Page 45 - A Hero of Ticonderoga

CHAPTER IX

--A FRONTIER TRAGEDY

One autumn day after the leaves had faded and fallen, Nathan was busy
husking corn, with less thought upon his task and the growing pile of

yellow ears than of a promised partridge hunt on the morrow with his good
friend Job. His father was chopping in a new clearing. Silas had been sent

with the oxen to take some logs to Lemon Fair Mill. His mother grew
uneasy at her spinning, for Seth did not come home to dinner, nor yet when
the afternoon was half spent. After many times anxiously looking and

listening in the direction of the clearing, and as often saying to herself,
"What does keep father so?" she called to Nathan.

"I guess you’d better go and see what henders father so. I can’t think what it
is. I hope it hain’t anything."

"Perhaps he’s gone over to Callenders or some o’ the neighbors," said

Nathan. "I hain’t heard a tree fall for ever so long nor his axe a goin’ for a
long time."

"Mebby he’s cut his foot or something," said Martha, beginning to cry.

"I can’t hear nothin’ of him for all the air’s so holler and everything sounds
so plain," said Ruth, listening again. "You’d better go and see what henders
him. Mebby he can’t git home."

As the boy anxiously hastened to the new clearing, the intense stillness of

the woods filled him with undefined dread. His ears ached for some sound,
the tapping of a woodpecker, the cry of a jay, but most of all, for the sound
of axe strokes or his father’s voice. Silence pervaded the clearing also.

There, on a stump, was his father’s blue frock, one bit of color in the

sombre scene. And yes, there was some slight flitting movement near the
last tree that had been felled and lay untrimmed just as it had fallen, but it
was only a bevy of chickadees peering curiously at something on the