keep Springvale a pushing, prosperous community, and while our efforts
were often ludicrous, the manliness of purpose had its effect. It gave
us breadth, this purpose, and broke up our narrow prejudices. I believe
in those first months I would have suffered for the least in Springvale
as readily as for the greatest. Even Lettie Conlow, whose father kept on
shoeing horses as though there were no civil strife in the nation, found
such favor with me as she had never found before. I know now it was only
a boy's patriotic foolishness, but who shall say it was ignoble in its
influence? Marjie was my especial charge. That Fall I did not retire at
night until I had run down to the bushes and given my whistle, and had
seen her window light waver a good-night answer, and I knew she was
safe. I was not her only guardian, however. One crisp autumn night there
was no response to my call, and I sat down on the rocky outcrop of the
steep hill to await the coming of her light in the window. It was a
clear starlight night, and I had no thought of being unseen as I was
quietly watching. Presently, up through the bushes a dark form slid. It
did not stand erect when the street was reached, but crawled with head
up and alert in the deeper shadow of the bluff side of the road. I knew
instinctively that it was Jean Pahusca, and that he had not been
expecting me to be there after my call and had failed to notice me in
his eagerness to creep unseen down the slope. Sometimes in these later
years in a great football game I have watched the Haskell Indians
crawling swiftly up and down the side-lines following the surge of the
players on the gridiron, and I always think of Jean as he crept down the
hill that night. It was late October and the frost was glistening, but I
pulled off my boots in a moment and silently followed the fellow. Inside
the fence near Marjie's window was a big circle of lilac bushes,
transplanted years ago from the old Ohio home of the Whatelys. Inside
this clump Jean crept, and I knew by the quiet crackle of twigs and dead
leaves he was making his bed there. My first thought was to drag him out
and choke him. And then my better judgment prevailed. I slipped away to
find O'mie for a council.

"Phil, I'd like to kill him wid a hoe, same as Marjie did that other
rattlesnake that had Jim Conlow charmed an' flutterin' toward his pisen
fangs, only we'd better wait a bit. By Saint Patrick, Philip, we can't
hang up his hide yet awhoi