Grant Allen - Babylon. Volume 1

And yet in the chapter the deacon had read at family worship that evening there was one little clause which said: ‘Quench not the Spirit.’

Hiram slept but little that night, with the vague terror of to-morrow’s whipping overshadowing him through the night watches. But he had at least one comfort: Sam Churchill had got out and gathered up his books, and locked them carefully in his box again.

‘If the boss tries to touch they books again, I tell ‘ee, Hiram,’ he said bi-lingually (for absorbent America was already beginning to assimilate him), ‘’e’ll vind ‘isself a-lyin’ longways on the vloor, afore he do know it, I promise ‘ee.’ Hiram heard, and was partly comforted. At least he would still have the books to read, somehow, at some time. For in his own heart, unregenerate or otherwise, he couldn’t bring himself to believe that there could be really anything so very wicked in Henry the Fourth or Peter Simple.

The deacon’s cowhide cut deep; but the thrashing didn’t last long: and after it was all over, Hiram wandered out aimlessly by himself, down the snowclad valley of Muddy Creek, and along to the wooded wilds and cranberry marshes near the Ontario debouchure, to forget his troubles and the lasting smart of the weals in watching the beasts and birds among the frozen lowlands. He had never been so far from home before, but the weather and the ice were in his favour, enabling him to get over an amount of ground he wouldn’t have tried to cover in the dry summer time. He had his skates with him, and he skated where possible, taking them off to walk over the intervening land necks or drifted snow-sheets. The ice was glare in many places, so that one could skate on it gloriously; and before he had got half-way down to Nine-Mile Bottom he had almost forgotten all about the deacon, and the sermon, and the beating, and the threatened ten chapters of St. John (the Gospel of Love the deacon called it) to be learned by heart before next Lord’s day, in expiation of the heinous crime of having read that pernicious work the ‘Vicar of Wakefield.’ It was the loveliest spot he had ever seen in all his poor unlovely little existence.

Close under the cranberry trees, by a big pool where the catfish would be sure to live in summer, Hiram heard men’s voices, whispering low and quiet to one another. A great joy filled his soul. He could see at once by their dress and big fur caps what they were. They were trappers! One piece of romance still survived in Geauga County, among the cranberry swamps and rush beds where the flooded creek flowed sluggishly into the bosom of Ontario; and on that one piece of romance he had luckily lighted by pure accident. Trappers! Yes, not a doubt of it! He struck out on his skates swiftly but noiselessly toward them, and joined the three men without a word as they stood taking counsel together below their breath on the ice-bound marshland.

‘Hello, sonny!’ one of the men said in a low undertone. ‘Say whar did you drop from? What air you comin’ spyin’ out a few peaceable surveyors for, eh? Tell me.’

‘I didn’t think you was surveyors,’ Hiram answered, a little disappointed. ‘I thought you was trappers.’ And at the same time he glanced suspiciously at the peculiar little gins that the surveyors held in their great gauntleted hands, for all the world like Oneida traps for musk-rats.

The man noticed the glance and laughed to himself a smothered laugh – the laugh of a person accustomed always to keep very quiet. ‘The young un has spotted us, an’ no mistake, boys,’ he said, laughing, to the others. ‘He’s a bit too ‘cute to be took in with the surveyor gammon. What do you call this ‘ere, sonny?’

‘I calc’late that’s somewhar near a mink trap,’ Hiram answered, breathless with delight.

‘Wal, it is a mink trap,’ the trapper said slowly, looking deep into the boy’s truthful eyes. ‘Now, who sent you down here to track us out and peach upon us; eh, Bob?’

‘Nobody sent me,’ Hiram replied, with his blue eyes looking deep back into the trapper’s keen restless grey pair. ‘I kem out all o’ my own accord, ‘cos father gave me a lickin’ this mornin’, an’ I’ve kem out jest to get away for a bit alone somewhar.’

‘Who’s your father?’ asked the man still suspiciously.

‘Deacon Winthrop, down to Muddy Creek Deepo.’

