gler on the slender line,
it wins in the end against the erratic violence of the strongest
trout. She had managed then that Guy should join the Injun camp, and
gloried in his outrageously exaggerated accounts of how he could lick
them all at anything, "though they wuz so much older'n bigger'n he
wuz."

But on this day he was fallen in hard luck. His father saw him coming,
met him with a "gad" and lashed him furiously. Knowing perfectly well
that the flogging would not stop till the proper effect was produced,
and that was to be gauged by the racket, Guy yelled his loudest. This
was the uproar the boys had heard.

"Now, ye idle young scut! I'll larn ye to go round leaving bars down.
You go an' tend to your work." So instead of hiking back gloriously
laden with Calfskins, Guy was sent to ignominious and un-Injun toil in
the garden.

Soon he heard his mother: "Guysie, Guysie." He dropped his hoe and
walked to the kitchen.

"Where you goin'?" roared his father from afar. "Go back and mind your
work."

"Maw wants me. She called me."

"You mind your work. Don't you dar' on your life to go thayer."

But Guy took no notice and walked on to his mother. He knew that at
this post-thrashing stage of wrath his father was mouthy and harmless,
and soon he was happy eating a huge piece of bread and jam.

"Poor dear, you must be hungry, an' your Paw was so mean to
you. There, now, don't cry," for Guy began to weep again at the
recollection of his wrongs. Then she whispered confidentially: "Paw's
going to Downey's this afternoon, an' you can slip away as soon as
he's gone, an' if you work well before that he won't be so awful mad
after you come back. But be sure you don't let down the bars, coz if
the pig was to get in Raften's woods dear knows what."

This was the reason of Guy's delay. He did not return to camp with the
skins till late that day. As soon as he was gone, his foolish, doting
mother, already crushed with the burden of the house, left everything
and hoed two or three extra rows of cabbages, so "Paw" should find a
great showing of work when he came back.

The Calfskins were hard as tin and, of course, had the hair on.

Caleb remarked, "It'll take two or three days to get them right," and
buried them in a marshy, muddy pool in the full sunlight. "The warmer
the better."

Three days later he took them out. Instead of being thin, hard,
yellow, semi-transparent, they now were much thicker, densely white,
and sof