Page 27 - A Hero of Ticonderoga

his brown summer coat, wide-eyed with terror, flashed like a dun streak
across the path just before him, and close behind the terrified creature a

gray lynx shot past, eager with sight and scent of his prey, closing the
distance with long leaps. Before the intermittent scurry of footfalls had

faded out of hearing they ceased, and a wail of agony announced the
tragical end of the race. The cry made him shiver, and he could but think
that the lynx might have been a panther and the hare a boy.

His heart grew lighter when he saw the sunshine showing golden green

through the leafy screen that bordered the hunter’s little clearing. He found
Job leaning on his hoe in his patch of corn, looking wistfully on the creek,
where the fish were breaking the surface among the weeds that marked the

expanse of marsh with tender green, and where the sinuous course of the
channel was defined by purple lines of lily pads. The message was received

with a show of vexation, and the old man exclaimed:

"Plague on ’em all with their pitches and surveyin’ and squabblin’. Why

can’t folks let the woods alone? There’s room enough in the settlements for
sech quarrels without comin’ here to disturb God’s peace with bickerin’s

over these acres o’ desart. I thought I’d got done wi’ wars and fightin’s,
exceptin’ with varmints, when the Frenchers and Injins was whipped. But I
guess there won’t never be no peace on airth and good will to men for all

it’s ben preached nigh onto eighteen hundred years. Plague on your
Hampshire Grants and your York Grants, the hul bilin’! Wal, if it must

come it must, and I’ll be skelped if I’ll see Yorkers a runnin’ over my own
Yankee kin. Yorkers is next to Reg’lars for toppin’ ways. I never could
abear ’em."

While he spoke he twirled Nathan’s hemlock sprig between his fingers and

now set it carefully in the band of his hat and led the way to his cabin.

"And Ethan Allen’s in these betterments? Well, them Yorkers’ll wish they’d

stayed to home. He’s hard-handed, is Ethan."

The two were now in the cabin, and Job set forth a cold johnny-cake and
some jerked venison that Nathan needed no urging to partake of. "’Tain’t