s brief. In a long streak down behind
the shoulder the hair was already slipping off.

"Sarved ye right!" she grumbled remorsefully, as with gentle fingers
she began sifting the flour up and down over the wound. The light
stuff seemed to soothe the anguish for the moment, and the sufferer
stood quite still till the scald was thoroughly covered with a
tenacious white cake. Then a fresh and fiercer pang seized the wound.
With a bleat he tore himself away, and rushed off, tail in air, across
the stump-pasture and into the woods.

"Mebbe he won't come back, and then Jabe won't never need to know!"
soliloquized Mrs. Jabe, returning to clean up her kitchen.

The sufferer returned, however, early in the afternoon, and was in his
customary attitude before the door when Jabe, a little later, came
back also. The long white slash down his favourite's side caught the
woodsman's eye at once. He looked at it critically, touched the flour
with tentative finger-tips, then turned on his wife a look of poignant
interrogation. But Mrs. Jabe was ready for him. Her nerve had
recovered. The fact that her victim showed no fear of her had
gradually reassured her. What Jabe didn't know would never hurt him,
she mused.

"Yes, yer pesky brat come stumblin' into the kitchen when the bar was
down, a-lookin' for ye. An' he upset the bilin' water I was goin' to
scrub with, an' broke the pot. An' I've got to have a new pot right
off, Jabe Smith--mind that!"

"Scalded himself pretty bad!" remarked Jabe. "Poor little beggar!"

"I done the best _I_ know'd how fer him!" said his wife with an
injured air. "Wasted most a quart o' good flour on his worthless hide!
Wish't he'd broke his neck 'stead of the only pot I got that's big
enough to bile the pig's feed in!"

"Well, you done jest about right, I reckon, Mandy," replied Jabe,
ashamed of his suspicions. "I'll go in to the Cross Roads an' git ye a
new pot to-morrer, an' some tar for the scald. The tar'll be better'n
flour, an' keep the flies off."

"I s'pose some men _ain't_ got nothin' better to do than be doctorin'
up a fool moose calf!" assented Mrs. Jabe promptly, with a snort of
censorious resignation.

Whether because the flour and the tar had virtues, or because the
clean flesh of the wild kindreds makes all haste to purge itself of
ills, it was not long before the scald was perfectly healed. But the
reminder of it remained ineffaceable--a long, white slash down across
the brown hide of