Glengarry School Days-a story of early days in Glengarry

by Connor, Ralph

  He took a handful of slugs and bullets, poured them into his gun, rammed down a wadding of leaves upon all, retreating as he did so to the higher limbs, the bear following him steadily. But just as he had his cap securely fixed upon the nipple, the bear suddenly revealed his plan. Holding by his front paws, he threw his hind legs off from the trunk. It was his usual method of felling trees. The tree swayed and bent till the top almost touched the ground. But Hughie, with his legs wreathed round the trunk, brought his gun to his shoulder, and with its muzzle almost touching the breast of the hanging brute, pulled the trigger.

  There was a terrific report, the bear dropped in a heap from the tree, and Hughie was hurled violently to the ground some distance away, partially stunned. He raised himself to see the bear struggle up to a sitting position, and gnashing his teeth, and flinging blood and foam from his mouth, begin to drag himself toward him. He was conscious of a languid indifference, and found himself wondering how long the bear would take to cover the distance.

  But while he was thus cogitating there was a sharp, quick bark, and a great black form hurled itself at the bear's throat and bore the fierce brute to the ground.

  Drawing a long sigh, Hughie sank back to the ground, with the sound of a far-away shot in his ears, and darkness veiling his eyes.

  He was awakened by Don's voice anxiously calling him.

  "Are you hurt much, Hughie? Did he squeeze you?"

  Hughie sat up, blinking stupidly.

  "What?" he asked. "Who?"

  "Why, the bear, of course."

  "The bear? No. Man! It's too bad you weren't here, Don," he went on, rousing himself. "He can't be gone far."

  "Not very," said Don, laughing loud. "Yonder he lies."

  Hughie turned his head and gazed, wondering, at the great black mass over which Don's black dogs were standing guard, and sniffing with supreme satisfaction.

  Then all came back to him.

  "Where's Fido?" he asked, rising. "Yes, it was Fido saved me, for sure. He tackled the bear every time he rushed at me, and hung onto him just as I climbed the tree the second time."

  As he spoke he walked over to the place where he had last seen the dog. A little farther on, behind a spruce-tree, they found poor Fido, horribly mangled and dead.

  Hughie stooped down over him. "Poor old boy, poor old Fido," he said, in a low voice, stroking his head.

  Don turned away and walked whistling toward the bear. As he sat beside the black carcass his two dogs came to him. He threw his arms round them, saying, "Poor old Blackie! Poor Nigger!" and he understood how Hughie was feeling behind the spruce-tree beside the faithful dog that had given him his life.

  As he sat there waiting for Hughie, he heard voices.

  "Horo!" he shouted.

  "Where are you? Is that you, Don?" It was his father's voice.

  "Yes, here we are."

  "Is Hughie there?" inquired another voice.

  "Losh me! that's the minister," said Don. "Yes, all right," he cried aloud, as up came Long John Cameron and the minister, with Fusie and a stranger bringing up the rear.

  "Fine work, this. You're fine fellows, indeed," cried Long John, "frightening people in this way."

  "Where is Hughie?" said the minister, sternly.

  Hughie came from behind the brush, hurriedly wiping his eyes. "Here, father," he said.

  "And what are you doing here at this hour of the night, pray?" said the minister, angrily, turning toward him.

  "I couldn't get home very well," replied Hughie.

  "And why not, pray? Don't begin any excuses with me, sir." Nothing annoyed the minister as an attempt to excuse ill-doing.

  "I guess he would have been glad enough to have got home half an hour ago, sir," broke in Don, laughing. "Look there." He pointed to the bear lying dead, with Nigger standing over him.

  "The Lord save us!" said Long John Cameron, himself the greatest among the hunters of the county. "What do you say? And how did you get him? Jee-ru-piter! he's a grand one."

  The old man, the minister, and Don walked about the bear in admiring procession.

  "Yon's a terrible gash," said Long John, pointing to a gaping wound in the breast. "Was that your Snider, Don?"

  "Not a bit of it, father. The bear's Hughie's. He killed him himself."

