Читать книгу The Red Moccasins - Morrison Heady - Страница 9

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So, next Monday, Jervis Whitney set out on his long tramp, with Pow-wow for company, and with Black Bess, his rifle, to keep them supplied with game, their chief dependence for subsistence while traveling the five hundred miles of wilderness, which lay between them and their old home beyond the Alleghenies. While they were gone, Sprigg kept count of the months and weeks and days, and, as they went silently gliding by, he went silently dreaming on about the red moccasins. Silently, for never another word said he to his mother concerning the matter he had so near at heart. He knew she would laugh at him, and call him a monkey—our hero, bear in mind, being as touchy to ridicule as a raw mouth to ginger. You might scold him and rate him, sneap him and snub him, to a degree you would suppose sufficient to break the heart of any boy who knew his catechism, yet not a fig nor a flint would he care for it all. Perhaps, he would kick up his heels in the very face of your reproof; or, it may be, merely wrinkle up his saucy young knob of a nose, thereby saying as plainly as words could say it:

"Thin! thin!

When the wise waste words, then fools may grin,

So, save your breath for a rainy day,

Or the wind will blow it all away;

Bottle it up and cork it fast,

The longer you keep it, the longer 'twill last."

The month of May was drawing near its close. Night was spreading its dusky shadows over the lonely forest home. The turkey-cock had gone to its rest; so had the red-bird, so had the jay-bird; so had Sprigg. Elster had heard her boy repeat his prayers and was now singing him to sleep with a hymn; a pious custom which, in all sincerity, she had faithfully observed from his infancy up; doing her best, from night to night, to make him a Christian, while suffering him, from day to day, to become more and more of a heathen. Such parental inconsistencies were rare in the days of Mary Washington, but are so common nowadays that no one excepting himself or herself can find an exception to the rule except at home. The last line of the hymn had just been sung, and Sprigg was making his last big sleepy wink at the cradle before fairly off for nodland, when they heard, first, a glad yelp out there in the yard, which they thought they knew; then a brisk, firm step on the loose board floor of the porch, which they were certain they knew. Up from her chair sprang Elster; up from his bed bounced Sprigg, and by the time the door, with a ringing click of its wooden latch, swung open, both were there, and both hugged tight in the long, strong arms of husband and father.

"Heaven be thanked!" exclaimed Elster, kissing her husband for the——, but I must not say what number of times.

"The moccasins! the moccasins!—where are my red moccasins?" cried Sprigg, who had not kissed nor hugged his father once.

"You young feather-pate! you jay-bird!" exclaimed Jervis. "Can't you give your poor pap some little sign of welcome first?"

"Oh! then, you have got them! You have got them!" And now, assured that such was the case, Sprigg could find it in his heart to hug and kiss his father, which he did as sleekly and lovingly as any he-kitten. But Sprigg paid for this bit of selfishness, and that dearly, too. Having laid Black Bess in the rifle-hooks over the fireplace, and hung his bearskin cap on the hook to the left and his ammunition pouch and powder horn on the hook to the right, Jervis hugged and kissed his wife again. Then, from the capacious game bag which, slung by a strap from the shoulder, he wore at his side, he began drawing out slowly and with great show of carefulness a small package, which Sprigg instinctively knew to be the object of his heart's desire. The next moment, held high aloft in pap's right hand, there they were at last, in plain view before his eyes, the long dreamed of red moccasins. How beautiful looked they. Trimmed with the finest of fur and glittering all over with the brightest of beads, to say nothing of the color—red, as the reddest of leather could be, not dyed in blood. You would have laughed, or, perhaps, felt more like crying, to have seen the poor, vain boy, as he stood there, with his heart in his eyes, gazing gloatingly up at the moccasins as if the very shine of them had charmed him out of his senses. Thus he stood for several moments till, giving a quick turn of the head, he glanced sharply up at the Indian boy on the show bill, as if half expecting to find the young horseman stripped of his moccasins and now performing his equestrian antics in bare feet.

"Jervis," said Elster, grieved and provoked, "I am so surprised that you should indulge our boy in so ridiculous a fancy, as were he, after all, the monkey he would make himself. I had no idea that you would ever give the whim a second thought. Why did you not get him the boots you have been promising him? Throw the moccasins into the fire and let us be rid of the nuisance at once! If you won't, I will!"

"Mum, Elster! Mum! I neither bought them nor sought them. They were sent as a present to our boy by some one, who said that he was one of Sprigg's very best friends; and that he could not do a better part by our boy and ourselves, too, than to let him have them and wear them, a little experience being all that he needed to disenchant him of his fancy. 'Our boy's case,' said he, 'was like a man's case, whose heart is set on matrimony—a little lively experience being all that was needed to cure him of his hankering and set him right with matrimony, so with moccasins.' Quoting, Elster; understand me, now, only quoting: Thirteen years of lively experience, and here am I, just as far from being cured as I was the day we went to the show, and your case every whit as desperate. But here stands the boy like one bewitched. Sprigg!"

The boy giving a big start, the spell, which the moccasins, or his own fancy, or, it were hard to say what, had thrown upon him, was snapped in a twinkle, and recovering the use of his tongue, he cried out: "Let me try them on! Let me try them on!" and on they were in a trice. "Look, look! Do but see how nicely they fit! Oh, what beautiful shoes!" And the boy began dancing about the room in a fashion so fantastic as were enough to make one fancy that what he had on his feet were medicine moccasins, which could carry him whithersoever and in what manner soever might please him, or might please them. In the extravagance of his delight he ran up to Pow-wow, where he sat on the hearth, and gave him an affectionate hug; then, taking the old dog's paws in his hand and shaking it heartily, said: "How are you, old pard, and did you bring your Sprigg the red moccasins? Yes, that you did, and you shall have a good meat-bone for it, too; that you shall." And going to the cupboard, like old Mother Hubbard, to get the poor dog a bone, Sprigg found there three ribs of a bear, and so the poor dog had plenty.

"Sprigg," said Elster, in a grieved and reproachful voice, "are all your thanks for the dog? Have you none for pap? Poor pap, who has been gone so long and traveled so far, and has come home so weary, and has been so kind to bring you the moccasins, which, of all things else, you have most desired! Shame upon you! Who would have thought that our boy could have shown himself so thankless!"

Sprigg stopped short in his capers; looked first at his mother and then at his father, and, perceiving that pap also seemed hurt and grieved, he hung his head, but not this time to look at the moccasins. It was to hide the blush of shame, which, redder than they, burst up from his heart and burned in his cheek—the first that had ever been seen there. They had hardly observed the change and wondered thereat when the boy burst into tears, and drawing off the moccasins crept back to bed. Nor could they get another word out of him that night, though they tried hard to do so—harder, indeed, than was wise. So, at last they gave it up and allowed him to sob himself to sleep.

But all night long, to and fro and up and down, were the red moccasins walking about in his dreams. Sometimes he felt as if they were treading upon his naked heart and brain, as though feet were in them—cruel feet, which took a delight in trampling upon him, and once or twice it seemed to him as if some wild and fearful shape of the night were clutching at his toes, when he had cried out in a fright: "Oh! the red moccasins! How they hurt my feet!"