“Wa’al,” he drawled, “it looked a leetle thet way, I thort, a spell ago;” and he still kept us in the field of his weapon, till at length I exclaimed, in desperation.
“For gracious sake! point that gun in some other way, will you?”
“Wa’al, no! I’m not fer pintin’ it ennywhar else jest yit—not until you’ve sot them ar bags daown agin, jist whar ye got ’em, every one on ye.” The bags were speedily replaced, and he slowly lowered his gun.
“Wa’al, naow,” he continued, as he came up in our midst, “this is putty bizniss, ain’t it? Bin havin’ a putty likely sort o’ time teu, I sh’d jedge from the looks o’ these ’ere bags. One—two—six on ’em; an’ I vaow they must be nigh on teu a half bushel in every pleggy one on ’em. Wa’al, naow”—with his peculiar drawl—“look eeah: you’re a putty ondustrious lot o’ thieves, I’m blest if ye ain’t.” But the deacon did all the talking, for his manœuvres were such as to render us speechless. “Putty likely place teu cum a-nuttin’, ain’t it?” Pause. “Putty nice mess o’ shell-barks ye got thar, I tell ye naow.—Quite a sight o’ chestnuts in yourn, ain’t they?”
There was only one spoken side to this dialogue, but the pauses were eloquent on both sides, and we boys kept up a deal of tall thinking as we watched the deacon alternate his glib remarks by the gradual removal of the bags to the foot of a neighboring tree. This done, he seated himself upon a rock beside them.
“Thar!” he exclaimed, removing his tall hat and wiping his white-fringed forehead with a red bandanna handkerchief. “I’m much obleeged. I’ve been a-watchin’ on ye gittin’ these ’ere nuts the hull arternoon. I thort ez haow yeu might like to know on’t.” And then, as though a happy thought had struck him, what should he do but deliberately spit on his hands and grasp his gun. “Look eeah”—a pause, in which he cocked both barrels—“yeu boys wuz paowerful anxyis teu git away from eeah a spell ago. Naow yeu kin git ez lively ez yeu pleze; your chores is done fer to-day.” And bang! went one of the gun-barrels directly over our heads.
We got, and when once out of gun-range we paid the deacon a wealth of those rare compliments for both eye and ear that always swell the boys’ vocabulary.
“All right,” he yelled back in answer, as he transported the bags across the field. “Cum agin next year—cum agin. Alluz welcome! alluz welcome!”
As I have already said, the deacon gathered all his nut harvest—sometimes by a very novel method.