Gordon Stables - Harry Milvaine - or, The Wanderings of a Wayward Boy

For the life of him he could not help it.

“Wow-ow-ow-wo-ah!” roared the bull.

That was a sound that could be heard for one good mile at least.

The three men advancing to the rescue heard it.

For the first time since he had left home the farmer-laird felt real dread and fear. In his imagination he could see the mangled bodies of his son and the governess, with the bull standing guard over them.

“Come on, men. Great heavens! I fear the worst now.”

Milvaine had his strong, tall crook, John his terribly – punishing hide whip, the cleerach had a double-barrelled gun.

The bull – infuriated now beyond measure – came roaring to meet them.

The cleerach fired at his legs. The shot but made him stumble for a moment; it had no other effect. On he came wilder than ever. He seemed to single the farmer himself out, and charged him head down. Mr Milvaine met the charge manfully enough. He leapt nimbly to one side, striking straight home with the iron-shod end of the crook. It wounded the bull in the neck, but ill would it have fared with the farmer had he not got speedily behind a tree.

Whack, whack, whack. John is behind the bull with his whip of hide.

The bull wheels round upon him ere ever he can escape, and runs him between his horns against a tree.

John has seized the horns, and thus they stand man and brute locked in a death grip.

The farmer has stumbled and fallen in running to John’s assistance. The cleerach is loading again, when help comes from a most unexpected quarter, and Eily herself rushes on the scene.

She at once seizes the bull by the hock. The roar he emits is one of agony and rage, but John is free.

Eily easily eludes the bull’s charge. He follows a little way towards the gate, then turns, when she fixes him again. And this game continues until the bull is fairly into the field.

Whenever the bull turns Eily seizes his hock; whenever he gives her chase she runs farther into the field, barking defiantly.

“I think, men, we may safely leave the brute to Eily,” said Laird Milvaine; “but where can the dear children be!”

“Safe, safe, safe!” cried a voice from the tree.

Miss Campbell could speak now.

“Thank God!” was the fervent ejaculation breathed by every lip.

An hour afterwards Harry was in his mother’s arms, laughing and crowing with delight as he related to his mamma all the fun of what he called the jolly match with Towsie.

His mother’s eyes were red with weeping, but she was laughing now nevertheless.

Were I to tell one-half of the adventures of the child Harold, as his father called him, I would fill this whole book with them, and would not have space to say a word about his career as a youth and young man. So I shall not begin.

No more vivacious reader of books of biography, travel, and adventure, perhaps ever existed than Harry Milvaine was when about the age of ten. I have often wondered when he slept.

At midsummer in the far north of Scotland there is light enough all night to read by. Harry took advantage of this, and would continue at a book from sunset till sunrise.

The boy had a deal of independence of character and real good feeling.

“I must have light to read by all night in winter,” he said to himself, “but it would be unfair to burn my father’s candles. I’ll make some.”

There was an odd old volume in Mr Milvaine’s library, called “The Arts and Sciences,” which was a very great favourite with Harry because it told him everything.

It taught him how to make moulded candles. He possessed a tin pen-and-pencil case. This made a first-rate mould. He collected fat, he got a wick and fixed it to the bottom of the case and held it in the position described by the book, then he poured in the melted fat, and lo! and behold, when it cooled, a candle was the result. He worked, in his own little tool-house, away down among the shrubbery at the bottom of the lawn, and made many candles. John, the coachman, admired them very much, and so did the female servants.

“Dear me?” said one old milk-maid, “it’s your father, Master Harry, that should be proud of his bonnie, bonnie boy.”

This old milk-maid had a beard and moustache that many a city clerk would have envied, and she was reputed to be a witch accordingly, but she dearly loved little Harry, and Harry loved her, and made a regular confidante of her.

She did not give him bad advice either. One example in proof of this. Harry came to her one day in great grief. He was not crying, but his mouth was pursed up very much, and he was very red in the face.

“Oh, Yonitch, Yonitch!” he exclaimed, in bitterness, “what shall I do? I’ve shot papa’s favourite cock.”

“Shot him dead? Have you, dear?” said Yonitch.

“Oh, dead enough, Yonitch. I fired at him, and my arrow has gone clean through his breast. I don’t think I really meant it, though.”

Yonitch ran down with him to the paddock to view the body, and there certainly never was a much “deader” cock. The arrow was still sticking in his breast.

“What shall I do? Shall I bury the cock and run away?”

“That would not be brave, dear. No Highlander runs away. Go straight to your father and tell him.”

Harry did so.

“What’s the matter, lad?” said his father. “Hold up your head. What is it?”

“Papa,” replied the boy, not daring to look up, but speaking to a plough that stood near. “Papa, I took my bow and arrows – ”

“Yes, boy.”

“And I went down the paddock.”

“Well?”

“And I fired at the cock.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m afraid he – wants to be – buried.”

“Well, well, well, never mind, boy; I forgive you because you’ve come like a man and like a Highlander and told me. We’ll put the poor cock in the pot and have him for dinner.”

“Oh, no, no, dear papa,” cried Harry, looking up now for the first time, “I could not bear to see him cooked.”

“Well, go and bury him yourself, then.”

Harry ran off happy, and Yonitch and he dug a grave and buried the poor cock’s corpse, and it took Harry a whole week’s work in the tool-house to fashion him a “wooden tombstone,” and write an epitaph. The epitaph ran as follows: —

That tool-house and workshop of Harry’s was quite a wonderful place. And wonderful, indeed, were the things Harry turned out of it. I’m not joking. He really did make good useful articles – boxes, picture frames, a footstool for his mother, a milking-stool for Yonitch, and an extraordinary rustic-looking, but comfortable, arm-chair for his father. It had a high back and a carpet bottom, and seated in it, on the verandah on a summer’s evening, with his pipe and his paper, papa did look the very quintessence of comfort and jollity.

But Harry might often have been seen at the village carpenter’s shop, taking lessons in the useful art of joinery.

In return for the high-backed chair, his father presented him, when Christmas came round, with a turning lathe. Then I think that Harry’s cup of bliss was full to overflowing.

But his workshop soon proved too small to hold all his belongings. He secured a piece of ground from his father in a quiet and sheltered corner of the paddock, and within this he determined to do great things, as soon as spring brought out the daisies, and the ground was dry.

Now let me tell the reader, before I go a line farther on with my story, that though I am bound, in justice to my young hero, to say that he never neglected his lessons, nor his prayers, dear lad, still I do not wish to make him out a greater saint than perhaps most boys of his age are.