone? There’s room enough in the settlements for sech quarrels without comin’ here to disturb God’s peace with bickerin’s over these acres o’ desart. I thought I’d got done wi’ wars and fightin’s, exceptin’ with varmints, when the Frenchers and Injins was whipped. But I guess there won’t never be no peace on airth and good will to men for all it’s ben preached nigh onto eighteen hundred years. Plague on your Hampshire Grants and your York Grants, the hul bilin’! Wal, if it must come it must, and I’ll be skelped if I’ll see Yorkers a runnin’ over my own Yankee kin. Yorkers is next to Reg’lars for toppin’ ways. I never could abear ’em.”
While he spoke he twirled Nathan’s hemlock sprig between his fingers and now set it carefully in the band of his hat and led the way to his cabin.
“And Ethan Allen’s in these betterments? Well, them Yorkers’ll wish they’d stayed to home. He’s hard-handed, is Ethan.”
The two were now in the cabin, and Job set forth a cold johnny-cake and some jerked venison that Nathan needed no urging to partake of. “’Tain’t your mother’s cookin’, but it’s better’n nothin’,” Job said, as between mouthfuls he counted out a dozen bullets from a pouch and put them in his pocket. Then he held up his powder horn toward the light after giving it a shake, and, being satisfied of its contents, slung it over his shoulder. Their hunger being satisfied, he took the long smooth-bore from its hooks, examined the flint, and, nodding to Nathan to follow, went down to his canoe, that lay bottom up on the bank.
“It’s quicker goin’ by water’n by land,” said Job, as he set the canoe afloat and stepped into it, while Nathan took his place forward. Impelled by the two paddles, the light craft went swiftly gliding down the creek, and then northward, skirting the wooded shore of the lake.