but in
imagination following the lost lambkin to the eagle's grim eyrie on
wild, inaccessible Snaggle-Tooth Rock.

"It is dreadful, dreadful; but I won't tell Jemima Calline," was her
last thought as she crept into bed beside her sister.

For Monongahela was old beyond her fourteen years, and bravely strove to
fill the place of their lost parent to the motherless little ones,
sending them trim and tidy to school and "Methody meetin'," feeding them
on plenty of bacon, corn-dodgers, and apple-butter, and every morning,
in spite of grimaces, dosing them all round with "whiskey and burdock"
as an antidote against dyspepsia, the curse of that hog-eating,
excessive coffee-drinking community.

Within a few days Washington's fears were painfully confirmed. Our young
mountain folk were out one afternoon on the hill-side gathering ginseng
and other herbs, when they met the circuit-rider who visited in turn the
churches of their vicinity, and whom Mr. Saunders had frequently
entertained. He paused for a chat, and informed them of the
consternation created in a neighboring valley by the appearance of the
terrible bird to prey upon any poultry or small animals left out over
night; while one man had been severely wounded in an almost hand-to-claw
tussle in order to save his dog.

The following morning, then, when Monny, with the baby toddling by her
side, went out early to milk the cow, she heard a continuous firing, and
came upon her brother armed with the old flint-lock rifle which he had
inherited from his grandfather, popping away at the brown and purple
cones on the top of a tall pine-tree, and deftly snapping off the one at
which he aimed nine times out of ten.

"Well, Washington Beauregard, I'll allow you are a pretty fair
marksman," she remarked, after a moment of admiring watching. "Not many
private hunters kin wing a bird as well as you, kin they?"

"Reckon I could hold my own agin most of they-uns if I only had a
new-fangled gun," returned the boy. "This old fowlin'-piece ain't wurth
much, and I do hope I kin sell enough 'sang'[1] this year to buy
another. 'Tain't much fun to git a fine aim at a buck and lose him
'cause your gun misses fire. As it is, though, I believe I could snip a
curl off the baby's head an' hardly scare the darlin'. Jest hold him up,
honey, an' let me hev a try." But to this William Tell arrangement Monny
objected in horror, and scurried off with the infant, followed by Wash's
roar of laughter