  "Losh me! And you don't tell me! And how did you manage that, Hughie?"

  "He chased me up that tree, and I guess would have got me only for Fido."

  The minister gasped.

  "Got you? Was he as near as that?"

  "He wasn't three feet away," said Hughie, and with that he proceeded to give, in his most graphic style, a description of his great fight with the bear.

  "When I heard the first shot," said Don, "I was away across the swamp. I tell you I tore back here, and when I came, what did I see but Hughie and Mr. Bear both sitting down and looking coolly at each other a few yards apart. And then Nigger downed him and I put a bullet into his heart." Don was greatly delighted, and extremely proud of Hughie's achievement.

  "And how did you know about it?" asked Don of his father.

  "It was the minister here came after me."

  "Yes," said the minister, "it was Fusie told me you had gone off on a bear hunt, and so I went along to the Cameron's with Mr. Craven here, to see if you had got home."

  Meantime, Mr. Craven had been looking Hughie over.

  "Mighty plucky thing," he said. "Great nerve," and he lapsed into silence, while Fusie could not contain himself, but danced from one foot to the other with excited exclamations.

  The minister had come out intending, as he said, "to teach that boy a lesson that he would remember," but as he listened to Hughie's story, his anger gave place to a great thankfulness.

  "It was a great mercy, my boy," he said at length, when he was quite sure of his voice, "that you had Fido with you."

  "Yes, indeed, father," said Hughie. "It was Fido saved me."

  "It was the Lord's goodness," said the minister, solemnly.

  "And a great mercy," said Long John, "that your lad kept his head and showed such courage. You have reason to be proud of him."

  The minister said nothing just then, but at home, when recounting the exploit to the mother, he could hardly contain his pride in his son.

  "Never thought the boy would have a nerve like that, he's so excitable. I had rather he killed that bear than win a medal at the university."

  The mother sat silent through all the story, her cheek growing more and more pale, but not a word did she say until the tale was done, and then she said, "'Who delivereth thee from destruction.'"

  "A little like David, mother, wasn't it?" said Hughie; but though there was a smile on his face, his manner and tone were earnest enough.

  "Yes," said his mother, "a good deal like David, for it was the same God that delivered you both."

  "Rather hard to cut Fido out of his share of the glory," said Mr. Craven, "not to speak of a cool head and a steady nerve."

  Mrs. Murray regarded him for a moment or two in silence, as if meditating an answer, but finally she only said, "We shall cut no one out of the glory due to him."

  At the supper-table the whole affair was discussed in all its bearings. In this discussion Hughie took little part, making light of his exploit, and giving most of the credit to Fido, and the mother wondered at the unusual reserve and gravity that had fallen upon her boy. Indeed, Hughie was wondering at himself. He had a strange new feeling in his heart. He had done a man's deed, and for the first time in his life he felt it unnecessary to glory in his deeds. He had come to a new experience, that great deeds need no voice to proclaim them. During the thrilling moments of that terrible hour he had entered the borderland of manhood, and the awe of that new world was now upon his spirit.

  It was chiefly this new experience of his that was sobering him, but it helped him not a little to check his wonted boyish exuberance that at the table opposite him sat a strange young man, across whose dark, magnetic face there flitted,
now and then, a lazy, cynical smile. Hughie feared that lazy smile, and he felt that it would shrivel into self-contempt any feeling of boastfulness.

  The mother and Hughie said little to each other, waiting to be alone, and after Hughie had gone to his room his mother talked long with him, but when Mr. Craven, on his way to bed, heard the low, quiet tones of the mother's voice through the shut door, he knew it was not to Hughie she was speaking, and the smile upon his face lost a little of its cynicism.

  Next day there was no smile when he stood with Hughie under the birch-tree, watching the lad hew flat one side, but gravely enough he took the paper on which Hughie had written, "Fido, Sept. 13th, 18—," saying as he did so, "I shall cut this for you. It is good to remember brave deeds."

