y. For I was jealous of Tom. I am not ashamed to own it now.

In the smoky haze that rises just before night lets her curtain fall, we
descended the farther slope, and came to Mr. Ripley's cabin.

CHAPTER VII. IN SIGHT OF THE BLUE WALL ONCE MORE

Polly Ann lived alone with her grandfather, her father and mother having
been killed by Indians some years before. There was that bond between
us, had we needed one. Her father had built the cabin, a large one with
a loft and a ladder climbing to it, and a sleeping room and a kitchen.
The cabin stood on a terrace that nature had levelled, looking across
a swift and shallow stream towards the mountains. There was the truck
patch, with its yellow squashes and melons, and cabbages and beans,
where Polly Ann and I worked through the hot mornings; and the corn
patch, with the great stumps of the primeval trees standing in it. All
around us the silent forest threw its encircling arms, spreading up the
slopes, higher and higher, to crown the crests with the little pines and
hemlocks and balsam fir.

There had been no meat save bacon since the McChesneys had left, for of
late game had become scarce, and old Mr. Ripley was too feeble to go on
the long hunts. So one day, when Polly Ann was gone across the ridge,
I took down the long rifle from the buckhorns over the hearth, and the
hunting knife and powder-horn and pouch beside it, and trudged up the
slope to a game trail I discovered. All day I waited, until the forest
light grew gray, when a buck came and stood over the water, raising
his head and stamping from time to time. I took aim in the notch of a
sapling, brought him down, cleaned and skinned and dragged him into the
water, and triumphantly hauled one of his hams down the trail. Polly Ann
gave a cry of joy when she saw me.

"Davy," she exclaimed, "little Davy, I reckoned you was gone away from
us. Gran'pa, here is Davy back, and he has shot a deer."

"You don't say?" replied Mr. Ripley, surveying me and my booty with a
grim smile.

"How could you, Gran'pa?" said Polly Ann, reproachfully.

"Wal," said Mr. Ripley, "the gun was gone, an' Davy. I reckon he ain't
sich a little rascal after all."

Polly Ann and I went up the next day, and brought the rest of the buck
merrily homeward. After that I became the hunter of the family; but
oftener than not I returned tired and empty-handed, and ravenously
hungry. Indeed, our chief game was rattlesnakes, which we killed by the