"Some folks about here will tell you wonderful stories about that moose," he said. "Some will tell you it came from Maine; and some will tell you it came from Canady; and some will tell you they don't know nothin' at all about it; an' generally it'll be the last ones that tell the whole truth, though it did come from both Canady an' Maine; and, what's more, if it hadn't come, I wouldn't ha' been here. Nobody knows that but me, for up to now I haven't breathed a word about it to a soul, but I don't mind tellin' you boys the whole truth."
"You don't mean to say it got you your position here as a bell-boy, do you?" asked Jack.
"Yes, I do—that is, it did in a way, as you'll see when I've told you the whole story," returned Sandboys, and he began:
"My father, when he was a boy, used to live up in Canady. I don't recollect the name of the exact place. He told me its name lots o' times, but it was one o' them French-Canadian names with an accent to it I never could get the hang of. Names of English towns, like London or New York, I can always remember without much trouble, because I can spell 'em and pronounce 'em; but the minute they gets mixed in with a little foreign language, like French or Eyetalian, I can't spell 'em, pronounce 'em, or remember 'em to save my life. If anybody'd say to me, 'Remember the name o' that town or die,' I think that I'd simply have to stop breathin' an' die. I do remember, though, that it was a great place for salmon and mooses. My daddy used to tell me reg'lar slews of stories about 'em. Why, he told me the salmon was so thick in the river back of his father's barn, that if you took a bean-shooter and shot anywhere into the river, usin' pebbles instead o' beans, you couldn't help hittin' a salmon on the head and killin' it—or, rather, knockin' it unconscious, so's it would flop over and rise to the surface like it was dead, after which all you had to do was to catch it by the tail, chop its head off as you would a chicken's, cook it, and have your marketing done for two weeks."
"Jiminny!" said Bob. "It's too bad you can't remember the name of that place. A hotel at a place like that would be good as a mint."
"Oh no—it's all changed now," said Sandboys, sadly. "They've put a saw-mill in there now, and the salmon's mostly all gone. Sometimes they tell me they do catch one or two, and they're so big they cut 'em up in the saw-mill just like planks, and feed on 'em all through the winter."
"I've heard of planked shad," put in Bob, very anxious indeed to believe in the truth of Sandboys's statement, and searching in his mind for something in the way of a parallel which might give it a color of veracity.
"Hyops!" said Sandboys. "Planked shad is very good, but it can't hold a candle to planked salmon. But, as I was tellin' you, the place was full of moose too. They used to catch 'em and train 'em to go in harness. I don't believe anybody up there ever thought of buying a horse or a team of oxen to pull their wagons and plough their fields, moose were so plenty, and, when you could catch 'em hungry, so easy to tame. They'd hitch 'em to the plough, for instance, with ropes tied to their horns, and drive 'em around all day, and when night came they weren't a bit tired. But sometimes daddy said they'd strike a fearfully wild one, and then there'd be trouble. Pop told me he hitched one up to the harrow once, and the thing got a wild fit on and started across the field prancin' like a Rocky Mountain goat. He pulled up all the fences in his way with the harrow's teeth, and before he stopped he'd gone right through my grandfather's bay-window, into the dinin'-room, out the back door into the kitchen, takin' all the tables and chiny in the place with him. Where he went to nobody ever knew, though the harrow was found on top o' one of the mountains about sixty miles away, three years afterwards. I'd tell you the name of the mountain, only it had one o' those French-Canadian names too, so of course I can't.
"Time went on, and pop got to be a pretty big boy, and on his thirteenth birthday his father gave him the gun he'd used in the war—the war of the Revylation, I think it was, when George Washington was runnin' things. With it he gave him a powder-flask and some bullets, and I tell you pop was proud, and crazy to go huntin'. His father wasn't anxious to let him, though, until he thought pop knew enough about fire-arms to kill something besides himself, and he told him no, he couldn't. He must wait awhile. So pop tried to be good and obey, but that gun was too much for him. It kept hintin', 'Let's go huntin'—let's go huntin',' and one night pop could not resist it any longer. So after everybody'd gone to bed, he got up, sneaked down stairs into the parlor, took down the gun from the bricky-brack rack, and set out for the lonely woods.