APTER III.

Meets with the Object of His Love.

So, next Monday, Jervis Whitney set out on his long tramp, with Pow-wow
for company, and with Black Bess, his rifle, to keep them supplied with
game, their chief dependence for subsistence while traveling the five
hundred miles of wilderness, which lay between them and their old home
beyond the Alleghenies. While they were gone, Sprigg kept count of the
months and weeks and days, and, as they went silently gliding by, he
went silently dreaming on about the red moccasins. Silently, for never
another word said he to his mother concerning the matter he had so near
at heart. He knew she would laugh at him, and call him a monkey--our
hero, bear in mind, being as touchy to ridicule as a raw mouth to
ginger. You might scold him and rate him, sneap him and snub him, to a
degree you would suppose sufficient to break the heart of any boy who
knew his catechism, yet not a fig nor a flint would he care for it all.
Perhaps, he would kick up his heels in the very face of your reproof;
or, it may be, merely wrinkle up his saucy young knob of a nose,
thereby saying as plainly as words could say it:

"Thin! thin!
When the wise waste words, then fools may grin,
So, save your breath for a rainy day,
Or the wind will blow it all away;
Bottle it up and cork it fast,
The longer you keep it, the longer 'twill last."

The month of May was drawing near its close. Night was spreading its
dusky shadows over the lonely forest home. The turkey-cock had gone to
its rest; so had the red-bird, so had the jay-bird; so had Sprigg.
Elster had heard her boy repeat his prayers and was now singing him to
sleep with a hymn; a pious custom which, in all sincerity, she had
faithfully observed from his infancy up; doing her best, from night to
night, to make him a Christian, while suffering him, from day to day, to
become more and more of a heathen. Such parental inconsistencies were
rare in the days of Mary Washington, but are so common nowadays that no
one excepting himself or herself can find an exception to the rule
except at home. The last line of the hymn had just been sung, and Sprigg
was making his last big sleepy wink at the cradle before fairly off for
nodland, when they heard, first, a glad yelp out there in the yard,
which they thought they knew; then a brisk, firm step on the loose board
floor of the porch, which they were certain they knew. Up from her c