The sufferer returned, however, early in the afternoon, and was in his customary attitude before the door when Jabe, a little later, came back also. The long white slash down his favourite’s side caught the woodsman’s eye at once. He looked at it critically, touched the flour with tentative finger-tips, then turned on his wife a look of poignant interrogation. But Mrs. Jabe was ready for him. Her nerve had recovered. The fact that her victim showed no fear of her had gradually reassured her. What Jabe didn’t know would never hurt him, she mused.
“Yes, yer pesky brat come stumblin’ into the kitchen when the bar was down, a-lookin’ for ye. An’ he upset the bilin’ water I was goin’ to scrub with, an’ broke the pot. An’ I’ve got to have a new pot right off, Jabe Smith––mind that!”
“Scalded himself pretty bad!” remarked Jabe. “Poor little beggar!”
“I done the best I know’d how fer him!” said his wife with an injured air. “Wasted most a quart o’ good flour on his worthless hide! Wish’t he’d broke his neck ’stead of the only pot I got that’s big enough to bile the pig’s feed in!”
“Well, you done jest about right, I reckon, 137 Mandy,” replied Jabe, ashamed of his suspicions. “I’ll go in to the Cross Roads an’ git ye a new pot to-morrer, an’ some tar for the scald. The tar’ll be better’n flour, an’ keep the flies off.”
“I s’pose some men ain’t got nothin’ better to do than be doctorin’ up a fool moose calf!” assented Mrs. Jabe promptly, with a snort of censorious resignation.
Whether because the flour and the tar had virtues, or because the clean flesh of the wild kindreds makes all haste to purge itself of ills, it was not long before the scald was perfectly healed. But the reminder of it remained ineffaceable––a long, white slash down across the brown hide of the young bull, from the tip of the left fore shoulder.
Throughout the winter the young moose contentedly occupied the cow-stable, with the two cows and the yoke of red oxen. He throve on the fare Jabe provided for him––good meadow hay with armfuls of “browse” cut from the birch, poplar and cherry thickets. Jabe trained him to haul a pung, finding him slower to learn than a horse, but making up for his dulness by his docility. He had to be driven with a snaffle, refusing absolutely to admit a bit between his teeth; and, with the best 138 good-will in the world, he could never be taught to allow for the pung or sled to which he was harnessed. If left alone for a moment he would walk over fences with it, or through the most tangled thickets, if thereby seemed the most direct way to reach Jabe; and once, when Jabe, vaingloriously and at great speed, drove him in to the Cross Roads, he smashed the vehicle to kindling-wood in the amiable determination to follow his master into the Cross Roads store. On this occasion also he made himself respected, but unpopular, by killing, with one lightning stroke of a great fore hoof, a huge mongrel mastiff belonging to the storekeeper. The mastiff had sprung out at him wantonly, resenting his peculiar appearance. But the storekeeper had been so aggrieved that Jabe had felt constrained to mollify him with a five-dollar bill. He decided, therefore, that his favourite’s value was as a luxury, rather than a utility; and the young bull was put no more to the practices of a horse. Jabe had driven a bull moose in harness, and all the settlement could swear to it. The glory was all his.
By early summer the young bull was a tremendous, long-legged, high-shouldered beast, so big, 139 so awkward, so friendly, and so sure of everybody’s good-will that everybody but Jabe was terribly afraid of him. He had no conception of the purposes of a fence; and he could not be taught that a garden was not meant for him to lie down in. As the summer advanced, and the young bull’s stature with it, Jabe Smith began to realize that his favourite was an expensive and sometimes embarrassing luxury. Nevertheless, when September brought budding spikes of horns and a strange new restlessness to the stalwart youngster, and the first full moon of October lured him one night away from the farm on a quest which he could but blindly follow, Jabe was inconsolable.
“He ain’t no more’n a calf yet, big as he is!” fretted Jabe. “He’ll be gittin’ himself shot, the fool. Or mebbe some old bull’ll be after givin’ him a lickin’ fer interferin’, and he’ll come home to us!”