‘Deacon Winthrop! Oh, I know him, ruther. A tall, skinny, dried-up kind of fellow, ain’t he, who looks as if most of his milk was turned sour, an’ the Hopkinsite Confession was a settin’ orful heavy on his digestion?’

Hiram nodded several times successively, in acknowledgment of the general accuracy of this brief description. ‘That’s him, you bet,’ he answered with unfilial promptitude. ‘I guess you’ve seed him somwhar, for that’s him as like as a portrait. Look here, say, I’ll draw him for you.’ And the boy, taking his pencil from his pocket, drew as quickly as he was able on a scrap of birch-bark a humorous caricature of his respected parent, as he appeared in the very act of offering an unctuous exhortation to the Hopkinsite assembly at Muddy Creek meeting-house. It was very wrong and wicked, of course – a clear breach of the Fifth Commandment – but the deacon hadn’t done much on his own account to merit honour or love at the hands of Hiram Winthrop.

The man took the rough sketch and laughed at it inwardly, with a suppressed chuckle. There was no denying, he saw, that it was the perfect moral of that thar freezed-up old customer down to the Deepo. He handed it with a smile to his two companions. They both recognised the likeness and the little additions which gave it point, and one of them, a Canadian as Hiram conjectured (for he spoke with a dreadful English accent – so stuck-up), said in the same soft undertone: ‘Do you know where any mink live anywhere hereabouts?’

‘A little higher up stream,’ Hiram answered, overjoyed, ‘I know every spot whar ther’s any mink stirrin’ for five miles round, anyhow.’

The Canadian turned to the others.

‘Boys,’ he said, ‘you can trust the youngster. He won’t peach on us. He’s game, you may be sure. Now, youngster, we’re trappers, as you guessed correctly. But you see, farmers don’t love trappers, because they go trespassing, and overrunning the fields: and so we don’t want you to say a word about us to this father of yours. Do you understand?’

Hiram nodded.

‘You promise not to tell him or anybody?’

‘Yes, I promise.’

‘Well, then, if you like, you can come with us. We’re going to set our traps now. You don’t seem a bad sort of little chap, and you can see the fun out if you’ve a mind to.’

Hiram’s heart bounded with excitement. What a magnificent prospect! He promised to show the trappers every spot he knew about the place where any fur-bearing animal, from ermine to musk-rat, was likely to be found. In ten minutes, all four were started off upon their skates once more, striking up the river in the direction of the deacon’s, and setting traps by Hiram’s advice as they went along, at every likely run or corner.

‘You drew that picture real well,’ the Canadian said, as they skated side by side: ‘I could see it was the old man at a glance.’

Hiram’s face shone with pleasure at this sincere compliment to his artistic merit. ‘I could hev done it a long sight better,’ he said simply, ‘ef my hands hadn’t been numbed a bit with the cold, so’s I could hardly hold the pencil.’

It was a grand day, that day with the trappers – the gipsies of half-settled America; the grandest day Hiram had ever spent in his whole lifetime. How many musk-rats’ burrows he pointed out to his new acquaintance along the bank of the creek; how many spots where the mink, that strange water-haunting weasel, lurks unseen among the frozen sedges! Here and there, too, he showed them the points where he had noticed the faint track of the ermine on the lightly fallen snow, and where they might place their traps across the path worn by the ‘coons on their way to and from the Indian corn patch. It was cruel work, to be sure, setting those murderous snapping iron jaws, and perhaps if Hiram had thought more about the beasts themselves (whom after all he loved in his heart) he wouldn’t have been so ready to aid their natural enemies in thus catching and exterminating them: but what boy is free from the aboriginal love of hunting something? Certainly not Hiram Winthrop, at least, to whom this one glimpse of a delightful wandering life among the woods and marshes – a life that wasn’t all made up of bare fields and fall wheat and snake fences and cross-ploughing – seemed like a stray snatch of that impossible paradise he had read about in ‘Peter Simple’ and the ‘Buccaneers of the Caribbean Sea.’