  CHAPTER XI

  JOHN CRAVEN'S METHOD

  Mr. John Craven could not be said to take his school-teaching seriously; and indeed, any one looking at his face would hardly expect him to take anything seriously, and certainly those who in his college days followed and courted and kept pace with Jack Craven, and knew his smile, would have expected from him anything other than seriousness. He appeared to himself to be enacting a kind of grim comedy, exile as he was in a foreign land, among people of a strange tongue.

  He knew absolutely nothing of pedagogical method, and consequently he ignored all rules and precedents in the teaching and conduct of the school. His discipline was of a most fantastic kind. He had a feeling that all lessons were a bore, therefore he would assign the shortest and easiest of tasks. But having assigned the tasks, he expected perfection in recitation, and impressed his pupils with the idea that nothing less would pass. His ideas of order were of the loosest kind, and hence the noise at times was such that even the older pupils found it unbearable; but when the hour for recitation came, somehow a deathlike stillness fell upon the school, and the unready shivered with dread apprehension. And yet he never thrashed the boys; but his fear lay upon them, for his eyes held the delinquent with such an intensity of magnetic, penetrating power that the unhappy wretch felt as if any kind of calamity might befall him.

  When one looked at John Craven's face, it was the eyes that caught and held the attention. They were black, without either gleam or glitter, indeed almost dull—a lady once called them "smoky eyes." They looked, under lazy, half-drooping lids, like things asleep, except in moments of passion, when there appeared, far down, a glowing fire, red and terrible. At such moments it seemed as if, looking through these, one were catching sight of a soul ablaze. They were like the dull glow of a furnace through an inky night.

  He was constitutionally and habitually lazy, but in a reading lesson he would rouse himself at times, and by his utterance of a single line make the whole school sit erect. Friday afternoon he gave up to what he called "the cultivation of the finer arts." On that afternoon he would bring his violin and teach the children singing, hear them read and recite, and read for them himself; and no greater punishment could be imposed upon the school than the loss of this afternoon.

  "Man alive! Thomas, he's mighty queer," Hughie explained to his friend. "When he sits there with his feet on the stove smoking away and reading something or other, and letting them all gabble like a lot of ducks, it just makes me mad. But when he wakes up he puts the fear of death on you, and when he reads he makes you shiver through and through. You know that long rigmarole, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen'? I used to hate it. Well, sir, he told us about it last Friday. You know, on Friday afternoons we don't do any work, but just have songs and reading, and that sort of thing. Well, sir, last Friday he told us about the big row in Rome, and how Caesar was murdered, and then he read that thing to us. By gimmini whack! it made me hot and cold. I could hardly keep from yelling, and every one was white. And then he read that other thing, you know, about Little Nell. Used to make me sick, but, my goodness alive! do you know, before he got through the girls were wiping their eyes, and I was almost as bad, and you could have heard a pin drop. He's mighty queer, though, lazy as the mischief, and always smiling and smiling, and yet you don't feel like smiling back."

  "Do you like him?" asked Thomas, bluntly.

  "Dunno. I'd like to, but he won't let you, somehow. Just smiles at you, and you feel kind of small."

  The reports about the master were conflicting and disquieting, and although Hughie was himself doubtful, he stood up vehemently for him at home.

  "But, Hughie," protested the minister, discussing these reports, "I am told that he actually smokes in school."

  Hughie was silent.

  "Answer me! Does he smoke in school hours?"

  "Well," confessed Hughie, reluctantly, "he does sometimes, but only after he gives us all our work to do."

  "Smoke in school hours!" ejaculated Mrs. Murray, horrified.

  "Well, what's the harm in that? Father smokes."

  "But he doesn't smoke when he is preaching," said the mother.

  "No, but he smokes right afterwards."

  "But not in church."

  "Well, perhaps not in church, but school's different. And anyway, he makes them read better, and write better too," said Hughie, stoutly.

  "Certainly," said his father, "he is a most remarkable man. A most unusual man."

  "What about your sums, Hughie?" asked his mother.

  "Don't know. He doesn't bother much with that sort of thing, and I'm just as glad."

  "You ought really to speak to him about it," said Mrs. Murray, after Hughie had left the room.

