Page 26 - A Hero of Ticonderoga

"Trouble to Beeman’s, now."

"Yea, verily," said Allen to Newton, whose face flashed at the boy’s words.
"Rise up and gird on your swords, you and your sons. The Philistines are

upon you even as it has been prophesied. Felton and his gang of land
thieves. The son of Belial was warned to depart from the land of the elect,
but he heeds not those who cry in the wilderness. Confound the rascal! He

must be ’viewed’! You and your two boys take your guns and jog down that
way, and as you go cut a goodly scourge of blue beech, for verily there

shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. We’ll rally the
Callenders, and Jones, and Harrington, and North, and my friend Beeman
here will tell Job. We’ll gather a good dozen. Enough to mete out the

vengeance of the Lord to eight Yorkers, I’ll warrant!"

Strange and abrupt as were the transitions from Allen’s favorite Scriptural
manner of speech to the ordinary vernacular, no one thought of laughing.
As the boy dismounted, Allen said:

"You go straight to Job and do as he tells you;" and as he rode away called

back, "everybody lay low and keep dark till you hear the owl hoot."

Soon Nathan turned from the road into an obscure footpath that led in the

direction of Job Carpenter’s cabin. The gloom and loneliness of the
mysterious forest, through which the narrow footpath wound, so pervaded

it that the song birds seemed awed to silence, and the woodpeckers tapped
cautiously, as if afraid of being heard by some enemy. No boy, even of
backwoods breeding, would care to loiter had his errand been less urgent,

and he gave but a passing notice to things ordinarily of absorbing interest.

A mother partridge fluttered along the ground in simulated crippledness
while her callow brood vanished among the low-spread leaves. A shy wood
bird disclosed the secret of her nest as he sped by. Against a dark pine

gleamed the fiery flash of a tanager’s plumage. A wood mouse stirred the
dry leaves. His own foot touched a prostrate dead sapling, and the dry top

rustled unseen in the wayside thicket. There was a sound of long, swift
bounds, punctuating the silence with growing distinctness, and a hare, in