  "Well, my dear," said the minister, smiling, "you heard what Hughie said. It would be rather awkward for me to speak to him about smoking. I think, perhaps, you had better do it."

  "I am afraid," said his wife, with a slight laugh, "it would be just as awkward for me. I wonder what those Friday afternoons of his mean," she continued.

  "I am sure I don't know, but everywhere throughout the section I hear the children speak of them. We'll just drop in and see. I ought to visit the school, you know, very soon."

  And so they did. The master was surprised, and for a moment appeared uncertain what to do. He offered to put the classes through their regular lessons, but at once there was a noisy outcry against this on the part of the school, which, however, was effectually and immediately quelled by the quiet suggestion on the master's part that anything but perfect order would be fatal to the programme. And upon the minister requesting that the usual exercises proceed, the master smilingly agreed.

  "We make Friday afternoons," he said, "at once a kind of reward day for good work during the week, and an opportunity for the cultivation of some of the finer arts."

  And certainly he was a master in this business. He had strong dramatic instincts, and a remarkable power to stimulate and draw forth the emotions.

  When the programme of singing, recitations, and violin-playing was finished, there were insistent calls on every side for "Mark Antony." It appeared to be the 'piece de resistance' in the minds of the children.

  "What does this mean?" inquired the minister, as the master stood smiling at his pupils.

  "Oh, they are demanding a little high tragedy," he said, "which I sometimes give them. It assists in their reading lessons," he explained, apologetically, and with that he gave them what Hughie called, "that rigmarole beginning, 'Friends, Romans, countrymen,'" Mark Antony's immortal oration.

  "Well," said the minister, as they drove away from the school, "what do you think of that, now?"

  "Marvelous!" exclaimed his wife. "What dramatic power, what insight, what interpretation!"

  "You may say so," exclaimed her husband. "What an actor he would make!"

  "Yes," said his wife, "or what a minister he would make! I understand, now, his wonderful influence over Hughie, and I am afraid."

  "O, he can't do Hughie any harm with things like that," replied her husband, emphatically.

  "No, but Hughie now and then repeats some of his sayings about—about religion and religious convictions, that I don't like. And then he is hanging about that Twentie
th store altogether too much, and I fancied I noticed something strange about him last Friday evening when he came home so late."

  "O, nonsense," said the minister. "His reputation has prejudiced you, and that is not fair, and your imagination does the rest."

  "Well, it is a great pity that he should not do something with himself," replied his wife. "There are great possibilities in that young man."

  "He does not take himself seriously enough," said her husband. "That is the chief trouble with him."

  And this was apparently Jack Craven's opinion of himself, as is evident from his letter to his college friend, Ned Maitland.

  "Dear Ned:—

  "For the last two months I have been seeking to adjust myself to my surroundings, and find it no easy business. I have struck the land of the Anakim, for the inhabitants are all of 'tremenjous' size, and indeed, 'tremenjous' in all their ways, more particularly in their religion. Religion is all over the place. You are liable to come upon a boy anywhere perched on a fence corner with a New Testament in his hand, and on Sunday the 'tremenjousness' of their religion is overwhelming. Every other interest in life, as meat, drink, and dress, are purely incidental to the main business of the day, which is the delivering, hearing, and discussing of sermons.

  "The padre, at whose house I am very happily quartered, is a 'tremenjous' preacher. He has visions, and gives them to me. He gives me chills and thrills as well, and has discovered to me a conscience, a portion of my anatomy that I had no suspicion of possessing.

  "The congregation is like the preacher. They will sit for two hours, and after a break of a few minutes they will sit again for two hours, listening to sermons; and even the interval is somewhat evenly divided between their bread and cheese in the churchyard and the discussion of the sermon they have just listened to. They are great on theology. One worthy old party tackled me on my views of the sermon we had just heard; after a little preliminary sparring I went to my corner. I often wonder in what continent I am.

  "The school, a primitive little log affair, has much run to seed, but offers opportunity for repose. I shall avoid any unnecessary excitement in this connection.